FTV: Oasis Rides Again!
Over the first two weeks of September 2025, I took my third consecutive concert trip to the WOAS-FM West Coast Bureau in Eugene, Oregon. This trip was a little different because I didn’t get to actually see a live show. In 2023 and 2024, I got to see live performances at the Cuthbert Outdoor Amphitheater by Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and John Fogerty’s show on his hit laden ‘I got my songs back’ tour, respectively. This year’s trip was geared around me cat sitting the WCB’s three cats (Emma, Bernie, and Oscar) so Elizabeth and Todd could go and see one of the two reunion shows Oasis performed at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. Emma is the ‘grand dame’ of the trio, Bernie is a former street cat (nosey but still a little wary), and the new kid is Oscar who is a polydactyl cat. As the youngest, Oscar is the pesky little brother and full of pep (and I have the battle scars to prove it from all the good natured roughhousing we did).
Before I came home, I did get to watch the DVD of a record breaking show Oasis had done at the Knebworth Festival back in 1996 so this trip wasn’t totally devoid of music. I hadn’t paid too much attention to Oasis back in their prime so hearing their music fresh again almost thirty years later was a treat. They were a great live band back in 1996 so I was wondering how the brothers Gallagher (Noel and Liam) would pull this off after not working together for almost two decades. In a similar turn of events as happened to the Robinson brothers (Chris and Rich of the Black Crowes), a certain amount of tension had split Oasis. Some were not sure the rifts had healed enough for them to pull this off but the reviews from other shows were upbeat.
Like the Crowes brotherhood, both the Gallagher brothers had embarked on solo careers that were good enough, but not spectacular. Chris Robinson put out some decent solo albums but fans constantly compared them to the Crowes. Rich Robinson’s solo band (Magpie Salute) was actually doing quite well but Rich found out that running a band was a lot more work than playing guitar in a band with an established catalog. Guitarist Noel Galagher seemed to have a bit more going for his solo work than Liam did with his group Beady Eye. In the end, both bands saw the (dollar) signs on the wall and decided it was time to bury old grievances and give it another go. When a popular band disappears for a number of years, it seems the fans are the ones who make or break these kinds of outings, assuming they do not implode (the tour, not the fans) before they get rolling . Thus far, neither reunion has sparked any of the ‘nuclear options’ some fans feared.
While I was on cat duty that weekend, I pulled up an article from Variety about the Saturday night show at the Rose Bowl by Chris Willman. He gathered some good background on who exactly the band had attracted on this round of stadium shows by roaming the venue and talking to various fans. One typical exchange with an English fan from Wolverhampton named Kieran went like this: “Seeing the best band in the world, traveling overseas with your best mates, it’s an attraction in itself.” Kieran had already seen Oasis in Cardiff (Wales) and a show in Toronto (Canada). “It’s crazy – we’ve seen people that live down the road from us and we are seeing people that live 5,000 miles away. We were at the Whisky-a-Go-Go in L.A. last night to see a tribute act [the Canadian-based band Supersonic] and it was, I’d say, 70 percent English. We were talking to people from Coventry, Birmingham, London, Cornwall, Glasgow – everyone we spoke to seemed to be British.”
As for Los Angeles fans, Wilman said they took to Oasis in a big way right up to many sporting Liam’s signature ‘bucket hat’ and varying tour shirts. For the record, Todd wore his Don’t Look Back in Anger shirt that also displayed the song’s chords. Never fear, vendors selling upgraded tour swag were plentiful including a pop-up merchandise store setup in Hollywood.
The only failure of the American crowd, according to Willman, was in their inability to properly execute Manchester’s favorite dance, the Poznan.
To set up the tale of the Poznan, Willman recreated Liam’s lengthy dialogue delivered before the song Cigarettes and Alcohol: “As I was swimming this morning in Santa Monica in the sea, this (expletive deleted) shark jumps out. [He said] ‘Mr. Gallagher’ … I said, ‘It’s Liam.’ He said, ‘Good luck trying to get that lot to do the Poznan. You know what L.A. crowds are like; they’re all stoned out of their heads, in the sun all day…the best you can expect is more of a Grateful Dead kind of dance’ (which Liam mockingly demonstrated, telling the crowd, ‘but he [the shark] had faith in us’).” Liam then addressed the crowd: “You got it in you?” as he went on to describe the shark doing the dance out in the sea. Todd and Elizabeth reported the same story was attributed to a crab at the Sunday night show and presumably the L.A. crowd didn’t do much better with the Poznan than the Saturday night crowd (who ‘failed miserably’ according to Willman).
Just for clarity sake, this is how Willman described the origin of the famous Poznan dance that I had never heard of before now: “Virtually the whole crowd seemed to be jumping up and down in unison during the following number, having some kind of grasp on what the Poznan might be supposed to look like, if not the fundamentals. But Angelenos might have mistaken it for basic pogo-ing. Simply put, the Poznan – first popularized by Polish football team Lech Poznan in the ‘60s, and picked up and broadly adopted by Manchester City fans a decade and a half ago – consists of audience members wrapping arms around one another’s shoulders and jumping in place with their backs to the central action. Faced with this nuance, California was largely clueless.” It made sense to me because a football team (soccer team) no doubt started it to acknowledge their fans in the surrounding stadium. A concert isn’t staged in the round like a soccer game, so fans would presumably turn their back to the stage to be doing it correctly? Yes, it is confusing, especially if one has not seen the Poznan in action at any event.
Detractors back in the ‘90s often used the ‘Beatles wanna-bes’ label to describe Oasis’s music. As I watched the 1996 Knebworth festival, I found this to be a rather thin comparison. The Beatles 1960s pop phase, for the most part, didn’t have that ‘wall of sound’ effect Oasis generated. With three guitars in the current touring line up, Todd said even from their vantage point a football field away from the stage, you could feel the band as well as hear it. The big screens employed these days do give those in the back a better view of the action. Todd and Elizabeth found sitting in (reserved) cheap seats preferable to standing in the scrum on the field. Willman alluded to the Beatles comparisons by noting, “Near the end of the two-hour performance, Noel Gallagher had the visuals team train a camera on a young woman in the front who he said had been weeping throughout the whole show, and indeed, she looked like she’d been directly transported from the Ed Sullivan Theatre in 1964 to this spot. If this stuff tended to get written off back in the ‘80s as phony Beatlemania, it certainly hasn’t bitten the dust.”
Willman was able to track down some American fans as well. Walt and his wife from Thousand Oaks, California were sporting bucket hats, but not ones sold at the merch tent. Walt’s wife knitted these and when asked what seeing Oasis means to him, he said, “Oasis reminds me of a time when I didn’t have as much to worry about. When I still had light in my eyes.” He declined to give his last name in case the Variety article made him sound suicidal. Walt’s friend Jess from Washington state said, “[The show was] super nostalgic for me. These albums came out when I was in middle school and my daughter is in middle school right now, so it is weird for me to be the same age she is, thinking back on the music that came out when I was her age.” Jess had also seen Oasis live in San Francisco when she was around 14 years old.
A film maker named Craig noted the Gen-z generation would take to, “The simplicity and solidarity of the lyrics.” Craig pointed to the anthemic quality of the songs and the fact that fans could join in without having to have done a whole lot of homework. He continued, “I’d say for me, it is the collective joy of this show… it was almost overwhelming. People shouting at the top of their lungs, including my son and I; there were lots of dads and sons around us. It was like they were at a church service – a lot of hands up, raised and joyous. Exaltation, for sure.” Willman pointed out that all the Oasis-isms were still there; Liam’s hands clasped behind him unless he was playing a tambourine or maracas, his tendency to scowl and deliver lyrics with a sneer in his voice, and stage patter that is more jokey than serious (see the shark / crab story mentioned earlier). Noel’s songs tend to veer toward emo-like sentiment (ala Coldplay) but in a more ‘stiff upper lip’ British way. As brothers and musicians, the Gallaghers couldn’t be more different, but the two of them proved they are still a force of nature even sixteen years after they first drifted apart.
Todd said Liam’s dialog was sometimes difficult to decipher but the one thing that he thought sounded like typical Liam humor was, “So, America. Are we dating?” As long as I had already read Willman’s take on the Saturday show, I asked Todd for his one paragraph review of the Sunday night show: “Oasis (now a septet) created an immense sound. The addition of a third guitarist (and original rhythm player) Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs lifted the band, allowing Noel Gallagher and Colin ‘Gem’ Archer to share lead duties. Noel reclaimed lead parts to iconic songs like Live Forever and Don’t Look Back In Anger that previously shifted to Archer. The result was a return to the classic ‘O’ sound but with an elevated experience. And then to complete the band alchemy: the verve, swagger , and powerful sneering lead vocals of Liam Gallagher – who sounds arguably the best he has since 1997 – made for an epic night with 90,000 fans under a full moon at the Rose Bowl. Yes, the mighty O was BACK!”
Over the two nights at the Rose Bowl, a lot of celebrities were spotted in the crowd. Fellow Brit Sir Paul McCartney was there and the celeb scorecard was an even split between musicians and Hollywood stars: Kristen Stewart, Salma Hayek, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billie Eilish and her brother FINNEAS, Sofia Vergara, Vince Vaughn, Noah Cyrus, Niall Horan, Demi Lovato, Rita Ora, Taika Waititi, and Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) were all in attendance. Other A-listers were also seen in Chicago (Gwyneth Paltrow) and London (Tom Cruise attended with Ana de Armas). McCartney drew quite a bit of interest as he filmed part of the show (with his phone) from a suite and later confided to the paparazzi it was, “Fabulous.”
The weekend after the concert, we had the opportunity to travel an hour and a half north to have lunch with my old buddy Mitch. He drove down from his home base in Boring and we met in Silverton. Just east of Salem, Silverton is an area I have never been to so it was an interesting side trip. We had a nice long catch up visit, managed to hit a couple of book stores and a record shop in Salem, and still be home by late afternoon. Try as I might, the WCB wouldn’t let me so much as buy lunch on this trip (I must be a high paid cat sitter) but I will make up for it on the next trip.
Down the road, I am going to have to do an FTV about traveling tales. I do not travel as much as some, but living where we do, getting to the west coast always involves multiple airline hops. Unlike my August 2024 trip, I didn’t get COVID (which I had shared with the West Coast Bureau) this time around (and yes, I followed the masking protocols on all flights both years). Routing from Hancock to Denver to Eugene is always an 18 hour travel day but somehow my bag arrived in Oregon six hours before I did. My handy United Airlines app informed me, “Your bag arrived early, see the attendant at the baggage carousel” (which makes no sense in a smaller airport with limited staff). With no one at the ticket counter and only one more incoming flight that evening, we decided to come back and get it the next day. Again, the full details of the round trip are too long to relate here so this part of the story will have to wait for the Travelin’ Tales edition of FTV down the road.
I am already looking forward to my next inspection tour to the WCB. It will be another chance to have an extended visit with Emma, Bernie, and Oscar…oh yes, and also with Elizabeth and Todd. In the past couple of years, Taj Mahal and Ke’ Mo have performed in Eugene but my schedule didn’t match up. I also missed ZZ Top at the Cuthbert by a couple of weeks, but there is always next summer’s concert season pending!
Top Piece Video: Don’t Go Away performed o Letterman in 1997 – before the 16 year hiatus!