“Turn around and do the fucking Poznan.”
What seemed like a one-off in Manchester has now become a trope of Oasis’ tour as it rumbles across the United Kingdom. (With night 3 at Wembley already being hyped on those socials). Each new date seemingly conquers everything in its path.
The tour is forecast to generate £1.06Bn spending (which nips the 'Eras' tour if it holds). The average fan was projected to spend £766 across hotels, travel, merch, and food & drink. For the 2 Cardiff shows, spending on beer and cider alone was more than £4m
Visually, like a lot of this tour, it’s a pretty mighty sight to behold. The sheer mass of collectivism, whether in arms aloft, pogoing, Poznań’s, or singing, has been one of the defining features so far of this tour. This has been helped by the deft deployment of Oasis’s content machine, and of course, willing participants in the crowd. As each new video rolled in, the plan (as it was) has come clearer into view, and it’s worth deconstructing.
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I’d already spent time digging into the collaboration strategy underpinning the tour. Since spring, the machine has deftly cranked through the gears. Stoking anticipation and hype, navigating the twin towers of nostalgia and fantasy.
The Adidas film, which effectively served as the tour kick-off, has seamlessly transitioned into a riot of merchandise. Jackets, bucket hats, and limited-edition handball sneakers (arriving soon), a reissue series, and other various forms of cultural ephemera are sold via the venues and strategically located in city center areas. It’s equal opportunity participation writ large.
There have been some duds (Land Rover makes zero sense, and it showed). Demonstrating how a collaboration, yet again, needs to have cultural resonance rather than simply cold hard cash to keep it together. And the Lidl stunt, while fun, was light as a feather.
This rollout has cleverly subsumed the larger Gallagher brood, helping to create a unique connection point between generations. This is where Burberry’s festival campaign excelled. With a sixteen-year hiatus and 25 years since their last relative peak (Wembley 2000, which is a great live album), there are now two, if not three, generations connected through the band. Burberry ensured that by bringing everyone together, it would ward off the sense of a nostalgic fest, which stalked boomer bands of similar ages. Sure, you might not get ban-jaxxed at a festival anymore, but the mere dream of it is enough to sustain.
However, it’s the tour content that has helped shape this renewed sense of vitality. The brands themselves were the fluffers. The real action is on the floor.
Content As The Hero’s Journey
From the first show in Cardiff, it was apparent that shaping events and elevating the monumental nature of moments would be key. While John Hegarty is right that “all roads lead to the work”, it certainly helps when the work is being deftly massaged and shaped. A case in point is the first photo, showing them arm in arm. A show of solidarity, if not love. Prizefighters coming back to the fray.
Melodramatic? Absolutely. Appropriate. Absolutely.
This spirit of high-key drama has been maintained as the band has moved from venue to venue. And it’s moved back and forth, from band to crowd and back again.
Each stop has built its own very clear ecosystem.
A teaser.
Still images (with a taste for ‘biblical’).
A 30-second ‘what happened last night’ summary, and onto the next.
As the cadence and form have evolved, so have the drama and heightened emotions of the content. It’s a strategy of pure scale, and it works perfectly.
While noting that my algorithm, age, and general follower composition would predispose me to receive a lot of Oasis-centric content, it’s the crowds that have turned this into something extraordinary. Providing a window into what fandom means and moves people to do across generations. A feedback loop that’s echoed in and around what the band (and their team) is creating to stoke that energy and emotion.
The result is something genuinely interesting. A sense of catharsis that is beyond performative. Sure, people are documenting it, but those documents are sometimes deeply heartfelt; they’re random, but most of all, they’re ecstatic. It’s not just a gig, it’s not just clout-chasing, and it’s also not quite nostalgia either. It’s 80,000 people singing the song, before the band is on. It’s adding up to something quite meaningful and engaging to follow and document.
Take the below example - it’s not just a concert review, it’s about life and all that’s happened in it, seen through the lens of the brand.
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Or the content creators who have swarmed the gigs have, whether intentionally or not, reflected this everyman, everybody sensibility. It’s the inverse of ‘Eras.’ Not just the songs, but the eras of people.
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As just two examples of the hundreds of pieces of content floating around, they reflect something that even a few years ago felt impossible: Making Oasis musically desirable again.
While Oasis maintained a beloved fanbase, they were, for the vast majority, an anachronism since the early 2000s. At the same time, both Gallaghers have had their moments in the sun since 2009. their most successful albums and work never matched the highs of their past. It’s almost as if the band disappeared from critical and cultural relevance. Laughed at as reductive, almost Brexit-esque in its insularity. Slowly but surely as time has gone on, Liam especially has become a national treasure. A no-bullshit voice in a world of performative posturing. Liam turned out to be the real thing. His most successful moments came when he channeled Oasis directly (with his Knebworth performances in 2022.)
But their return was about as perfectly timed as it gets. In the same way, their peak is now associated with the last true ‘halcyon’ time of British culture; now they operate on two levels. A reminder of that (imagined) time, and, somehow, a reminder that collectivism is a true wonder that we’ve fundamentally lost in our hyper-fragmented moment.
At this scale, it’s not just wonderful to witness, it’s unusual. That unusualness drives a more profound need to participate. To be in it, not just observe it. The above video, weirdly, captures that by comparing 1996 and 2025. It’s Jurassic Park, a place where extinct species are brought back to life.
That revivalism and triumphalism are creating unique atmospheres that transcend a mere ‘gig’. Or as Bobby Gillespie put it in his post:
Hit after hit after hit. Dancing, smiling people everywhere - like being at a cup final with everyone supporting the same team and winning. ⚽️🏆🎸 What a fucking great night we had.
Deepening Relationships Along The Way
To channel that nostalgia into something modern, Oasis have learnt from modern-day behemoths such as Taylor Swift, not just in the content stakes, but in shaping and responding to the events that unfold during and around the concert itself.
Take, for example, the evolution of Gallagher Hill - a chance moment (someone spotted a gap where you could hear/see the concert), which turned into its concert within a concert. Initially shut down by the police, by the end of the Heaton Park run, Gallagher Hill was its own mini-world. A feat, recognized by the band and family, subsequently printing 2,000 ‘Gallagher Hill’ t-shirts. (Which of course now sells for £1k+, inspiring its version of variants being sold at the time…)
While Gallagher Hill was as organic a moment as it gets, the band has deployed other structured engagements too. The London Playing Fields Foundation works not only to celebrate the “unsung heroes behind grassroots sport,” but it also triples down on Oasis’ band of the people sensibility. Returning heroes, who never left their roots.
As I was writing this, I kept coming back to the (now iconic) ‘How To Build Brand Energy” from Grace Gordon last year. What was so brilliantly described was how BRAT came to dominate through its leveraging of cultural moments and tactics that subsumed both creator and fan. Offering both a template and a wider demonstration of how to leverage fandom, as ideas evolve outside of their original context.
BRAT was both an individualistic and a collective experience. Individual ideas, such as ‘The Apple Dance’, were adopted by the collective as one example. The energy came together in waves, but was fueled by a system that built off of clear content approaches and actions. The trick was that the system felt organic, which blunted critiques of inauthenticity or cash grabs. BRAT subsumed.
Oasis's approach is not as nimble as Charli XCX’s, but the band’s team has clearly paid attention - and inadvertently inverted the core idea that built BRAT. Building on collective experience to inform individual reaction. We’re not going to get “Kamala is BRAT”, becuase the most effective communication around the concerts is one of collectivism and communion with the band and audience. It’s so tightly wound that it becomes its own sonic and emotional monolith. You can’t “be” Oasis (although many bands, and Liam style-cos-players try), but you can be subsumed into the collective. BRAT was a hyper-individualistic idea with the loosest of tents around it. (Hence, anything could be implied and associated with being ‘BRAT’.)
A look back at BRAT, and you feel it perfectly captured the chaos of 2024. Charli’s (final) performance of BRAT was at Glastonbury - a set that drew enormous crowds, but also, watching it, felt like the end of something. Literal and metaphorical. Dare I say that Oasis’ return is capturing something, too. A sense of grabbing for hope and positivity in the cavalcade of relentless global shittiness that is 2025.
With everyone in the fear and loathing thunderdome, signs of positivity are grabbed with both hands. Superman’s return to positivity is just one example of that in popular culture right now. Collective optimism is a cheat code. Raw positivity and joy in 2025 feels like you’re cheating a system designed to enshittfy, divide, and make you angry and/or scared. By fusing the brothers, the band, and the crowds together, it’s both thoroughly old-school and thoroughly modern. Those bonded generations in the crowd bouncing up and down? It's about life. All of its triumph and tragedy, its naive possibilities, and the hard-earned lessons of what was. There’s ennui and euphoria in those lyrics and riffs.
Maybe that's overtly grandiose. But the longer the tour has gone on, the more this thought has borne out. I’ve seen it, and I’ve heard it anecdotally from friends who’ve gone. Oasis is right now, not a gig, not a band, but an ideal, with the layers of generation and story that that implies. In the end, it’s the hope, the positivity, the community, and the sheer leviathan quality of this tour that’s making it special.
See you at MetLife on August 31st.
An Oasis deep (ish) cut.
As you can see, I became instead immersed in this world and wider thought. So for my (traditional) music section, I started relistening to the back catalog. Something that I hadn’t done in years. One album, and one track, stood out - Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants.
I remember buying it in 2000, and it marked a significant departure from the band's previous style at that time. While it had some hit songs (“Fuckin’ In The Bushes” and “Go Let It Out”), there were some unlistenable parts (ahem, Little James), and it was an album that felt filled with unease and a desire to follow a trend. In this case, the Big Beat/Chemical Brothers era—full of chopped loops, like Tomorrow Never Knows for the 2000s
Yet, upon relistening, one song stood out. The frail and self-doubting ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’.
While the music video is let’s say… questionable, the acoustic version strips away the wall of sound and big-beat-I-tis to leave a song that says a lot about the price of success, and the self-doubt that supplants it.
While it’s not going to get any airtime in a concert setlist packed with anthems, it’s a nod back to a more troubled, but also interesting moment for the band.
More next week (but no Oasis).
Great post James. Oasis were the first band I fell in love with and my first gig was Knebworth. I started to lose that loving feeling for them not long after and, like a teenage sweetheart, they ended up drifting from my heart over the years as my world got bigger. I have been uninterested in this tour since it started (when it was announced I did go through the back catalogue to make a fan fiction album “Oasis if they were cool art kids” that you can listen to here https://open.spotify.com/playlist/71L1nRftAMJtyYSIbfQ2sq?si=fZJ5MJraTTSzCeObmZ1upw&pi=RWsWinmbRUOBt) but reading this post has rekindled those feelings that made me love them as a teenager: collectivism, uninhibited emotion and positivity. Maybe I’ll check out more concert footage on the socials? Definitely maybe.
https://thelastchord.substack.com/p/review-oasis-reunion-2025-a-night