From Glastonbury to Knebworth: the 10 most iconic Oasis concerts
The history of Oasis was always about more than just Beatle worship. At the height of their fame, no one else could touch the Gallagher brothers in terms of rock and roll excess, fantastic songs, and bringing rock and roll to the masses worldwide. Though the studio cuts work just fine, Oasis always thrived as a live outfit.
Before the band had even secured a record deal, they were honing their craft onstage, making songs that sounded like a punk version of what the golden age of rock and roll was like. The band’s existence as a live outfit was so good that it almost brought down their status in the studio as well.
When they were originally recording Definitely Maybe, Oasis continually ran into trouble capturing their live sound, which involved everyone recording the album three times over. Once Owen Morris got into the studio and added his brick-walling technique, fans finally got to hear what Oasis sounded like when they heard them live.
The live stage isn’t safe from a few fights here and there, and the Mancunians have been known to indulge in a few, from Liam Gallagher slagging off his brother Noel or the band getting into a conflict with the crowd. It might not always be pretty, but if life on the road was wholesome and nice, it just wouldn’t be Oasis.
The 10 most iconic Oasis shows:
King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut – 1993
Every band has to start somewhere. You can’t just throw together a bunch of friends that can play and think you’re going to be headlining Glastonbury in the next few weeks. Oasis were no exception, but their gig at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut set them on their path to stardom.
While there is grainy footage of the band’s performance that night, they were never supposed to go in the first place. They had been set to perform with the Sister Lovers, only for the venue to refuse their performance once they got there. After taking time out of the Sister Lovers’ show, the band got onstage and played a handful of songs that would make it to Definitely Maybe, like ‘Up in the Sky’.
The venue was far from packed, but one of the patrons that night was Alan McGee. Allegedly wanting to blow off some steam, McGee had seen the band live and offered them a handshake deal with Creation Records just from their first few songs. Even though the band didn’t have a pot to piss in at the time, you never know who’s going to be in the audience when you’re cutting your teeth.
The Word – 1994
It might seem a bit odd to add a television appearance to a list of the Manchester group’s most iconic shows, but when you dig into the history of the band’s appearance on The Word, it is also hard to remove it from the band’s rich iconography. It was the band’s television debut and offered up not only a taste of what was to come from the brothers Gallagher, but a stark warning of the hedonism which was about to flow out of what would later be defined as Britpop.
The Word was the perfect venue for the band’s TV debut, a magazine-style show designed for the youth of Britain, it presented live and uncensored performances from the alt-rock scene of the decade. Host Terry Christian often cites himself as the reason the band got on TV at all, and noted their entrance to this performance as particularly memorable when speaking to The Observer: “They arrived accompanied by a scallyish entourage of crew plus assorted mates from Manchester. During rehearsal, it was heartening to see that Liam Gallagher, far from being shy and retiring, was cheekily chatting up all the female dancers as if he was already a huge star,” claimed the host. “On the night itself, they sounded fantastic, with the show’s main guest, Bob Geldof, saying how good he thought the band were.”
The group delivered a performance which would reverberate not only around the airwaves of TV green rooms but across the nation as a whole. The rollicking show would present a brand new vision of being young, dumb and up for fun as a young person in Britain.
Glastonbury Festival – 1994
There are few better places in the music world to make a name for yourself than Glastonbury Festival. In the 1990s, it was just beginning to once again assert itself as a bastion of rock and roll, with powerhouse performers turning its hippy-dippy image on its head.
Oasis were one of the bands to turn the Pyramid Stage into a new Mekkah for Britpop in the latter half of the decade. They would headline the festival in 1995 as Oasis-mania had well and truly settled in. However, their first appearance at the festival confirmed they would be icons for years to come when they only had a solitary single under their belts.
The band arrived to play a much smaller stage that would accommodate them a year later. However, they would arrive at the comparatively tiny event with enough swagger and powerful tunes to be confident that they would be something to remember. It’s fair to say that they were right, but they didn’t do it with bluster alone. The set – which you can find in its entirety below – is littered with future classic and brilliant B-sides with the sparkle which have gone on to define the band.
The Whiskey a Go-Go – 1995
After becoming one of the biggest names in British music, the Gallaghers had their sights set on America next. Once they got mileage out of Definitely Maybe, the band made a trip over to the US to play some shows in the hopes of creating a buzz on the other side of the pond. While the band were introduced to LA in style at the Whiskey A Go Go, they were also introduced to crystal meth.
Despite important people being in the crowd, most of the band had been up for the past 24 hours and were in no shape to perform. After starting ‘Rock and Roll Star’ twice, the band devolved into shambles as the night went on, which wasn’t helped when Liam threw a tambourine at Noel’s head.
This one gig became the straw that broke the camel’s back, with Noel leaving for San Francisco and meeting up with an old flame who convinced him to rejoin the band. Although this meeting led to Oasis classics like ‘Talk Tonight,’ the band was Noel’s beast once he came back into the fold.
Maine Road – 1996
Some bands can point to live albums as the moment where everything clicked. The likes of KISS and Cheap Trick have made an entire career off of how well the band sounded when they took to the stage. When you look at Oasis’ welcome at Maine Road, though, you would have sworn it was for royalty.
Recorded during the peak of the Morning Glory era, this is one of the tightest setlists that the band ever had, going through one hit after another and sprinkling in iconic B-sides like ‘The Masterplan’. While Oasis were known to be larger than life, Alan McGee points to this gig as the perfect Oasis show.
Looking back on it, McGee thought this was the peak of their powers, saying, “This was rock as religious spectacle. Oasis don’t necessarily have fans, they have disciples who chant their love for the band.” After long years of claiming to be the biggest band in the world, this was the first truly biblical gig that the band ever played. Even bigger gigs were to follow.
Knebworth – 1996
It can’t really get much bigger than football stadiums in rock and roll. You might be used to slogging it out in run-down bars, but playing in a stadium with everyone singing along is something you only get once in a lifetime. Oasis were meant for something bigger, and Knebworth was the payoff for all those years in the clubs.
While Knebworth is usually reserved for the biggest bands in the world, the lads from Manchester had crossed the threshold by 1996, playing to 125,000 people across two nights of gigs. Noel Gallagher remembered being shellshocked, saying that he still thought of the band as indie rock rather than the leaders of a new cultural revolution.
Although the band called it after two nights, Liam Gallagher never wanted to give it up, saying, “Why only two nights? We still should be there playing right now.” Considering the mess that was to come on Be Here Now, Bonehead Arthurs thought that the band should have called it right there: “We should have said ‘We Were Oasis, good night.’” Oasis had another decade ahead, but it was never going to get better than this.
Wembley Stadium – 2000
When you’re a travelling musician, you have to leave some of your personal baggage inside whenever you play a show. Liam Gallagher is not one of those people. He has never been one to shy away from voicing his thoughts, and he was not having a great day when the band played Wembley Arena in 2000.
After a well-publicised divorce from Patsy Kensit, Liam was seething when he hit the stage and took out all his frustrations on the crowd. It didn’t help that he had relapsed on hard drugs before the show, which led to him shouting into the mic between sections of the song and intentionally messing up the words so nothing could be used for the televised version of the performance.
Although Oasis would continue on for almost a decade, Noel remembers this gig as rock bottom for the band, calling it a disgrace and thinking that Liam was sabotaging the entire gig on purpose. Liam did get back on track later, but this night of rock and roll excess ended with a lot of unhappy fans waiting in Wembley.
Switzerland – 2000
If there is one thing you can always rely on Oasis for, it is that they will never back down from a fight. Be it a lone stranger trying to rush the stage or an entire crowd of angry revellers. The latter took place on a summer’s evening at the Paleo Festival in Nyon when, unaccompanied by his more level-headed brother, Liam Gallagher and the rest of Oasis were booed off stage.
Noel Gallagher had already taken to avoiding live appearances when outside of the comforts of England, and he clearly made the right choice on this occasion. By this point in the band’s career, Liam was beginning to lose his head a little, and the image of him as the swashbuckling rock star which had once felt so unashamedly authentic was now beginning to wear thin as he splashed himself across tabloids with verbal barbs for anyone who dared cross his path. Governed only by himself and without the steadying presence of his brother Noel on this trip, Liam crossed the line, and instead of insulting musicians or reps, he went after Oasis’ own fans.
“A small group ruined it for the real fans,” was the group’s official line after the event; however, the audio paints a somewhat different picture. Within the clip, Gallagher breaks from the track and says, “If I catch you, dickhead, I’ll break your fucking arse, your family’s arse, and your mother’s arse. So pack it in.” The audio plays out and highlights Gallagher as he continues to berate members of the audience, and eventually, it all becomes too much. The audience didn’t hide their annoyance, pelting the stage with bottles and coins. With such a large crowd, it’s no wonder the members of Oasis felt so threatened. In fact, they felt so under fire that they went to the British consulate in Geneva to make sure they could get out of Switzerland without harm.
Barrowlands – 2001
For many, the turn of the millennium offered the end of Oasis as a truly inspirational and progressive rock band. The band’s records certainly tail off around this time, but their performances did too. Sure, they could still deliver a mind-blowing performance after this date, but the truth is, they had lost the zip and drive that all good bands have before they become great. In the same way that a debut LP is often a group’s best – harnessing all of the enthusiastic power one needs to achieve such a feat and often losing it the very next day – so to a band’s set of performances can eventually fall into simple professional outings.
However, the same cannot be said for their show at Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow, Scotland. The city that gave the band their big break may also be the scene of their final triumphant show. There are plenty of decent performances in the following years, but they run as a high-class band doing what a high-class band does, putting on a good show and leaving the customer very happy. However, at this gig, the band let rip.
Liam’s vocals sound pitch-perfect, Noel’s guitar snorts like an untethered dragon, and the band are arguably near their peak. It does help that the performance was then put on Sky Box Office the following night and gave everyone a taste of the biggest rock band on the planet, but the gig should also be remembered as the group’s ultimate crescendo. That year, The Strokes would release Is This It, and the rock world would move away from Oasis’ unique swagger.
Paris – 2009
The 2000s era of Oasis is a much different beast than who we met back in the ‘90s. The Gallaghers ruled the band with an iron hand, and nothing was going to get in the way of them pushing forward. That is unless they lashed out at each other.
Before a gig in Paris, Liam went off during a press conference before the show and started swinging a guitar backstage. While Noel watched on as Andy Bell said nothing, he took the guitar out of his brother’s hands and smashed it before leaving to get on the tour bus. Though Noel contemplated going back on and finishing the gig, this was the last straw, cancelling the show and announcing that Oasis was over a few days afterwards.
Looking back on the concert, Noel did seem to have some regrets, saying: “we only had two more shows to play on that tour and then we would have gotten a break from each other for a while. But I just was thinking about it and was like, ‘No, not this time.’” Despite having the whole world at their fingertips, those years of bad blood couldn’t be ignored any longer.
