An Oasis reunion is exactly what woke, bland Britain needs

So it’s happening. The prayers of middle-aged men like me have been answered. The Gallagher bros have ended the feud and are hitting the road. Oasis are back. Gird yourself for noisy glee from 50-year-old men with thinning mop tops and a thousand shit thinkpieces on why the last thing we need is a resurrection of ‘lad culture’. It’s going to be beautiful and terrible all at once.

The nation is in a tizz at the news that Liam and Noel are reuniting for a British-Irish tour next year. It’s the lead story on BBC News. ‘Mad for it!’, yells the headline to a Beeb report on how Oasis fans are ‘rejoicing’, which made even me – a rejoicing Oasis fan – cringe. The Guardian is inviting Oasis fans to WhatsApp it to ‘tell us how you feel’. As if any self-respecting Oasis fan reads the Guardian.

It’s 15 years since Oasis last played live. More importantly, it’s 28 years, three months and 29 days since I last saw them live. That was at Maine Road in Manchester in April 1996, where 40,000 of us, young then, bobbed and swayed in dumb rhythm to the classics. ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol.’ ‘Live Forever.’ ‘Wonderwall.’ It was a different time. No one was ‘sober curious’. No one was genderfluid. No one was getting cancelled for saying ‘Sorry, babe’ to the woman they bumped into at the bar. It was just men and women and cigarettes and alcohol. Two genders, two vices and two brothers on stage marching us toward frenzy.

Naturally, there’s cynicism already among media ponces. Oasis, precisely because they’re adored by the throng, have long rankled with those who fancy themselves possessed of more refined cultural tastes. You could tell these tossers a mile off in the Nineties, sat in the corner of a gastropub, wanging on about how superior Blur’s knowing pop was to Oasis’s sub-Slade crowd-pleaser anthems. (To the snob, there’s nothing more offensive than pleasing the crowd.) The naysayers are back, to tell us we’re wrong, and that Oasis are, in fact, ‘shit’.

Whatever. To quote Oasis themselves. I’m thrilled about the reunion not only because I get to badly bop down memory lane, but also because Britain really needs a shot of Gallagher right now, right? In a cultural scene colonised by posh, fey ‘fluids’, where even pop has become a playground for the privately educated, and when you can be unpersoned for the crime of calling someone with a cock ‘a man’, I can think of nothing better than the return of these prodigal sons of the Manchester-Irish working class who, for their sins, speak their minds.

I’m looking forward to Liam’s cultural commentary. He’s the great unsung critic of our times. ‘The White Stripes? School ties? At the age of 24? Fucking hell’, he said in 2002, which is literally everything you need to know about the White Stripes. He said of Keith Richards and George Harrison, after they had a pop at Oasis, that ‘They’re jealous and senile and not getting enough fucking meat pies’. As for Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day: ‘I’m not having him. I just don’t like his head.’ I can’t be the only person who can’t wait for an interviewer to probe him about Taylor Swift or The 1975.

And I’m looking forward to more social wisdom from Noel. ‘Play “One”, shut the fuck up about Africa’, was his timeless advice to Bono. He recently slammed Glastonbury for going ‘woke’ and being full of ‘fucking idiots’ saying things like, ‘Hey guys, isn’t war terrible? Let’s all boo war.’ Then there was his keen observation on Meghan-era Prince Harry – a ‘fucking arsehole’ who should ‘shut up’. I love it that someone this blunt is hitting the road in an epoch when you can be strung up for saying ‘he’ about Sam Smith.

An Oasis explosion won’t defeat today’s culture of conformism, I know, but it might dent it. Who do indie youths have these days? The 1975? A band whose interests include ‘LGBTQ+ rights and climate-change mitigation’ and which records songs with Greta Thunberg? When The 1975 won Best Band at the Brit Awards in 2019, their lead singer Matty Healy – I can’t believe what I’m about to write – quoted a passage from the Guardian about how there are too many ‘male misogynist acts’ in the music business. It’s hands down the most offensive thing to ever happen at the Brits.

A brat at Cambridge gave away the truth about upper-crust Oasisphobia in a piece for Varsity that favourably contrasted The 1975 with Oasis. Where The 1975 made a stirring speech about sexism upon receipt of the Best Band gong, he wrote, Oasis, when they won the same award in ’96, ‘incoherently grunt[ed]’ and ‘engag[ed] in some juvenile boasting’. Thank God, says our prissy scribe, that ‘lad culture’ has withered and the era of ‘cocksure and crass’ bands like Oasis has given way to a brave new world of ‘introspective and ruminating’ bands like The 1975. I’m sorry, but when did young people become so fucking lame?

Naturally, Matty Healy hates Brexit. You’d be hard-pressed to find a rocker who doesn’t, apart from Roger Daltrey, and he’s 80. The vote to leave was driven by a ‘sentiment of anti-compassion’ and all us ‘liberal, intelligent people’ know this, a preening Healy told the turbo-smug middle classes of Glastonbury in 2016. Now, Noel isn’t too hot on Brexit, either – he called it a ‘living nightmare’ – but at least he said the thing all rich Remainers should have said after the masses voted Out. Namely, that the only thing ‘worse than a fool who voted for Brexit’ is ‘the cunts trying to get the vote overturned’.

What makes the return of Oasis not only exciting for ageing farts but also socially fascinating for Britain is that it’s happening at a time when almost every corner of culture is occupied by the posh and privileged. Even pop. The Sutton Trust reports that 19 per cent of recent Brit Award winners attended private school, compared with seven per cent of the general population. Gone are the days when the likes of Johnny Rotten, Morrissey and the Gallaghers could rise from the working classes to the dizzy heights of pop superstardom – now we have Fred Again (descendant of Shane, 3rd Baron O’Neill), Florence + The Machine (daughter of a famed scholar of the Renaissance), and Coldplay (four posh tits). That some in the chattering classes are ambivalent about the Oasis comeback is not surprising – they’re worried these ‘grunting’ lads from inner-city Manchester might upend the ‘introspective, ruminating’ pop fashioned by the fine fellows they once boarded with.

Bring it on, Liam and Noel. Play your crowd-pleasers, piss off your interviewers and drop the c-word like it’s going out of fashion. What sweet respite it will be from the safe, mannered, Edwardian hell pop has become in your absence.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy