HS analysis Oasis was a hugely popular band that should have broken up at the peak of their popularity – eventually the band was destroyed by popularity, and the Gallagher brothers still don’t talk about it.

Small The village of Knebworth is just under 50 miles north of London. A few thousand inhabitants, church, train station. The perfect venue for a historic big concert.

125,000 spectators flocked to the field every two nights. Allegedly, as many as 2.6 million Britons queued for tickets from the telephone service when they went on sale.

In 1996 Noel and Liam Gallagherin led by the British rock band Oasis was at its peak of popularity.

The Gallagher brothers, like a rocket, were working-class jans who took everything from their success. The band flew to the gig grandly in a helicopter to see the ocean from above.

Multi is of the opinion that Oasis was at its best at the time and should have stopped. This is what the band itself thinks: it comes back to reminisce about that year.

Documentary Supersonic (2016) was released specifically for the 20th anniversary of the Knebworth gigs. The film told of the band’s early years until that gig.

In September this year, it premiered Oasis Knebworth 1996 -documentary. It had fans at the gig instead of the band. In November, the official gig recording was released for the first time on the album, as well as the concerts of both evenings on DVD.

Now appeared Simon Halfonin book written by Supersonic (Finnish) Juha Ahokas and Einari Aaltonen, Like) also tells the story until the Knebworth gigs. The book is done Supersonicbased on interviews with the documentary.

It is also the first authorized Oasis book. There is not a word about the band’s 21st century. The book is spelled out from interviews with the band, family and other close associates.

Basically, each of these works struggles with the same question: what was behind the wild popularity of Oasis?

Irish background Gallagher’s family lived in Manchester. Big brother Noel was the most musical of the early brothers. He sat alone in his room for a long time playing guitar. Little brother Liam focused on causing trouble, eating too many weetabixes and waving at neighbors.

“Everyone here liked him because he had time for the elderly. If someone was coming from the store, they offered to carry the shopping, ”their mother said Peggie says in the book.

The brothers worked for their father Tommyn in a construction company, but the father often failed to pay wages. He was also violent towards his family. Soon Peggie and the boys moved into their own apartment. Even today, the brothers are not in touch with their father.

Liam said he only became interested in music when someone hit him in the school yard with a hammer on his head. After that, the music started to sound different.

“Someone is hammering music in his head … Quite a responsibility, isn’t it?” Noel commented in the book.

Oasis was founded in 1991, just five years before Knebworth.

The band trained for the first few years at the Manchester Boardwalk Club. Liam in particular believed that he and the band would still become hugely popular at times.

Creation Records happened to be at one of the Glasgow gigs Alan McGee. Already during the second song, he decided to offer the band a record deal.

Debut album Definitely Maybe appeared in 1994. From then on, it was a so-called hard drive: working-class young men got a taste of success and money.

Oasis has never been more loved by critics, although the debut album got pretty good reviews. Like Alex Niven writes in his book Definitely Maybe (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), Oasis has not been written very often with the seriousness the band deserves. Working-class art is easily treated with a degrading tone. For example Cheekin and the stories of Oasis are not so different in the end: from poor conditions to arrogance to success and its glorification, still loved by the people and hated by critics.

The reasons for adjusting the oasis are easy to see. Gallagher’s brothers were brazen in public. They shot in the interviews what’s going on, like that they’re going to be bigger than the Beatles. They did not behave conventionally.

Their songs were often sheer nonsense. Noel wrote his songs quickly and focused little on the lyrics.

Second plate (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) was made in such a hurry in the midst of popularity that Noel did not have time to write in any of the songs except one verse and chorus. It didn’t bother the listeners: Wonderwall still plays around the world in bars, radios and streaming services.

Oasis made himself easily hated. However, there were also many reasons to love it. Noel’s songs echoed familiar tones from both 60’s and 80’s British rock and pop. The compositions were catchy and one good, memorable one was enough for the song to work oneliner.

At the same time, there were bands on the surface in British music that made an effort on an art school basis, such as Blur and Pulp, who cultivated irony and played with their music.

In relation to these, Oasis stood out clearly from the crowd as a working-class band. The Knebworth documentary features several fans who found Oasis ’music approachable, without unnecessary gimmicks. It was easy for many to identify with Liam’s heartfelt and open arrogance, honest wooden head.

While Oasis was able to shoot jokes, their music didn’t have the slightest bit of irony typical of the era. They treated the music with the pride of a workman.

At least until 1996.

SupersonicIn the book, it is heard several times from the mouth of both brothers that they could be mocked outside the stage but not on stage, for someone had paid money to see them perform. This makes it difficult not to draw parallels with the experiences of youth when one’s own father failed to pay wages.

Noel in particular says in the book that his goal was just to make as much money as possible.

In the oasis many things came together at just the right time. In the 1990s, Britain lived Thatcherin after. Leader of the Labor Party John Smith died the same year that Oasis’ debut appeared. He was replaced Tony Blair, which began to build a new kind of Labor Party and took it more to the right. There were winds of change in the air.

Noel even posed with Prime Minister Blair in pictures in 1997, which he later regretted.

Quickly and intuitively, Noel was able to keep up with the times. For example Cast No Shadow sings: “As they took his soul they stole his pride”. At the gigs, however, Liam sang in the form of me, “Take my soul, but don’t take my pride.”

Pride was a central part of the Cool Britain culture of the 1990s, where economic growth and nationalism sought to raise optimism after difficult decades.

Oasis’s music was optimistic about this atmosphere in just the right way: something difficult was always behind in the songs.

The brothers have always denied Oasis to be a political band. There was still dissatisfaction in Oasis’ music. Hedonistic Cigarettes & Alcohol could not help but hit Thatcher’s post-surgery and post-unemployment Britain: “Is it worth the aggravation / to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?”

In life, knocking is a universal experience that always feels very personal: no one has been kicked in the head in exactly the same way as me.

In addition, Oasis’ songs managed to be collective and charming: “We’re gonna live forever.”

While the band sang forever about living, the band’s music heard that the crash and the end of it all was around the corner all the time.

I proved in the final moments of the Oasis Power band itself at Wembley Stadium in the summer of 2009. I saw how totally Oasis fans in their forties and fifties got mixed up. They pissed on empty pots and threw them on top of each other.

A few weeks later, the inevitable finally happened: The oasis fell apart.

Both Oasis ’greatest asset and weakness was the relationship between the brothers. With Knebworth at the latest, rock’n’roll became a business rather than an honest job.

Published in 1997 after Knebworth Be Here Now disc is mentioned only once in the book. For a band whose popularity had been destroyed plays.

Noel himself speculates on the popularity of Oasis in the book:

“When journalists ask what a song means, I reject the whole idea and say it means nothing at all. (…) That’s why Oasis was so great, everyone got to explain the songs in their own way. (…) That’s why the phenomenon swelled so enormously, the songs appealed to so many people: the middle class, the working class, the wealthy, the older generation, the 60s and even the young people today. ”

Simplifying the reason for Oasis ’popularity could be summed up by quoting the opening track of the band’s debut album: It’s just rock’n’roll.