Oasis: the joyous roar of a forgotten people

At Wembley the other week, I and 90,000 others indulged that most lethal of emotions. An emotion so supposedly deadly that entire books have been devoted to examining and dismantling it. Some call it humanity’s ‘dull ache’. Others call it ‘toxic’. Some outright call it ‘dangerous’. And yet there we were, tens of thousands of us, a sea of bucket hats and beers, our throats sore from roaring, our arms flung round perfect strangers, all in the gleeful grip of that most taboo of feelings: nostalgia.

It was at an Oasis gig. Of course it was. From the four corners of London, and much farther afield, we had assembled to submit ourselves to this summer’s frenzy – Oasismania. It’s hard to think of any recent cultural phenomenon as large and wild and fraught with bittersweet feeling as the Summer of Oasis. At times it has felt like Beatlemania. Only this time the wall of emotive noise comes not from girls screaming hysterically but men and women of a certain age blubbing like muppets into warm, overpriced beers.

Our anticipation had been fizzing for a year, ever since Noel and Liam announced in August 2024 that they were getting back together. And we were not disappointed. The concert was brilliant. All those five-star reviews you’ve read are entirely accurate. They played banger after banger, most of them from that staggering period of August 1994 to October 1995 when they released Definitely Maybe and What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?. We took those albums for granted at the time, but to think now that in the space of little more than a year, these two twentysomething braggart brothers from the Manchester-Irish working class gifted Britain so many of the tunes that would become the anthems of our lives and standards in the Great British Songbook – it’s mad.

But there was something else at Wembley, too. The main show, in fact. That crowd. It felt like the joyous roar of a forgotten people. Here were working-class men and women reclaiming their rightful place in Britain’s culture. For so long sidelined as pop came to be the dominion of double-barrelled knobs who mistake having a mental disorder for a personality, for so long shunted by a political class far more interested in the concerns of minorities, the genderfluid and posho leftists posing as victims, at these Oasis gigs, finally, ‘ordinary Brits’ are reassembling. They’re coming together in a riot of nostalgia for a time when music was good and they were respected. That’s what I felt at Wembley: the deafening reassertion of the virtue of normalcy, mixed with that swagger only Oasis can stir up.

There were no Palestine flags. No trans flags. No solemnly issued lies from the stage about how transwomen are women. No climate-change bollocks. No ‘Fuck the Tories’. If Led By Donkeys had rocked up with one of their shit light shows telling the crowd what a disaster Brexit has been, they’d have been lynched, or certainly told to piss off back to their snug in that poncy Stoke Newington pub they hang out in. As Noel once advised worthy bands: ‘Play your fucking tunes and get off.’ No one gave a damn what ‘race’ you were or what your pronouns are. All that mattered in this electric, mirthful mob is that you had a bucket hat, a pint and stamina. It felt like a free zone, ungoverned by the choking etiquette of our bland, whining, sobering ruling class. It was, honestly, glorious.

The Summer of Oasis is the revenge of normal people. Not Sally Rooney normal people – actual normal people. At a time when ‘the culture’ has been well and truly conquered by the neuroses and invented oppressions of the upper middle classes, here comes less the silent majority than the sane majority. The people we rarely hear about because they’re not nearly exotic enough for media elites obsessed with drag queens, drunk on ‘Islamophobia’ sob stories and friends with pricks who think they’ve suffered structural oppression because the Oxford college they studied at didn’t have a separate bog for genderqueer demisexuals like them.

Looking at the swaying crowd, I thought about how rare it is to see ‘these people’. They’re not in TV ads anymore. They might get a walk-on part as a hooligan or iffy husband in some drama. They certainly don’t feature in left-wing campaigning, which is now more interested in destroying the Jewish State, or at least the gender binary, than in lifting up the working class. The official view of ‘these people’ is the one uncovered in those leaked Edinburgh City Council safety briefings which fretted that the Oasis fans storming the city would be fat, drunk and rowdy. You’re ‘fucking slags’ who should ‘leave town’ when we’re playing, Liam shot back.

And yet here ‘these people’ are, hundreds of thousands of them across the country, reliving a time when you could be working class and a rock star, or just working class and treated with respect – 30 years ago but it might as well be a million. Yes, it’s nostalgia. And yes, nostalgia is the great verboten feeling in the 21st century. Our stiff rulers hate this emotion above all others. Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion was the name of a book published last year. EU big cheese Michel Barnier wrote off Brexit as ‘nostalgia for the past’ (tautologous much?). Trump is frequently accused of whipping up deadly wistfulness among ‘white trash’ people nostalgic for the simpler times of segregation. In truth he’s attracted working people of all ‘races’ nostalgic for a time when they had well-paying jobs and their kids weren’t being taught by fruitcakes with purple hair that there are 72 genders.

They hate nostalgia because it grates against their Year Zero lunacy, their unflappable conviction that the institutions and culture they have created are better than everything that went before. There’s something low-key revolutionary about nostalgia in an era when we’re instructed to feel distant from and even disdainful of our own social and personal histories. To be clear, I wasn’t thinking any of that as we thousands helped Oasis close the show by tearfully singing: ‘Someday you will find me / Caught beneath the landslide…’ But I’m thinking it now.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy