Noel Gallagher (left) Andy Bell (centre) and Liam Gallagher, members of the British rock band Oasis hold a photocall in Hong Kong on 25 February, 2006.
Photo: MIKE CLARKE/AFP
- Britpop icons Oasis are reforming for the first time since 2009, with feuding brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher calling a truce to get the band back together.
- Oasis will headline a series of live concerts in the UK and Ireland next year.
It’s official! After 15 years of refuting any suggestion they might reform, Oasis have reunited to headline a series of live shows.
After teasing fans earlier this week, Liam and Noel Gallagher have confirmed they would bury the hatchet to perform a run of concerts across the UK and Ireland in 2025.
What are Oasis’s reunion dates?
The band will play four shows each at London’s Wembley Stadium and Heaton Park in Manchester, the band’s hometown. They will also play two shows each in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Dublin, making for a total of 14 live dates between July and August 2025.
There was no official word on if Liam and Noel Gallagher would be joined by former Oasis members, including guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell, who were part of the line-up before the group disbanded in 2009.
“Me and Liam are, like, telepathic you know what i mean?,” Noel could be heard saying in a video teaser.
“I know my brother better than anybody else, when we both come together you have… greatness.”
“This is it, this is happening”
Tickets on sale this Saturday 31st August (8AM IST / 9AM BST)
Dates:
Cardiff Principality Stadium – 4th/5th July
Manchester Heaton Park – 11th/12th/19th/20th July
London Wembley Stadium – 25th/26th July & 2nd/3rd August
Edinburgh Scottish Gas… pic.twitter.com/5hRQ3sJihb— Oasis (@oasis) August 27, 2024
British newspaper The Sun reported the band could secure an estimated NZD$850m for their upcoming dates.
Liam helped fuel speculation about comeback shows this past week, replying to fan reactions on X. For instance, in response to one fan complaining about Heaton Park being “terrible for concert venues”, the frontman replied: “see you down the front you big f***y”.
During his set at Reading Festival on 23 August, Liam dedicated his performance of Half The World Away to “Noel f**king Gallagher”.
The reunion news coincided with the 30th anniversary of the band’s first album Definitely Maybe, which became the UK’s fastest-selling debut record at the time.
Why did Oasis break up?
The feuding between the Gallagher siblings was almost as central to Oasis’s legacy as their arena-sized singalongs.
Their in-fighting was increasingly hostile until, on 28 August, 2009, it boiled over into a scuffle backstage, moments before the band were set to arrive on stage to play Rock en Seine festival in Paris.
The next day, Oasis was no more.
“It is with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight,” Noel wrote in a statement at the time.
“People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”
The writing had been on the wall before then. Noel described the “terrible, terrible time” he had during the group’s “dreadful” final year in the second season of ABC TV’s Take 5 with Zan Rowe.
“That last tour was not happy. Nobody was happy at the time. The other fellas trying to rewrite history that it was all f***ing great. It wasn’t all great,” he said.
“It had come to an end, you could feel it. it was time to move on.”
Over the past 15 years, the brothers have traded enough foul-mouthed, funny insults to fill a phone book (Noel once described Liam as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup”) while continuing with their own solo careers.
Liam fronted Beady Eye with former Oasis members Gem Archer, Andy Bell, and Chris Sharrock. The band released two albums before Liam went solo. He was currently on tour celebrating 30 years of Definitely Maybe, joined by original Oasis guitarist Paul Arthurs, aka Bonehead.
Noel Gallagher formed his titular band Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in 2010. They’ve released four studio albums, including last year’s Council Skies.
Why is an Oasis reunion such a big deal?
As well as being one of the defining rock bands of the 90s Britpop boom, Oasis were also one of the decade’s biggest-selling acts, with over 75 million records sold worldwide to date.
The band’s headlining concerts at Knebworth, England in 1996 demonstrated their combined popularity and bankability: They were some of the biggest gigs in British history.
Demand was so great that more than 4 percent of the UK population (around 2.5 million) applied for tickets at the time.
Oasis played to a total of 250,000 fans over two nights – and held the record for the UK’s biggest outdoor concert until 2003 when Robbie Williams played to 375,000 people over three nights at the same venue.
They had success in Australia as well, with nearly every single they released between 1994 and 1998 making it into ARIA charts.
Their biggest hit was the chart-topping second album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, which has gone eight-times Platinum Down Under.
Anthemic breakout single Wonderwall also spent several weeks at #1 and topped triple j’s Hottest 100 of 1995.
The song made it to #12 in a special “All Time” edition of the youth broadcaster’s countdown in 2009, and in 2013 topped the countdown of the biggest songs of the past 20 years.
– ABC