Oasis: There are reasons why they are last great working-class band to conquer the world

By the time you read this, both Noel and Liam Gallagher will be €59 million richer. That’s split between them, technically, so €29 million richer, off the back of ticket sales from their fabled comeback tour, due to take place next summer. It could pay for Noel’s costly divorce, with enough to tide him over until he decides whether to sell the band’s lucrative back catalogue. Even for the biggest Oasis fans, that is a sobering and bitter pill to swallow, particularly if you spent hours staring hopelessly at the little timer on the Ticketmaster website, praying to get into the queue to buy tickets.
Those lucky enough to get past Ticketmaster’s riddles were greeted with price gouging that left the final tickets costing as much as €400 each. In the ensuing backlash, ticket providers revealed to fans that this kind of gouging, known in the business as “dynamic pricing”, is a choice made by the artists, not the sites. If Oasis hadn’t wanted you to pay hundreds to see them, then you wouldn’t have.
And if you did manage to get one of those hundred-odd euro tickets before they all sold out (about 10 hours in, if you’re counting) then you’d better hope you had the sense to buy close to home. As soon as Oasis announced their comeback tour, hotel prices in Dublin, London, Cardiff and Manchester began to skyrocket. One person found themselves staring down the barrel of a single night at a cheap chain hotel for €5,000. Taoiseach Simon Harris waded into the discourse, pleading with hostelries to “engage fairly” with the scrum of demand. Predictably, they ignored him.
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It’s hard to blame them. This is an event intended to make money. This is a financial survival of the fittest. The Oasis reunion may have sparked genuine joy when it was announced – it’s something many of us thought would simply never happen – but it’s naive to think of it as anything other than a depressingly pure expression of the free market.
Unsurprisingly then, the conversation about the Oasis reunion quickly became a conversation about class. These boys, men now, were once the working-class heroes of the Britpop era, and now they’re asking you to buy their merchandise solely through Amazon, and to please not resell your ticket for thousands of Euro unless you’re paying them directly. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said that the price gouging was an example of the band “throwing working-class fans under the bus”. British prime minister Keir Starmer said it was unfair to “price people out of the market”.
The material circumstances of the Gallagher brothers have obviously changed since they started out. As Liam sings on his solo hit Once: “The freedom we wanted seems so uncool/ Just clean the pool and take the kids to school.” But it’s hard not to feel that their legacy has been tarnished with ticket cash grabs like the kind of greed they talk about in the Bible.
Perhaps it stings more precisely because their beginnings were so humble. In a nepo-baby-ified world that has few working-class musicians (or creatives in general any more) Oasis are remarkable precisely because their lives began unremarkably. The children of Irish immigrants, Noel, Liam and elder brother Paul’s tough upbringing in Burnage is well fabled. Their alcoholic father was so violent Noel, known as an adult for his acid tongue, was terrified to the point of becoming near-mute with a severe stammer.
Their introduction to music came not from costly private lessons but from the Irish rebel songs they heard in the diaspora clubs of Manchester, which Noel credits for inspiring Oasis’s anthemic sound. Their mother eventually fled in the middle of the night with the children in tow. Before superstardom, they worked on building sites rather than going to art school (Noel later said this experience gave him a “purer” soul than his middle-class musical rivals). Liam was unemployed so often his nickname was Doley.
As an origin story, it’s an impressive one, perhaps more so today than in the early 1990s. Then, Oasis were up against bands such as Blur – who met at Goldsmiths and sang satirical songs about the working classes in strained Thames Estuary accents – but had cohorts in Suede – whose frontman became a singer because he “didn’t want to live in a council house in Haywards Heath” – and Pulp, whose biggest hit was a piss-take of posh kids affecting a working-class persona to fit in at uni. Today, it’s hard to imagine a headline like the Guardian’s Blur vs Oasis framing: working-class heroes vs art school trendies. There’s hardly any of the former left, and most of the British music industry is made up of the latter.
Research conducted by the UK Labour Party found that, in the past decade, nearly half of the nominees for the country’s biggest cultural awards – the Brit Awards, Mercury Prize and Baftas – were privately educated. As a percentage of the entire population, only 6 per cent of British people have gone to private school. It’s just that apparently they all decided to start bands when they graduated. (Why wouldn’t you, if you don’t need to worry about the rent?) Consequently, this demographic dominates the cultural landscape, from Glastonbury stages to the Brit Awards.
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Last year the darlings of the UK music scene, The Last Dinner Party, inadvertently got themselves in trouble when lead singer Abigail Morris said that people “didn’t want to hear lyrics about the cost-of-living crisis”. Morris attended Bedales, one of England’s most prestigious public schools, which currently charges £42,500 (€50,368) a year in fees. Equity, a UK-based trade union for the performing arts world, released a report earlier this year stating that working-class representation in the industry is at its lowest point in a decade.
To be clear, this is not the fault or responsibility of Liam and Noel Gallagher. I mention it because I think it goes some way to explaining the huge demand for their return and the bitter taste when it became impossible to access tickets. Oasis are – were – a working-class band. They profited off a culture and aesthetic that came from their communities, and then found themselves new communities, in Highgate and Primrose Hill, which they found they liked much better. But they continued to sing about what they knew best, which was partying and drinking and enjoying life, and people loved them for it.
There is no equivalent today to this. There are bands from the north of England, and there are working-class musicians, and there are Britpop-inspired musicians, but nobody is doing it like Oasis. There is no space for a new band to come up, either, in the same circumstances, who might one day be able to ascend to the next level. The creative industries, in the aftermath of Britpop, became cliquey and closed off, harder to break, harder still if your dad didn’t go to school with some jolly fine lads now working at Sony or Universal. This is a game for the 1 per cent now, is the message. So why not join them, with some jolly fun dynamic pricing?
Still, for every fan criticising the supernova capitalists, there are diehards who defend them. There are people who make the case that Oasis shouldn’t be the paragon of champagne socialism class war in Britain, that charging people hundreds to see them during a cost-of-living crisis is their prerogative, that rock stars aren’t politicians. Which is a fair argument, albeit one that Oasis seemed less sure of in their 1990s heyday.
At the peak of their Britpop powers, in 1997, Noel posed for a now infamous photo with Tony Blair, the incumbent New Labour prime minister. The pair grin at each other, separated by flutes of champagne. The photo was taken in the Green Room of 10 Downing Street, a space littered with 18th-century oil paintings and gilt stucco, once used as the diningroom of Robert Walpole. The image hasn’t aged well, but it’s become, like a paper stub for an Oasis gig you paid double digits for, a relic of a forgotten era. Or, in the words of Richard Power Sayeed, author of 1997: The Future That Never Happened, evidence that Oasis had achieved the level of success that transformed their rebellion into “bland orthodoxy”.
“The optimism and sense of collectivity that had been built through years of Britpop expansion were now moulded into spectacle, a polite drinks party,” Sayeed writes. “Blair was connecting himself to a genre of music that celebrated being British, being a lad and being rebellious in a way that seemed glamorous, but which had little prospect of changing the world.” Noel, as usual, puts it better himself. “It’s sort of not exciting any more,” he once lamented to DJ Steve Lamacq. “We are the establishment.”
Sayeed’s book takes the stance that although the 1990s seemed like a great time to be alive, a time of change and excitement, little actually happened to make our lives better. Blair left office in disgrace, Girl Power didn’t make us more feminist, the biggest band in Britain and Ireland being working class did not pave the way for a new generation of upstarts. If they had, in the case of the latter, perhaps we wouldn’t be so desperate to live through Oasis’s heyday all over again. We’d have new Oasises, more Oasises. But that feels as much of a fantasy as a Gallagher reunion once did. For better and for worse, there is only one Oasis. And as long as we have the money to pay them to grace us with their presence, they can Live Forever.
Róisín Lanigan is a writer and contributing editor the The Fence magazine