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“See you next year.” These were the last words Liam Gallagher delivered to some 90,000 fans at London’s Wembley Stadium on September 28, a show that was widely expected to be a grand farewell to their homeland.
The ongoing Live ’25 world tour has been a monumental success by any metric—and there are plenty of metrics on offer. An estimated 14 million people reportedly tried to buy 1.4 million tickets in the U.K. and Ireland, with around 500,000 fans seeing the formerly warring brothers (a ‘90s one-hit wonder in the U.S., if you swallow the received wisdom) in North America alone. When the band played five nights at Wembley over the summer, the venue poured an average of 250,000 pints of beer each night. There’s not much to be proud of about being British at the moment, but that’s almost enough to restore your faith in the nation.
Mexico City, September 12, 2025. (Credit: Rodrigo Oropeza / AFP)
Partly, the hype was all about scarcity. It was implied that there would be only one set of dates for the reunion tour. But when the going’s as good as this, why stop there?
Inevitably, a drizzly Sunday in September didn’t have quite the same mad-fer-it buzz as those summer shows—and Liam had already let the cat out of the bag about “next year” the previous night, at the September 27 show. There was, though, still a festival atmosphere about the last of two extra U.K. dates—an olive branch for fans who missed out on tickets the first time around—wedged between the aforementioned North American tour and upcoming trips to Asia, Australia, and South America. As thousands of people streamed towards the stadium ahead of the gig, I spotted a teenage girl in an Oasis T-shirt, who looked like she wasn’t even born when the band acrimoniously split in 2009, grinning for a photo.
When, a quarter way through the gig, Liam instructed the audience to do the Poznan— to turn around, throw their arms on each other’s shoulders and bounce—during a giddy “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” it was remarkable and beautiful to see fans of all ages brought together by this timeless music. The perfectly calibrated band have certainly risen to the occasion, with Liam arguably sounding better than he has in decades.
Regardless of whatever the lads have planned together for 2026—if anything— the performance still felt unique, despite featuring the same support acts and same crowd-pleasing setlist as the previous U.K. and Ireland dates. The Live ’25 tour, John Power of opening band Cast said at the start of the evening, every night has become “more than a gig: it’s a gathering, a happening.” Following Cast, a sunglasses-clad Richard Ashcroft of the Verve hailed a “legendary” summer. From Noel chuckling at Liam mucking about during “Cast No Shadow” to a bloke waddling back from the bar with a massive tray of pints at the start of the encore, here was a celebration of what’s proved to be a frankly miraculous tour.
It was my second Live ’25 gig. Back in July, off-duty, I arrived at Wembley hungover and left drunk, which might actually be the optimum conditions for seeing Oasis. This time, sober and in note-taking capacity, I was struck by the same thing in a more clinical way: These shows are as much about the audience as the band.
Cardiff, July 4, 2025. (Credit: Oli SCARFF / AFP)
After that summer show, it was videos of the crowd doing the Poznan, chanting the “Cigarettes & Alcohol” riff like a football anthem, that did the rounds on social media. Pictures of Liam and Noel hugging or otherwise interacting went viral after plenty of the gigs, but perhaps only then because they stand in for our own relationships, our own ups and downs with friends and family.
I was born a few years too late to experience Oasis’s ’90s heyday but I did grow up in a small village in the north of England. Come of age somewhere like that and their music—so much of which is about trying to get somewhere else, to be someone—is just an inherent part of you.
At 18, I listened to “Half The World Away” on repeat the night before moving away to university, a prospect that filled me with excitement and a sense of blind panic. Three years later, I listened to the band endlessly while vowing to ace my final exams and move to London—to “fly me down to capital city”, as Liam put it on “Be Here Now”—and ’ave it. Almost a decade after that, thankfully emerging from a period of debt and bad vibes, “It’s Gettin‘ Better (Man !!)” summed up the feeling of finally moving forward again.
Fans watch Oasis perform at Soldier Field in Chicago on August 28, 2025. (Credit: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP)
None of this is unique or profound, but it is my life, however small, and these songs have been a marker throughout almost every part of it. Looking around at Wembley Stadium, I knew I wasn’t alone in this. As if to underline exactly who this “final” gig was about, Liam belted out the lyrics “Tonight, I’m a rock ’n roll star” before adding, with an impassioned snarl, “Yes you fucking are!” Later, he thanked the audience for “keeping the faith and putting this band back on the map.”
Back in the day, Oasis’s U.K. gigs had a reputation for being beery, blokey, and not overly welcoming if you didn’t fit that last descriptor. Well, it was obviously still pretty beery on September 28, but the mixed-gender, all-ages Live ’25 crowds have been notable for their wholesome, friendly atmospheres. For younger fans, this is clearly a chance to be a part of something they missed out on in the ’90s—and no-one seems to want to spoil that. As a result, there was a familial vibe that perhaps peaked with a roar of applause when Noel shouted out Bonehead, the band’s original guitarist, back in the fold after a battle with cancer.
Fellow guitarist Gem Archer beamed at the madness of it all, while Noel wore a look of bemused satisfaction that the songs he wrote three decades ago still give people the nights of their lives. Bit by bit—or, ahem, little by little—Oasis have become slightly more formidable with every Live ’25 date. Noel’s unashamed classic rock solos were thrilling at Wembley, while Joey Waronker’s beefed-up drums gave “Supersonic” even more oomph than usual.
As the band has grown tighter, though, the shows have become looser and sillier. Noel looked petrified at the first date in Cardiff and has since admitted as much, but now seemed relaxed to the point of dad jokes: “Anyone here from Jamaica? No? That’s a shame because this song’s called “The Rasta Plan””. For his part, Liam declared that “this one’s called…”, and then bizarrely froze on the spot before the band rolled out the elegiac opening to “Whatever.”
That song set the tone for a wistful encore of “The Masterplan,” “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” “Wonderwall,” and “Champagne Supernova,” which was all the more emotional as the U.K. tour came to a close. Pure hysteria ensured: Security guards paraded out between the barriers, one belting lyrics back to the audience, while a lad grabbed me and bellowed a line from “Champagne Supernova” into my ear as if bereft that it all had to end: “Why whyyyy whyyyy whyyyyy?” Fireworks pulsed out into the sky as Liam held another statuesque pose, a tambourine perfectly balanced on his head, perhaps the iconic image from this tour.
There’ll never be another show like this. Then again, there’s always next year.
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