The band that Damon Albarn called musical hypocrites: “That’s just idolatry”
Was 2025 truly the year of the comeback? Oasis, Radiohead and even The Maccabees would likely prove that it was the case.
In the past ten years leading up to this point, nostalgia as a currency has been strengthening. As we bury ourselves under endless content online, archival footage of music and culture gone by seems to tap into a sort of toxic itch within us.
This idea, that everything that once came before, is better than what comes before us now and if given the chance, we would pay anything to experience it. In the case of Oasis, it literally was anything.
But exercising this idea then puts the entire idea of these treasured bands at odds. Because if you think about any of the mammoth bands in British history, who could feasibly roll out a mega stadium tour akin to Oasis and Radiohead recently, you don’t think of them as slick commercial machines.
They weren’t curated in a lab by Simon Cowell; their objective isn’t to make inoffensive commercial music, and ultimately, the communities in which they seemingly represent are as humble as the venues in which they played their first gigs.
While it’s seemingly a fine line to tread, Oasis to their credit waltzed down it like an Olympic gymnast, putting on a string of summer shows that rivalled some of their 1990s finest and made Wembley Stadium sound like The George Tavern. In the year of comebacks, it proved to be the ultimate and is unlikely to be topped by anybody in the coming years.
Not even Radiohead, who did the one thing Oasis didn’t, and that was cap the ticket prices. Using a balloted system, they avoided the pitfalls of dynamic pricing and set a stall out for a comeback tour that would seemingly hit all the notes for a die-hard Radiohead fan. Moreover, the tour will be trotting around European arenas as opposed to stadiums, which, for a band of their size and cultural stature, is as close to intimate as they’re likely to get.
Maybe that decision came from historic mistakes, having done the stadium shows and receiving criticism for it, namely, from Damon Albarn, who questioned the sacrifice of intimacy for ticket sales. In 2006, the Blur frontman said, “Radiohead – I’m not gonna get into anyone, but bands who care about certain things and then go on one-and-a-half year stadium tours are just total hypocrites. In one sense, you’ve got this developing humanist thing… Then you’re creating these massive impersonal events where you’re set up as the subject of thousands of people’s adoration. Where is the humanity in that? That’s just idolatry.”
Albarn was probably unaware that in nearly 20 years’ time, he would also take his own band into the changing rooms of Wembley Stadium, and play two sell-out nights which, like Oasis, proved the merit in those mammoth shows. But maybe all of these bands didn’t quite account for how popular their music would become in the future, and how our insatiable appetite for nostalgia would see them compromise on their artistic values.
