England’s Last Band Standing

LONDON—On the cusp of a new technology, the old impersonates the coming form. The “mash-up”—the digital overlay of disparate musical elements—became technically possible in the late 1990s. But the mash-up already existed by another name in the late 1970s, through the DJs manually syncing two turntables. And though the mash-up looked forward to the end of manual music-making, at the time its most prominent analogue, both technologically and symbolically, was the backward-looking manual labor of a four-piece rock band, Oasis.

Oasis was the most successful and least innovative of the late-1990s Britpop bands. The superlative and its antonym are closely related, for rock music is a deeply conservative form: “We fear change,” said Garth in Wayne’s World, the 1992 comedy about rock’s adolescent ossification. Garth demonstrates this by taking up a hammer and smashing the prosthetic arm of a Frankenstein’s monster in the making. The digital enemy must be destroyed if rock is to survive. Oasis’s early hits included “Live Forever.” And they have. They were the last rock band in 1995. There are none more last.

The molten core of Oasis is the dysfunctional relationship between the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel. In Britain, they are usually referred to in that order, but it is not their birth order. Noel is five years older and writes the songs. Liam is the singer. Their priority in public perception is also their priority in public affection. Noel, whose early lyrics include, “I need to be myself, / I can’t be no one else,” is frequently mistaken for Liam, who expresses his need to be himself by doing his best to look and sound like John Lennon in 1966. For several years, their drummer was Zak Starkey, Ringo’s son. This would be taking the Beatles bit too far, were it not that the whole point of Oasis is that they take it too far, and always by staying too near to the Beatles.

Oasis broke up 14 years ago in a bout of guitar-slinging in a French dressing room. Noel says that Liam swung a guitar at his head “like an ax.” This should not be confused with Liam hitting Noel with a tambourine at their L.A. debut in 1994 after a crystal meth bender, Noel hitting Liam with a cricket bat in 1995 because Liam had invited some new friends back from the pub to the recording studio, or Noel punching Liam in the face in 2000 after Liam questioned the paternity of Noel’s daughter. Noel says Liam is angry, “a man with a fork in a world of soup.” Liam says Noel and his “celebrity mates” are “up their own arses,” but, this proctological class analysis notwithstanding, he’d give Noel a kidney and expects that Noel would do the same.

The fighting Gallagher brothers’ reformation is the hottest ticket in Britain this summer, and also, thanks to dynamic pricing, the most expensive. Demand for tickets was so high on the first day of sale that the band would need to play more than a hundred dates at the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium to satisfy everyone. After the 17-date British tour, which included 7 nights at Wembley, the band will perform in Toronto, Chicago, East Rutherford, the Rose Bowl, and Mexico City.

Oasis broke another record at Wembley. Each night, their audience drank 250,000 pints of beer. This was more than twice Coldplay’s lightweight 120,000 pints a night, and more than six times Taylor Swift’s heavily female audience put away. The floor of the stadium was sticky with the stuff. On the penultimate night of Oasis’s seven-night Wembley run, a man slipped, went overboard from the upper tier, and fell to his death.

Oasis is man’s music, played by men for men, and the kind of women who like men’s stuff. Oasis do not cavort about like Chris Martin or wear fun outfits like Taylor Swift. They wear leisure wear. They stand still when they play, with the blank faces of laborers watching concrete being poured. And they sound incredible.

This is partly because Oasis largely keep to tunes from their first two albums, their 1994 debut Definitely Maybe and its 1995 follow-up (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? And it’s partly because Oasis songs sound like a mash-up of other people’s songs. The opener, “Hello,” is so derivative that Oasis were, like many rap acts, obliged to share the royalties with the composer they had ripped off. He was Gary Glitter, the 1970s glam act who, in the English way, went from national treasure to disgraced pedophile. Glitter’s signature tune, “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” was football hooliganism set to music, and as much a precursor to punk as the more respected Bolan and Bowie side of glam.

Oasis updated this model for the hedonistic, post-industrial 1990s by combining soccer, the working-class English obsession, with its ancillary hobbies of music, drugs, and sex. Imagine a soccer match where everyone is friends, men share their feelings with their wives and children, and everyone wins, and you have an Oasis concert. At times, you cannot hear the vocals, because 90,000 people are shouting the lyrics in the kind of ecstasy that usually only happens when the home team scores.

When they play “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” Liam orders the crowd to “do the Poznan” and make like Manchester City’s fans by turning their backs, linking arms, and jumping up and down. I was sitting in the upper tier. The entire stadium was shaking. “Is it my imagination, or have I finally found something worth living for?” everyone howled. “I was looking for some action, / But all I found was Cigarettes and Alcohol.” The tedium of everyday life, and the dream of escape, is at the heart of Oasis’s appeal. “Is it worth the aggravation to find a job when there’s nothing worth working for?”

“I don’t know what it is that makes me feel alive, / I don’t know how to wake the things that sleep inside,” Liam sings in “Acquiesce,” which Noel says he wrote while stuck on a train for four hours in 1995. The bluesy monotony of Liam’s two-note verse segues from A to C via a grinding passage that sounds not unlike the Sex Pistols. Then the entire stadium erupts with Noel’s keening pentatonic chorus: “Because we need one another, / We believe in one another.”

Every great band has an arc of tension that sparks across its music: the sibling rivalry of Ray and Dave Davies, the quasi-sibling dependencies of Lennon and McCartney, the consummation of the Jagger-Richards romance over the dead body of Brian Jones. Like Mick Jones in the Clash, Noel has the tunes but not the voice, but none of Jones’s charisma. Like Joe Strummer, Liam has the voice and the attitude, though none of Strummer’s lyrical talent.

Noel denies that “Acquiesce” is about their relationship in the way that Strummer wrote the words to “Lost in the Supermarket” for Jones. Noel also claims that he ended up singing the chorus because Liam couldn’t hit the high notes. Perhaps “Acquiesce” is, as Noel says, about friendship in general. Regardless, the shift in mood and the alternating vocals make “Acquiesce” a crowd favorite. Live, the vagueness of its lyrics makes it a song about the mutual dependence of band and audience. The Gallaghers are stuck with one another. We are stuck with them. Or are we just stuck?

Apart from drinking beer and singing along, one of the pleasures of a night out with the Gallagher brothers is spotting the lifts. “Some Might Say” opens like Status Quo’s “Caroline,” has a verse sequence like the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” and the chorus of the Pixies’ “Debaser.” “Cigarettes & Alcohol” comes in on T. Rex’s “Get It On,” and exits with a jam on the chords to Them’s “Gloria.” The chords of “Morning Glory” are those of R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.” “Slide Away” is a variation on Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.”

The pay-off on “Roll With It” is the chords from Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” with the original lyric “I think it’s gonna be a long, long time” barely masked as “I think I’ve got a feelin’ I’ve lost inside.” “Don’t Look Back in Anger” begins with the “Imagine” piano intro, develops into the chord sequence of that Baroque banger, Pachelbel’s Canon, and takes the title of its otherwise meaningless lyrics from a John Osborne play of the Angry Young Men era. “Whatever” ends with the opening couplet from Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden.”

As Noel freely admitted, “If you go back through 30 years of music, we’re the best bits, your favorite bits, all encompassed in one band. We’re Oasis.” This is not strictly true. “Octopus’s Garden” isn’t even the best Ringo track. But you can hardly complain that the chorus of “Acquiesce” is from Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize” when Oasis’s live version is better than the original.

When a man is tired of Oasis, he may have listened to a whole album. Oasis may have released twice as many good albums as the Sex Pistols, but they don’t have enough upbeat rockers to keep the crowd bouncing. After about an hour, they slip into a musical brewer’s droop of mid-paced balladry. Liam’s passionate bellowing cannot completely redeem Noel’s fruitless search for words to express his deeply repressed but consistently shallow emotions. The acoustic interlude and the fleeting addition of a horn section add to the soporific, bleary atmosphere. The main set ends with the explosive “Rock ’N’ Roll Star,” but the encores are all slow singalongs.

There’s something doubly nostalgic about hearing Oasis 30 years on from when they reworked the hits 30 years on, and something painful in the slowing of pace and passion as the evening wears on toward the inevitable recitations of “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” The collages on the video screens show the young Liam and Noel with their Irish immigrant family amid Victorian terraces and postwar tower blocks. These, the stock images of the vanished world of childhood and the lost world of working-class England, are the visual counterpart to the Beatles’ songbook and the lager-soaked 1970s’ pub playlist that supplies most of Oasis’s tunes. Like a scratched record, we are stuck with Liam and Noel at the moment when time stopped.

When the Sex Pistols reunited in 2007, they came onstage in London to a wartime marching ballad by Vera Lynn. “Thank you for singing along to ‘There’ll Always Be an England,’” John Lydon said, “because as long as we exist, there fucking well will be.” Oasis are Thatcher and Lydon’s children, ’90s hedonists who wanted to live forever.

England was a hopeful place in the 1990s. The digital tide had yet to mash up a unitary national culture and dissolve our sense of time and place. Oasis and the Spice Girls were the last acts from old England—a culture rooted in the Victorian world of Irish laborers, frothy pints, and football crowds, recurrently refreshed by the vaudeville singalong tradition that produced the Beatles, the Kinks, Elton John, Slade, and the Sex Pistols.

England is not the same. The English are not the same. English music is not the same. But Oasis are the same.

“So come on, feel the noise
Girls, rock your boys
We’ll get wild, wild, wild … 

And I don’t know why, I don’t know why anymore”

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

The post England’s Last Band Standing appeared first on .