Oasis Live ’25 in Cardiff: A Lifelong Fan’s Reunion
Oasis’s Cardiff reunion brings teenage memories flooding back for a lifelong fan who first saw them in 1996.
As I finish my fourth cheap pint of the evening I’m lost in memories of a band that meant everything to me as an impressionable teenager. Firstly, seeing them in Páirc Uí Chaoimh at the height of their popularity in August 1996, though I was on crutches and had to be carried a significant distance by my unfortunate brother-in-law. A serious cycling accident the day before resulted in several hours at Cork University Hospital undergoing tests and having painful grazes all over my body treated, but couldn’t prevent me from going to the gig. How could I let it? The biggest band on the planet were playing three miles from my front door. Another reminiscence is of wearing out the There and Then video tape of the Maine Road and Earls Court performances my sister had given me for Christmas. Listening to an album on repeat as we drove through Northern Italy on a school tour and buying the slightly too expensive album sheet music books from Crowleys or Pro Musica to learn the chords and lead guitar parts of the many songs I adored. These all seem like a lifetime ago, and they were.
It’s time to leave Wetherspoons on City Road in Cardiff and start a thirty-minute walk to the Principality Stadium. It’s 5th July 2025 and I’ve got one of the most eagerly sought after tickets in history, to see Oasis tonight on their Live ’25 reunion tour. By coincidence, the previous night I’d journeyed by bus from Bristol two hours earlier than planned and had been walking from the bus stop to my accommodation when I passed the stadium and heard the opening night of the tour in progress. It was the first time the band had played a gig together in 16 years.
It’s ten months since I paid £400 after a furious scramble on Ticketmaster and then shelled out more than £600 for two nights in what turned out to be a depressingly basic apartment and it’s just now that this financial gouging seems worth it. Mom had said to say a prayer to Granny that I’d get a ticket. I did say it, but whether my Granny, who had most likely never heard of the internet, was able to manipulate it to force hundreds of thousands of people who’d been ahead of me out of the queue or whether those people were put off by the eye-watering dynamic pricing policy, I don’t know. All I know is that I did manage to get one after spending the entire day on my laptop, making frantic calls and missing out on Dublin and Edinburgh.
These shows are all everybody in Cardiff is talking about. The thronged city has submitted to Oasis mania and it harkens back to a pre-social media age, perhaps to a time when people were happier and devotion to an artist meant more. That’s how it seems to me at least, as I believe you’ll never connect with music again as you do in your teenage years when devotion borders on cultlike fanaticism. Everyone I see has either a tour T-shirt, bucket hat, vinyl album or some other merch purchased from the pop-up shop that’s done a roaring trade here.
An hour later I can relax as I’m in my seat inside the vast stadium facing the stage, and it’s a bloody good seat. The stars are aligning for me now, it’s really going to happen. Cast are a few minutes into their set. They’re followed by a fantastic performance from Richard Ashcroft, formerly of The Verve, but we’re all here for another act and finally, at 20:15, the moment arrives.
A pair of longtime feuding brothers appear on stage raising each other’s hands in a victorious salute to the crowd, before the band launches appropriately into ‘Hello’ and we’re assaulted by a sonic missile of crunching guitars, thundering drums and a parka-clad Liam Gallagher snarling his vocals at us at the top of his voice, in familiar stance with hands clasped behind his back and it all sounds absolutely fucking magical.
Within seconds, with just a handful of chords and vocal notes we’re all back in 1996. I’ve been to dozens of gigs, many of them great, but I’ve never seen anything like this. There are 70,000 of us in attendance and every one of us is singing every line of every song. We want a setlist bursting with songs from Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Oasis oblige as they understand the assignment here perfectly.
It’s easy to forget how many iconic songs they conceived in those mid-90s glory days, when everything they touched turned to gold, so much so that future classics were discarded from album recording sessions, relegated to B-sides. ‘Slide Away’ is followed by ‘Whatever’ and ‘Live Forever’, before ‘Rock N Roll Star’ closes out the set and I can recover my senses before the big-hitting four-song encore which I know is coming.
Minutes later there’s a moment during ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ where the emotional impact of the event almost overcomes me as I gaze upon the swelling ocean of revellers beneath me illuminated in neon blue light with arms raised in religious or drunken ecstasy. I feel tears well up in my eyes but pull myself together at the event horizon moment to maintain the accepted social convention. It wouldn’t do for a middle-aged man to burst into tears surrounded by strangers at a gig.
The deafening sound of feedback from the final guitar notes of ‘Champagne Supernova’ rings out around the stadium with the equally deafening cheering and clapping of the enraptured crowd and we spill slowly back onto the sprawling streets of Cardiff, mesmerised by what we’ve seen and heard and how it somehow managed to eclipse the rabid expectation that preceded it. I have a new memory of Oasis now, forged in the fire of a raucous cauldron overlooking the River Taff that was shaken to its rafters for the last two hours. It’s joined those from a lifetime ago, and will live forever.