“In Russia, nostalgia is regarded as an illness,” declared the mighty comedian Simon Munnery once, “or at least it used to be, in the good old days.” Zing! Oasis, who 30 years ago represented a kind of condensed nostalgia for the previous quarter-century of British rock, are re-forming. The cocaine dealers of Britain are already putting in advance orders so thousands of middle-aged men can stand in stadiums next summer bellowing trivial conversations about fuck all at each other all through the gigs they’ve paid hundreds of pounds to touts to attend. The trail of dead South American drug war casualties will stretch all the way from Heaton Park to Pablo Escobar’s ruined hippo enclosure. All the same, I wish I was going.
It used to be embarrassing when bands re-formed, didn’t it, like your dad dancing at a wedding? But when 70s New York televisionaries Television regrouped in 1992, I was delighted, as I knew all the solos on Marquee Moon off by heart and hadn’t seen them in 77 owing to being eight and preferring the Geoff Love & His Orchestra Bond themes album that I bought in Woolworths. Bands didn’t get back together in those days, unless it was to cash in on the Saga holidays circuit, where my mum was disappointed to see PJ Proby fail to split his trousers on demand sometime around the turn of the century. Nostalgia, she noted, wasn’t what it used to be.
Proby’s pre-weakened strides once seemed to me the epitome of sad showbiz shtick, but I spent most of 2017 doing a routine where I deliberately made my trousers fall down, 254 times. Live long enough and you will eventually become the person you most pitied as a child. But me and PJ Proby, we’re professionals. Can the same be said of Liam Gallagher, who once got so drunk he declared war on the entire country of Switzerland during the fade of D’ You Know What I Mean?.
When the studious Television, not an especially lively band in their heyday, took the stage of the Town and Country Club in London in November 1992, the 24-year-old me was amazed at how brilliant they were, despite what I considered their impossibly advanced ages. Guitarist Richard Lloyd was 41, after all! It was amazing he could even speak or move around. But Television kept being sporadically brilliant for the next 30 years until Tom Verlaine’s death finally put paid to that long-delayed fourth album, although a similar fatality did not stop Tupac Shakur producing much of his best work. What can we expect next summer from the Gallagher brothers, who, at a staggering combined age of 108, are older than all five Beatles put together when they went to Hamburg in 1960?
In the past 30 years I’ve stood and watched dozens of re-emerged artists I never expected to see. Some – Love, Nic Jones, Heavenly, the Sex Pistols, Green on Red, Ut, and the Crome Syrcus – played the hits; some – the Stooges and the Soft Boys – knocked out an accompanying album for added authenticity; others – Patti Smith, Mission of Burma, the Dream Syndicate, the Nightingales, Shirley Collins, Slowdive, the Long Ryders, Faust and Träd, Gräs och Stenar – started significant second careers. And five years ago I walked to my local, the Shacklewell Arms, where a band called the Zeros were advertised in the back room. Surely, I thought, it can’t be the 70s Los Angeles Latino punks of Beat Your Heart Out fame? But it was, with all original members, and they played Beat Your Heart Out. Did I dream it, like the time I had a horrible nightmare I was on stage at the Carlisle Sands Centre, and then woke up and realised I was?
Oasis are a guilty pleasure for a pseudo-intellectual like me, and I think they split just as that track Falling Down suggested a populist, stadium-sized psychedelia was imminent. Much is made of the eye for talent of Alan McGee, boss of Creation, Oasis’s first label, but he also signed Technique, the Legend!, and Keith “Smelly” O’Connell’s Five Go Down to the Sea?, the managerial equivalent of a massive hose spraying shit against a wall. Some of it was bound to stick. And Oasis were that sticky shit.
Until Creation nabbed Oasis, the label’s trajectory followed indie rock’s general post-punk upward creative arc. Moonshake meshed Can and PiL. The Boo Radleys spawned shoegazey psychedelia. And My Bloody Valentine made music no one had ever anticipated, a tree filled with angels, bright wings bespangling every bough like stars. But Oasis represented a massive, if mighty, full stop, consolidating the past to date and boldly nailing all the best bits together, the Trigger’s broom of pop. Was that momentum ever regained?
Suddenly, parents and kids all liked the same Beatles-Pistols hybrid. Oasis were the last ever national pop moment before the internet ended consensus, the weekly music papers folded, and Top of the Pops went off air. And in May 2017, when Manchester grieved for the victims of the arena bombing, it was Don’t Look Back In Anger they sang in the street spontaneously. Oasis enabled that moment. And to be fair to My Bloody Valentine, no one there was about to lead a mass outdoor singalong of the sonic inferno midsection of You Made Me Realise. Horses for courses.
But the Oasis reunion already has one unintended consequence. In Edinburgh, a Holiday Inn Express room next August for the first two nights of their Murrayfield shows will now cost you £1,300 due to anticipated demand. Edinburgh fringe performers’ and audiences’ whole month’s accommodation budget would go in a night, so by my reckoning the first two weeks of the festival just got totally fucked, Oasis singlehandedly murdering what 14 years of the Tories’ war on the arts couldn’t quite kill off. Sorted!
• Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on the streaming service Now TV now, and his 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Square Theatre in December
