Twenty-three-year-old Yulia Markovskaia is “going crazy” about her chance to see a reformed Oasis on stage when the band play together for the first time in 15 years. Her bedroom walls at home in the Russian city of St Petersburg are decorated with images of Liam and Noel Gallagher, some of them her own carefully-crafted fan art. A poster for Liam’s other band Beady Eye hangs above her music system as she shoots a selfie in the mirror, the famous “Oasis” logo across her black vest. But it is the original 1990s line-up that she longs to see for real next year.
She reveals that she has already been looking up the UK visa process in the hope of getting to an Oasis gig in Manchester, London, Cardiff or Edinburgh in summer 2025. “I am mentally preparing myself because this is history happening and I won’t forgive myself if I miss it,” she says. “I think I will explode! It’s insane!”
Like so many young Oasis fans who congregate on social media, using the hashtag #oasistwt on X, Yulia was not even born when the band’s debut album, Definitely Maybe, first scorched into the world in August 1994. She discovered it while at school in the 2010s and remembers “how uplifting, exciting and angry – in a good way – they felt to me”. She says its 11 tracks have soundtracked her life since then. “When I came back to this album a few years later and listened to it in full, and this time with more understanding and also knowledge of the band and their history, I loved it even more. A burst of hope and life.”
More than 7,000 miles away in Sao Paolo, Brazil, 22-year-old Bella Perozzi is clutching her Liam doll and posing in front of a burgundy wall-mounted electric guitar. She is eight years younger than the debut Oasis album. “Definitely Maybe was the first Oasis CD that I bought after I really got into the band,” Bella explains as she describes the tunes that, like Yulia, have become her obsession. “You can feel how connected and proud they felt while recording those songs, and also how they wanted to connect with the young people at that time. I still get chills while listening to the intro of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’.”
Her favourite song is a Definitely Maybe-era track, ‘Listen Up’ which came out on the B-side of ‘Cigarettes And Alcohol’. For Bella, it is the tune that says it all. “As a 22-year-old woman, sometimes all you want to do is get away from it all and be left alone. The lyrics have a deeper meaning once you really get into that song and connect with it. The beautiful instrumental, Liam’s voice and the words Noel meant to express are a work of art. ‘Listen Up’ is also a great song to blast at 3am while looking up at the ceiling.”
Yulia and Bella are just two of many thousands of young, female Oasis fans who chat about the band every day on X, Tik Tok and Instagram, sharing videos of band sightings, showing off their newly-acquired memorabilia and helping each other discover other bands that share the Britpop sound.
The buzz around the 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe, and Liam Gallagher’s run of concerts in which he performed the album in full this summer, had given fans genuine reason to believe this week’s special announcement was possible.
James Corcoran is the voice behind the Oasis Podcast, which began in 2017, but he’s been an Oasis fan since his own teens in the 1990s. “If you go back and look at footage of Oasis gigs in the early days there were a lot of female fans, it was a relatively even split,” he says. “Later on it did get more rowdy and male, that football fan crowd took over a bit and an Oasis gig became an opportunity for lads to meet up and get hammered.”
But he says the pissed-up lads in cagoules reputation “dissipated as that generation has got a bit older” and now “there is this really interesting movement of young women and girls discovering the band”. He reckons many young people have found themselves “looking back to the last big movement which was largely pre-internet” and that ‘90s nostalgia is often found to be strongest among those who were not there to witness the decade (and the grim reality of Hooch and Steps) the first time around.
There’s another key ingredient. Oasis themselves, especially Liam, directly engage with their followers in a way that was not possible in the pre-social media 1990s. “Liam is regularly on Twitter (X) and engages with the fans,” explains James. “I can’t think of another artist at that level who does that. And Noel has often talked about being surprised by how many younger people are in the crowds singing every word.”
Many of the Gen-Z fanbase routinely use social media to hit back at claims that the blokes in Oasis represent the worst of unreconstructed 1990s lad culture. Bella reckons “Britpop’s focus on working-class life and pushing back against American influence gave it a one and only style that was appreciated by many people, regardless of gender.”
“My dad actually introduced me to Oasis,” explains Emma Arenstarr from Swanage, Dorset, in the UK. “He sat me down and got me to watch the ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ music video like it was some kind of rite of passage and then from then on I would watch their different music videos, discover other songs, there we were, now here we are. I just became obsessed, really.”
“I think there’s a massive misconception that it’s ‘boyish,’ and [other music fans] don’t expect girls in my age range to listen to [Oasis]. And of course, you get the usual ones who don’t believe you [are a fan], which is pretty infuriating because that shouldn’t be the case. Oasis are for everyone.”
Back in the mid-90s, it’s me, the author of this article, who is the girl falling in love with Britpop. I buy a strange version of Definitely Maybe on my hometown market in Knaresborough in North Yorkshire and for a while I am confused by the cassette inlay because ‘Cigarettes And Alcohol’, the single that follows ‘Live Forever’, is listed simply as ‘Cigarettes’. I later notice a sticker on the box which declares it “for sale in GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries only” where alcohol is far less tolerated than in Burnage. How this copy found its way to the three-quid stall next to the mushroom man remains one of the mysteries of my 1990s. I am much more of a Blur fan, so much so that I wear a ‘Country House’ T-shirt when I get the chance to see Oasis at Knebworth in August 1996.
But I can’t help myself loving the way Liam Gallagher sings ‘may-beeeeh’ in the opening line of ‘Live Forever’. It’s every moment of a night out in provincial 90s England rolled into two drawn-out vowels. It’s the world I know, a dreamlike half step away from John Lennon’s faded suburban house on the single’s cover art. I stand forever in the morning rain that “soaks you to the booone” on a pavement glistening wet at the bus stop, waiting for the future. Perhaps it was this future, here in 2024, I was thinking about.
attitude, while listening to my £3 copy of Definitely Maybe
‘Live Forever’ is the Definitely Maybe track most frequently chosen as the one – the gateway drug – by today’s fans. “I think the lyrics are amazing and really describe how a young person feels,” says 15-year-old Scarlett Allen, from Kent in the UK, when she talks about it. She gets in touch eagerly to explain why Oasis matter to many 21st century teenagers like her. “Oasis mean so much to me and the Gallagher brothers have changed my life in so many ways.” Born the year the band split up, in 2009, hers is an active voice in the #oasistwt community, and she’s ecstatic about what is to come next year. “To see them standing next to each other in a photo again with a tour announced, it feels completely unreal.”
Charlotte Abisset, who lives outside Lyons, in France, was just seven when Definitely Maybe was released and it was Noel’s guitar on ‘Live Forever’ that first got her attention too, but many years later. “I found out about Oasis thanks to an English teacher who came from Manchester. He listened to music on his headphones all the time and one day I asked him what he was listening to. He put the headphones in my ears, and it was the first time I heard an Oasis song. It was Noel’s guitar solo part from ‘Live Forever’. I immediately loved it and then I heard Liam’s voice and fell in love with this band. My love affair with Oasis began that day.”
Thirty years on, Definitely Maybe’s raw power and melodic self-certainty seems to pack the same emotional punch as it did for teenagers in the 1990s. “I really did fall in love with every track, and I believe it’s an album that you can just listen to an infinite number of times and never tire of,” says Emma. “I remember being in awe of the sheer power of Liam’s voice, how it could go from being soft and mellow on ‘Married With Children’ to an absolute powerhouse on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’.
Yulia loves ‘Live Forever’ so much that she has a permanent reminder of the song on her skin. “I’ve got a tattoo of Liam’s starshaped tambourine and ‘Live Forever’ written inside it, so now Oasis is literally with me forever,” she jokes, in a completely, definitely, serious way. And it’s the song that “just clicked” in Emma’s case. “Oh man… I carved those two words on an old table one time. It became like a mantra.” She adds: “I had an extremely difficult loss in my life last year and I think the song is a lyrical masterpiece that gives me, and so many people, optimism and strength.”
