Oasis Melbourne concert: Why the legendary Brit-pop duo is everything we need right now

Oasis fever has hit Australia with the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour enrapturing massive crowds in Melbourne over two nights with another three Australian dates still to come.

By now, we’ve all seen those videos on social media of the first night revellers, streaming out from Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium on the steps of the nearby train station, belting in unison the fan favourite hit Don’t Look Back in Anger.

There appeared to be no rancour among the crowd, just good vibes and love for a band that was so formative to generations of music lovers.

The nostalgia is strong with this one, and part of it is because no one thought we would ever be here.

When Oasis sensationally split up right before Rock en Seine in 2009, a reunion was never on the cards, not for anniversaries, not even for the London Olympics closing ceremony.

There was too much animosity between the constantly feuding brothers, Noel and Liam, which continued with years of public sledging. So, the Oasis Live ’25 Tour is definitely, no maybes about it, a case of “Happy to just be here”.

Never before have millions of fans benefited from a star’s bank account being depleted thanks to a divorce.

There’s something else at play though. For two guys whose public personas have been abrasive and argumentative, trying to live up to that rock and roll star lifestyle, Oasis’s biggest hits are inherently optimistic almost to the point of Pollyanna.

Off-stage, they might be liberally imbibing champagne and Jack Daniels aboard an overnight ferry to Amsterdam, getting in on a brawl, getting deported back to the UK and jeopardising their first European tour. Or being slapped with a lifetime ban by Cathay Pacific.

Or hitting each other on the head – Liam threw a tambourine at Noel, Noel smacked Liam with a cricket bat – or Liam losing two front teeth in a punch-up in a Munich nightclub. Ed Sheeran and Michael Buble they are not.

But if you listen to their biggest hits, most of which feature on the setlist of this tour, the world Oasis aspired to is bright and hopeful.

Music writer Stuart Maconie, who termed Britpop in 1993, was no fan of Oasis, but he hit the nail on the head when he said of the genre more generally in The New Statesman, “unlike the petulance of (American) grunge, this was cheeky not whiny, funny and optimistic rather than morose and self-pitying.”

“No one in this movement, as the Nirvana song put it, hated themselves and wanted to die – they were having too good a time.”

Maconie lamented the shift of Britpop from the early days of Pulp (which just announced an Australian tour), Suede and Blur as quintessentially music born from the marginalised class, to when Oasis and Spice Girls took over in the second half of the decade, and the genre became about fame and stuff.

You probably have your own judgments on the creative merits or not of Oasis’s music or its impact on lad culture – the band has as many detractors as they do fans – but what the Gallaghers and their songs represent is this shining moment before the turn of the millennium, before terror attacks, before the GFC, before social media ubiquity, before tech barons, before the Union Jack (and other national flags) were co-opted by racist nativist movements.

In the UK, the wind-down of 20 years of Conservative rule was in the wind, and New Labour, at the time, genuinely presented an opportunity for change, fresh perspectives and the end of demonising the working class.

You could have a day-and-night-long pub session because no one was expecting you to be at pilates at 7am the next morning.

It was a celebration of excess (and orchestral arrangements) without shame or cringe, and it was inherently upbeat.

Those concertgoers in Melbourne on Friday night that were carolling Don’t Look Back in Anger, may be casting their mind to a different era when they first fell in love with that song, but what it espouses is looking forward and not getting hung up on regrets.

There’s not necessarily a deeper meaning behind what it says on the tin, but the refrain is a pretty good life philosophy for any moment, especially now, one where bitter grievances reign.

Noel has also talked about the influence of John Lennon on Don’t Look Back in Anger, lyrically from memoirs the late Beatle had started to record on cassette and musically from Imagine, another song that supposes a better tomorrow.

Take Acquiesce, which first appeared as a B-side on Some Might Say and then was later added to the beloved B-sides compilation album The Masterplan. Noel has said the song was not about him and Liam specifically but about friendships in general.

But it’s hard to not read more into it, especially as both brothers sing on the track, which happened only one other time throughout their discography, on Let There Be Love (not on the setlist but another sentimental ditty whose lyrics include “May all your dreaming fill the empty sky, but if it makes you happy, keep on clapping, just remember I’ll be on your side”).

Consider the lyrics in Acquiesce’s chorus, “because we need each other, we believe in one other, and I know we’re going to uncover, what’s sleeping in our soul”. The song closes with a repetition of “We believe”, and with a crowd of tens of thousands of people chanting along, it starts to resemble a religious experience.

These notes of optimism and empowerment are littered all throughout the tour setlist - Supersonic’s “You need to be yourself, you can’t be no one else”, Whatever’s “I’m free to be whatever I, whatever I choose”, and Half the World Away’s “I’ve been lost, I’ve been found, but I don’t feel down”.

Two favourites from Oasis’s debut album encapsulates that youthful insouciance and idealism, the belief that big, exciting things were on the horizon. Before they knew they would be superstars, at the top of his lungs, Liam belted out “you and I are gonna live forever” and “tonight, I’m a rock and roll star”.

Those declarations required confidence, but it also gives all those original fans, now three decades on in middle-age with responsibilities, anxieties and 5:2 fasts, to cling onto that feeling that you could be loose and anything was still possible, and it was within your control to make it happen.

For newcomers to the Oasis fandom who were too young to remember or be alive in the 1990s, what its anthemic songs represent is an unfamiliar age, a nostalgia for something you didn’t live through but wished you had.

Even if everyone is looking back with rose-coloured glasses (Britpop was always a very white and mainstream movement, and, honestly, getting into brawls is not cool), it’s escapism mixed with yearning.

One of Oasis’s very best songs, and one which Noel regretted originally releasing as a B-side, is The Masterplan, an absolute banger that swells and carries you on its waves of joy, big emotions and optimism.

It supposes there’s a masterplan, although Noel has said that maybe the masterplan is that there isn’t one, but if you can’t control it, then you have to do what’s going to make you happy, dance if you want to dance.

As he wrote and sang, “it’s up to us to make the best of all the things that come our way”. Now that’s sunshine and roses.

Oasis is performing at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium on Tuesday and Sydney’s Accor Stadium on Friday and Saturday