It’s high summer in the middle of the decade. An increasingly unpopular and authoritarian government languishes in the polls, England put four past the Netherlands in the group stage of the Euros, and Oasis dominate the headlines after playing the biggest gigs of their career. The year is 2025, but you might be forgiven if you mistook it for 1996.
From Blitz-themed street parties to reminiscing about proper binmen, the romanticisation of our imagined former glories has long been one of Britain’s favourite national pastimes. In terms of sheer scale, however, few examples can match the wave of nostalgia which greeted the Gallaghers’ triumphant return to live performance earlier this year. More than a million of us spent upwards of a billion pounds rushing to either relive our own experiences of the 90s, or reenact someone else’s.
As the band returns for two more Wembley dates this weekend, at the same moment that the UK as a whole slides into increasingly sinister forms of national self-mythologising, it’s worth asking why Britpop revivalism has felt quite so potent in 2025, beyond the simple fact of its 30-year anniversary, and what this might tell us about the Britain of today. Three decades on from their debut, and some 60 years removed from much of the music they’re so often accused of mimicking, Oasis have inarguably been the sound of the summer. To what extent that’s something to be celebrated or criticised remains harder to ascertain.
The anti-Oasis argument is best summed up by a deliciously splenetic 2021 rant from the late writer Neil Kulkarni. For Kulkarni, Britpop meant “the cunts taking over”: a conservative counter-revolution liberating the UK from the suspiciously progressive and alien clutches of grunge, hip-hop and rave, an “English Rock Defence League” powered by a vanguard of “properly homophobic, mildly racist lads” and a “cowardly, craven” music media. We can argue about whether this is a fair reflection of the 90s, but it’s clear that in 2025 its stereotyping of Oasis fans feels outdated and inaccurate, as explored in this Quietus article from earlier in the year.
“I feel like their lyrics just spoke to me,” says Grace Ellison, a 17-year-old from Glasgow who names Definitely Maybe as her favourite Oasis album. “They’re such a big part of my life.” Grace was an infant when the band broke up, but watching them this summer felt like coming home. “I didn’t feel out of place at all, it felt like everybody there was united, like I could strike up a conversation with anybody around me.” she says. “Most of the people there were a lot older than me, but we were all sharing this love for the same thing.” Far from an opportunity for lagered-up reactionary lads to run amok, this summer’s reunion offered a diverse, emotive moment of cross-generational catharsis, and a powerful antidote to the vitriol and instability seemingly infecting the rest of the UK.
All of this chimes with the arguments put forward by Alex Niven, author of the 33 ⅓ book series’ entry on Definitely Maybe. Far from a conservative retrenchment, Niven says, those early songs were suffused with “radical potential” for a new kind of communal Britishness: “a culture of radical hedonism and anti-establishment belligerence” formed from the ashes of Thatcher’s torching of old certainties and the Gallaghers’ working-class, Irish immigrant heritage. “The collective mood that Oasis inspired was at heart an inclusive one,” writes Niven, “based on the desire to advocate a more demotic, more democratic way of national being, rooted in the lived reality of working-class experience.” When Noel, joined this summer by a million-odd other voices of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds, sings in the soaring chorus to ‘Acquiesce’ that “We need each other / We believe in each other,” it becomes impossible to disagree.
And yet, for all the five-star reviews and universal good vibes, there remains a contradiction at the heart of Oasis’ enduring appeal. If their reunion offers us a chance to escape from the grim and inhospitable reality of modern Britain, it’s also true that the things we’re escaping from have been shaped by social and cultural forces that Oasis themselves helped usher in.
“We all know what happened next” writes Alex Niven somewhat coyly of the band’s post-1997 descent into moneyed isolation, musical stagnation and tabloid churn. He’s not alone in this, with several other recent histories (and indeed the setlist for this summer’s shows) drawing a discreet veil over pretty much everything from Be Here Now onwards: a degree of airbrushing which suggests that Niven’s assumptions might be misplaced. Our instinct is to neatly delineate Oasis’ glorious early days and their less impressive latter years. But everything they represented in 1996, and which we might strive to recapture three decades later, is inextricably bound up in what we and they have become in the interim.
That includes mainstream British pop culture’s increasing dependence on nostalgia, a trend which owes more to Oasis than perhaps any other band. For all of their unruly anti-establishment potential, what the Gallaghers offered was in large part the restoration of familiar lineages and hierarchies, and the rejection of a disorientating, unfamiliar present. This is less about their music being derivative – a tired and largely pointless debate – than their success altering British pop culture’s relationship with its own past.
Before 1995, overtly retro acts like Shakin’ Stevens or Status Quo were afforded little more than novelty status, derided as painfully naff anachronisms (including, in the Quo’s case, by Noel, despite their clear influence on his songwriting). In Britpop’s wake, however, deference to the sounds of the past has become a defining feature of mainstream UK music, from Amy Winehouse’s take on 60s girl groups to Mumford & Sons’ grimly lucrative folk pastiches. Even grime, one of relatively few genuinely innovative British sounds to have troubled the upper echelons of the charts this side of the millennium, only did so a decade after its first emergence: as if a hazy veneer of nostalgia was required for it to be seen as pop music in the first place.
This perhaps helps to explain why this summer’s reunion has captured the zeitgeist so powerfully. The very fact that so many of us are desperate to transport ourselves back to 1996 speaks to a moribund and backwards-looking pop landscape that Oasis themselves pioneered. On some level, we’re nostalgic not only for ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Supersonic’ as songs, but for a time before the broader cultural malaise they inspired became quite so inescapable.
If mainstream British music has become steadily more conservative and self-referential in the last 30 years, then the same is true of our social and political discourse. From the nationalist delusions of Brexit to the current government’s reheated Blairite leftovers, or the growing normalisation of the sort of rhetoric previously consigned to the days of Enoch Powell, we appear to have become obsessed as a nation with the idea that our best days lie behind us, and that recapturing those former glories is preferable to engaging with contemporary realities.
The vast majority of Britons remain, like the crowds at this summer’s concerts, tolerant and open-minded: at the national level we’re substantially more inclusive of difference than we used to be, or than the tabloids and social media barons would have us believe. And yet the parochial and regressive instincts which underpinned much of Britpop’s popular appeal have since seeped into Britain’s self-image more broadly: political representatives, media agenda-setters and populist rabble-rousers alike taking the same approach to social issues as Noel takes to his songwriting.
It might be a reach to suggest that Brexit wouldn’t have happened without Britpop. But there is clearly a continuum between Britain’s pop cultural conservatism and the backwards pull exerted by a minority of cynics on our broader civic life: between Union Jacks painted on guitars, and St George’s Crosses daubed on roundabouts. In this regard, Neil Kulkarni’s anti-Oasis invective includes one particularly compelling assertion: that their initial gatecrashing of the charts marked “the rejection of poofiness, stylistically.” If Kulkarni was ultimately proved wrong about Oasis’ fanbase, then his recognition of the quiet homophobia implicit in Britpop’s reassertion of normative rock & roll values feels far more on the money. A steady decline in homophobia has been one of the most positive trends in British social attitudes over the last three decades, but all too often Oasis have felt emblematic of something older and uglier.
“This is guitar pop distilled to its simplest, most infectious form, without ambiguity or gender-confusion” reads one weirdly off-colour segment from The Guardian’s review of debut single ‘Supersonic’. The word “poncey” comes up repeatedly in other coverage from the same period when describing Oasis’ competitors, alongside Noel’s assertion that “we don’t preach about our sexuality” when asked what differentiates them from their peers. Fast forward a couple of decades, via Liam’s infamous homophobic heckling at the Q awards in 1999 or more recent tweets about “batty boys” and “bum chums”, and you arrive at Noel making quips about “left wing lesbian atheists” at Murrayfield this summer – comments which felt shockingly reactionary, but passed largely unmentioned in glowing write-ups of the reunion tour as a whole.
Much as with the worn-out debates over their songwriting, this isn’t really a question of Liam and Noel’s personal beliefs, which are best described as scattershot and amorphous, buried under multiple inscrutable layers of irony. Instead, we should ask ourselves what other tendencies might have snuck through the doors the Gallaghers opened, what inclinations their repeated and exhaustively-reported pronouncements might embolden, and how that might contextualise our feelings towards them.
If you’re a journalist, the process is simple. You get Noel on the phone, he talks about something vaguely controversial, like novels being pointless, that Eddie Vedder should kill himself, or that he sends his kids to private school because he doesn’t want them “coming home talking like Ali G”. But he knows what he’s doing, so he says it with just enough sarcastic detachment to muddy the question of whether he really means it. Sensitive left-wing types either get offended, in which case they’re idiot scolds who can’t take a joke, or they do nothing, in which case the underlying sentiment is tacitly accepted. Either way, it’s a story. It’s not new, or particularly clever, but it’s undoubtedly effective.
What worked for the Gallaghers and the music press in the 90s has since been deployed to identical effect by every other poundshop contrarian out there, from Julie Burchill and Jeremy Clarkson to Piers Morgan and Katie Hopkins: rage-baiting as a highly monetisable media product. In 2017, Noel derided Jeremy Corbyn as a Communist in a magazine interview. “Last week I called Noel Gallagher a lad,” tweeted Nigel Farage in response, the man whose use of the press to stir up perpetual controversy mimics the Gallaghers’ more closely than perhaps anyone else’s. “Now it’s time to call him a legend.”
It’s easy enough to dismiss each individual example of this as mere banter, or a sign that the naysayers need to lighten up. But the cumulative effects build up over decades, like microplastics in the blood, each one shifting the Overton window ever so slightly in the same depressing direction. The Gallaghers’ willingness to offend social niceties felt refreshing in the 90s, but it’s since been co-opted by a rogue’s gallery of grifters to far more nefarious effect. If we’re celebrating this summer’s shows for welcoming everyone to the party, we should remind ourselves who else has blagged their way in with us.
In truth the media’s treatment of the Gallaghers has always been deeply compromised, with its salivating portrayals of two squabbling, drunken Irish brothers perpetually on the verge of violence, prodding and goading them in the hope that they’ll say or do something suitably outrageous. “They fight! They flirt! They go fucking mental!” reads one early profile, sounding like nothing so much as a Victorian carnival barker promoting his menagerie of freaks. If Definitely Maybe gestured boldly towards new visions of British working-class identity, then what we rapidly ended up with were the same old tropes about the lower orders, perpetuated by the same old middle-class gatekeepers: stereotypes that the Gallaghers have been perfectly willing to play up to when it suits them, and which get reanimated every time they hit the headlines again.
The coke-addled hubris of 1997’s Be Here Now is generally assumed to be the beginning of the end, but the real culprit may in fact be a single released two years earlier, a matter of weeks after ‘Wonderwall’. A bootleg 7” titled ‘Wibbling Rivalry’ put out by indie label Fierce Panda, it’s a recording of John Harris’ interview with Liam and Noel for the NME from April 1994, just before the band gatecrashed the mainstream, and shortly after every member but Noel was arrested and deported from the Netherlands for fighting on a ferry. Hopelessly drunk and endlessly combative, the pair mock and harass each other for just shy of 15 minutes: equal parts sad, hilarious, obscene and voyeuristic, its release marks the precise moment when the Gallaghers’ myth overtook their undoubted talent. “It’s not about you, it’s not about me, it’s about the music,” Noel shouts at one point, but the idea falls apart even as he voices it. What else was left but media-induced spats, the slow lowering of expectations, and endless facsimiles of what had gone before? In 2016, Pitchfork deemed it “easily one of the best Oasis records.”
In our eagerness to view this summer’s reunion tour as solely a question of Oasis’ first two records, and as much as the experience of listening to those songs might be, in isolation, a beautiful and meaningful thing, we’ve largely chosen to overlook all of this baggage. The world has changed, mimicking many of the Gallaghers’ least edifying tendencies, and yet we demand the right to stand still. The music remains unimpeachable, even as we have declined.
There’s a tragic circularity to all of this. A band rightly celebrated for their raucous working-class ideals and radical energy a generation ago are now content for a multinational ticketing company to price-gouge their fans to previously unprecedented levels. A pair of brothers famed for their straightforward common sense have seen that principle curdle, forming a rot at the heart of British life. Stunning songs about escape and transcendence are performed to an audience who’ve watched those same notions ground down to a nub, in a Britain unable to look beyond its own shadow. We dream, for two hours a night, of a world that we were once promised: a brief glimpse of what might have been, enabled and perpetuated by the very same forces that ensure those aspirations will remain forever unfulfilled.
