There was something rather apt in the tussle that followed the announcement of this summer’s Oasis reunion shows: websites crashed, prices soared, the scene grew frantic and unseemly. It was altogether in-keeping with the temperament of a band who split in the wake of a post-gig fight in Paris, then embarked upon 15 years of near-poetic acrimony.
This energy—swaggering and somewhat splenetic—has been an essential part of both Oasis’s story and their sound. Liam and Noel Gallagher, who fronted the band, didn’t just become known for their frequent internal squabbles, but also for their disdain for other acts—most notably, fellow Britpop band Blur, along with Coldplay and Keane and the Kaiser Chiefs, among many.
Their music, too, carried something confrontational, even in the ballads. It was pantomime, partly—a caricature of rock ’n’ roll rebellion, but it also owed something to the Gallagher brothers’ upbringing on the outskirts of Manchester. A chippy Northernness, perhaps; a sense of something to prove set against a guitar-led sound you could trace back through the Stone Roses and the Smiths to the Beatles.
The British music scene is now quite different to when Oasis split in 2009. There are fewer indie guitar bands, certainly. There is more jazz, more hip-hop, a pop resurgence. Even with the success of acts such as Sam Fender, English Teacher and Blossoms, it feels some while since Northern guitar bands dominated. Music trends are cyclical, of course, and guitar music tends to shift in and out of fashion, but it will be interesting to see the effect of the Oasis summer before us—whether the run of 17 UK shows, from Cardiff to London, via Edinburgh and, of course, Manchester, sparks something of a revival of musical Northernness.
The UK’s north-south divide is a complicated subject, one muddied by stereotype, presumption and exception. Not all Northerners are poor or working class, for instance, and not all Southerners are wealthy; London, our richest city, is simultaneously home to immense poverty, as are many other areas of the southeast and southwest.
Still, measured by GDP per capita, productivity and disposable income, the UK has one of the starkest regional imbalances in any industrialised nation. This grew under the coalition and subsequent Conservative governments, despite the grand revivalist hopes of the Northern Powerhouse and Levelling Up. In the space left between having and having not can spring all kinds of restlessness and frustration (as anyone who spent half a day queuing for Oasis tickets on Ticketmaster would tell you). In regional and economic terms, such disparity has been linked to changing political positions, for instance the rise of Ukip and Reform, a process described by Philip McCann, chair of urban and regional economics at Manchester Business School, as the “geography of discontent”.
That regional divide has also grown in musical terms over the last 15 years. Last year, the charity Youth Music issued their “Sound of the Next Generation” report, which found that in the northeast of England, young people were 18 per cent less likely to play an instrument than those in London, and just 2 per cent of young Northerners had the chance to perform at a local music venue.
‘We don’t book anyone from anywhere north of Birmingham,’ one band was told
The bands that do emerge also face the challenge of breaking into an industry that is largely skewed to the south. London gigs are pretty much essential if anyone is to attract the attention of labels, managers, publishers and booking agents, most of whom are based in the capital and few of whom relish a trip to the regions. But it can be hard to convince promoters to put a small Northern band on a London bill, as they are unlikely to have an established fanbase in the south, potentially leaving the venue half-empty.
Recently, one band told me how they were removed from a support slot in the capital after the promoter learned they were from Halifax. “We don’t book anyone from anywhere north of Birmingham,” they were told.
If I were to describe the sound of the “geography of discontent”, I might imagine it a little like Oasis. When the band emerged, in 1994, it was in the shadow of 18 years of Conservative government and a period of deindustrialisation that left the north decimated. Something in their music—the angles of the Gallaghers’ voices, the swell of their songs, the braggadoccio of their lyrics—seemed to speak to this time. It was a profound statement of identity, an insistence that the north still mattered.
Oasis would go on to be something of a musical Cottonopolis. All seven of their albums, from 1994’s Definitely Maybe to 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul, reached number one. They twice headlined Glastonbury, won six Brits, two Ivor Novellos and 17 NME Awards. In 1996, they played two sold-out shows at Knebworth—the largest single-stage venue in the country, with a capacity of 125,000.
Their return now feels hopeful; a string of summer shows that might bring about the end of a division, or perhaps the start of a musical devolution.
