Oasis bassist Andy Bell makes prediction on potential reunion
When Noel Gallagher appeared on ITV’s The Jonathan Ross Show in 2021, the host predictably asked him about a potential Oasis reunion. Gallagher rejected the prospect almost immediately, sharing his confusion about why people remain fixated on an Oasis reunion and claiming there is no attempt to replace them.
“I find it a bit sad that there’s a whole generation of kids, working-class kids, who have got nothing of their own to buy into,” he said on a sofa filled with David Walliams, Bree Runway and Aisling Bea. Gallagher continued: “And they’re projecting all that onto a couple of 50-year-old fellas. Where’s the new Oasis? Where’s that? Where are those guys?”
While Noel had a point, the UK music scene still cannot shake the prospect of a potential Oasis reunion, and it seems questions about the event’s feasibility will continue to be asked until it either happens or doesn’t. Recently, at the end of the nostalgia-driven interrogations was Andy Bell, who joined Andy Goldstein on Virgin Radio to talk about his upcoming tour with his band, the now-reunited Ride.
Bell didn’t join Oasis as a bassist until Ride and his subsequent band Hurricane broke up, but it didn’t take long before the conversation turned towards the Gallagher brothers. “I got into [Oasis] very early on, and I saw some really early gigs of theirs,” said Bell, reflecting on the early days of the band, “I saw them upwards of ten times all around the country, so yeah, I’m a huge fan.”
Recalling how he came to be in the band, Bell said, “It was a couple of years after Ride split, and I was in a new band called Hurricane. We had broken up, and there had been a story in the papers saying that my band had broken up, and I guess [Oasis] realised I was knocking around.”
Bell fit right in with Oasis’s sound despite being a guitarist by trade rather than a bassist. Although he wasn’t previously familiar with the bass, Bell gave it a go, mimicking guitar lines to provide the punchy riffs of Oasis with more depth. He looks back at that period as one of his life’s most “brilliant time”.
The Ride member couldn’t provide anything concrete when asked about the possibility of an Oasis reunion, but his general views were optimistic when probed. “Yeah, they probably will. I think yeah, they probably will do it,” he said. “I don’t think it looks likely right now, but life is long, isn’t it?”
When predicting how he thinks a reunion could look, he turned to another iconic Manchester outfit. “As a Stone Roses fan, that reunion happened completely against the way things were looking,” he remembers, “They were not getting on at all, and there was a lot of bad blood in the press and stuff with the Roses, and then suddenly you were hearing about gigs… I think we could see something like that for Oasis”.
Listen to Bell’s full interview with Virgin Radio below.
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