Brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, co-leaders of reunited ’90s rock greats Oasis, are not properly from Ireland — the lads were born and raised in Manchester, England, of course — but it’s hard to imagine them getting a warmer hometown greeting anywhere else than they received in Dublin on Saturday (Aug. 16).
Oasis fever simply consumed Ireland’s capital city this week in anticipation of the Gallaghers’ (whose parents, Peggy and Thomas, are both Irish) arrival for their first gig on the Emerald Isle since 2009. On Saturday, the roads to Gaelic sports stadium Croke Park were lined with pubs offering tribute bands, trivia contests and semi-official fan experiences, as devotees in Oasis shirts (some of which just offered if-you-know-you-know references like “sunshyyiiiiine” in the style of the band’s iconic boxed logo) and bucket hats swarmed the surroundings.
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Such merch was peddled both at the band’s official pop-up store on St Stephen’s Green and at various less-officially sanctioned stands across the city, as well as by enterprising locals wandering the streets with stacks of bucket hats for sale. Even department stores offered in-store performers delivering live acoustic renderings of “Live Forever” and “Cast No Shadow” as their shopping soundtrack. The ultimate feeling was a cross between a World Cup host city and a Disney theme park, an Oasis-tinted “Drinking All Around the World” Epcot experience.
All involved headed to Croke Park in the evening for the first of the band’s two shows this weekend, an event that seemed impossible for most of the 15 years following the group’s split (and not even a totally sure thing once the reunion dates were actually announced, given the Gallagher brothers’ history of combustion). After warmup sets from Britpop-era contemporaries Cast and former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft — whose set-closing performance of signature hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony” demonstrated it as one of the period’s few anthems of enduring resonance and singalong potency on par with Oasis’ greatest hits — the band was introduced by Irish folk ballad “The Auld Triangle,” which has been turned into a football chant in recent years, and then its own “Fuckin’ in the Bushes,” long used as the band’s ring entrance music.
Oasis offered few surprises in its crowd-pleasing, hit-heavy 23-song set, which the band has reprised essentially without deviation since kicking off the Live ’25 tour in Wales in July. The set’s most surprising moment might be the legendarily quarrelsome brothers taking the stage hand-in-hand, arms raised in triumph, as they’ve done throughout the tour. On Saturday night, the gesture encapsulated what a celebratory victory lap the trek has been — both as validation of the band’s singular legacy, and as proof that the Gallaghers could avoid their trademark tumult long enough to be able to actually enjoy it — and it felt particularly resonant in front of the heroes’ welcome afforded the brothers by their quasi-countrymen. (Liam later dedicated the band’s performance of “Roll With It” to the brothers’ Charlestown, County Mayo hometown, though not before chastising the crowd for collectively overstating its connection to the area: “There’s only about five people who actually live there.”)
In any event, unexpectedness has never been the name of the game with the brothers Gallagher, who rose to legend status in the mid-’90s by synthesizing the prior 30 years of U.K. rock history into instantly accessible, classic-sounding rave-ups and ballads that soon became era-defining youth culture hymns. Three decades later, Oasis obviously offers a Schedule II narcotic-grade nostalgia rush for the now-middle-aged fans who’ve stuck around since the band’s heyday, but also a catalog of culturally persistent classics whose strength has delivered them to the next generation, with plenty of parent-and-child combos visible in the audience on Saturday, all equally mad for it. It’s that rare combination of timeliness and timelessness that allows a band to still fill stadiums 30 years after its commercial peak.
Which isn’t to say that Oasis didn’t stay popular well into the 21st century — in the U.K., four of its eight No. 1 hits on the Official Charts came in the 2000s. But, tellingly, the live-curated version of the band’s greatest hits only features one song from after its ’90s golden age: 2002’s “Little by Little.” Otherwise, the setlist kept mostly to the Britpop icons’ now-canonized first two albums, 1994’s Definitely Maybe and 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Polarizing third album Be Here Now was also honored with a pair of representatives — including a “Stand by Me” dedicated to the lads’ mum Peggy, in attendance — but far greater stage time was afforded to the band’s early B-sides, ultimately collected for American audiences on 1998’s The Masterplan, with five tracks total.
If there were any later-period Oasis fans miffed at the era-unbalanced setlist, they were certainly little drowned out on Saturday night by the tens of thousands of supporters shouting along to the prime cuts, delivered with the same hurricane wallop that they were 30 years earlier, with no evident rust at all on the band’s part. It’s indicative of just what a high level the Gallaghers were producing at from the jump that it’s become near-impossible to delineate between the hit singles and the deep cuts in their catalog: “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” which closed the pre-encore part of the set, was never even a single, but it was still met with a full-stadium singalong to its self-fulfilling prophecies of fantastically realized pre-fame dreams.
Still: What a flex to be able to hold “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova” for your three final songs. The band’s three biggest hits — at least in the U.S., where Oasis’ 1996 Morning Glory run is the primary reason it’s able to play stadiums here too, as it will be in a couple weeks — closed out the show in spectacular fashion, Noel not even needing to sing the first chorus on “Anger” as the crowd of 82,000 played co-frontpeople. In its first run, Oasis often ended setlists with a cover — the band’s most recent Irish gig before this weekend, at the 2009 Slane festival, closed with its rendition of The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” — but the Gallaghers don’t need to honor their classic rock idols so explicitly anymore; they unquestionably are now such heroes themselves.
“Nice one for putting up with us over the years; it must be hard work,” Liam thanked the fans before the glorious final “Supernova.” Not wrong for much of the last three decades — but Saturday night’s gig, and all the joyous revelry surrounding it, showed why the Live ’25 Tour has been payoff enough for none of them to look back in anger at any of it.
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