Sarah Harte: Oasis reunion gives Gen X a chance to look back in nostalgia

Liam (left) and Noel Gallagher will reunite for Oasis's long-awaited return. Picture: Simon Emmett/Fear PR/PA Wire 

I didn’t get tickets to Oasis. Or to be more accurate, the person I charged with getting tickets didn’t. 

I rang an old college friend at ten past eight on Saturday morning when the 160,000 tickets had just gone on sale to see how he was getting on, and his response is unprintable because, as he huddled over his laptop, he told me how he didn’t need me heaping pressure on him.

With old friends, no matter who you become in your adult lives, you continue to perform your larval 18-year-old selves with a semi-violent affection because you have carried part of each other through the world, only getting to live those parts together.

In 1996, when Oasis played in Cork, around the time they were considered to have peaked, a vivid memory is making lasagne and garlic bread with a green salad pre-concert before I and my guests tripped off to Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Lasagne would have been old-school fare then, but I recall rationalising that it would act as soakage for the inevitable revelry.

You may not give a toss about the prospect of an Oasis reunion or you may regard it as the second coming. Discussing the desire to bag tickets with the generation above me, it was clear that they didn’t get what the fuss was about. Cue some muttering about there being people soft enough in the head to pay €6,000 for a ticket, which is the price some of the tickets are retailing at from ticket touts. Agreed, it is lunacy, but they fail to understand it’s not necessarily about the music. Many of us are not die-hard Oasis fans; there were so many other great bands during the Madchester era — Blur, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays.

The announcement that Oasis would reform 15 years after their split in Paris prompted something psychological. To paraphrase an Oasis song, it was a case of Let’s Look Back in Nostalgia. It was about more than simply having a chance to dance badly with other members of Gen X upon whose faces time has also played a tune. It was about getting in a time machine and returning to a simpler time.

Liam and Noel Gallagher performing at Marlay Park, Dublin, in 2005. Picture: IrishPhotodesk.ie

The sunlit nineties felt like an Edenic period. The boom had not reached its zenith, with the self-aggrandisement and unchecked rabid individualism that would lead to the human catastrophe of the Great Recession which cannibalised so many lives.

The Great Recession was like an avalanche waiting to happen as we, the minor characters at the start of the disaster movie humming in the van — or in this case the front row of the concert — had no idea that we were about to be killed off. Political error, economic slaughter, failure, and humiliation were on their way, but not yet.

When Noel and Liam took to the stage Leeside, it was a time when everything felt possible, when there was genuine reason to hope. It was pre 9/11. A ceasefire had been brokered in the North. Mary Robinson was in the Arás embracing community and inclusivity in her term and promising a better Ireland for women. Clinton was in the White House with his Third Way philosophy and the good ol’ boy Southern charm we found hard to resist. He was well on his way to becoming a neoliberal and deregulating the finance industry but that was not yet evident.

It was when we stayed up to watch Tony Blair sweep to power, incorrectly assuming the vulpine-smiled, big-haired ghost of Thatcher had been dispatched. It felt as if liberalism based on a notion of the social contract was in the ascendant, guaranteeing a brighter future of democracy and egalitarianism. Another major miscalculation, because the liberalism being enacted was entirely divorced from the social and economic reality it would produce.

Looking back, it was a time of hope more than knowledge, with what transpired to be a wildly optimistic view of globalist capitalist forms, which resulted in the rights of humans taking a bath in favour of the rights of corporations for which we are still paying the price.

That recession fomented a lack of social trust in systems which sometimes feel ineradicable and which has brought us a deeply damaging populism and in some quarters a disrespect for democracy.

During this Age of Innocence, I remember watching Noel Gallagher on The Late Late Show, how he said his mother Peggy told him he had to go on the show. Never mind that he was a superstar, for his Mayo mother the Late Late and Gay Byrne was still it.

Byrne introduced Gallagher as a very special guest from the biggest band on the planet, described him as Irish and marvelled that tickets were retailing at £150 or £200 a go (because it was three years before the euro came in). It was a major event when somebody famous came to Ireland and we all watched the same terrestrial television, which provoked bonding moments through a shared experience and a shared social reality. The proliferation of media options had not yet split us with people’s viewing being siloed on their laptops and phones.

On the Late Late, Noel sings ‘Wonderwall’ with his guitar. Gay stands silhouetted in the background in a suit and tie listening and if you watch the clip on YouTube, it’s strangely affecting. A baby-faced Noel is yet to get married; he now has two divorces behind him. Noel talks about his musical process, sticking his music down on little tape recorders. Remember those?

Gay mentions to Noel that Chris De Burgh had the same musical method, and the look on Noel’s face is hilarious. He confines himself to saying “does he?” because his mother was watching from the Point, where he had just played, and presumably all his family in Charlestown, Co Mayo. For someone who was famous for his acid wit and swearing, he was scrupulously polite.

In a world of climate change, oligarchs, mob oratory, and an online ecosystem of hate, it’s easy to focus on the troubling, but every political era produces disappointment and disillusion, and our challenge is to refuse to let this negativity metastasize.

The bromide that art alone will save us is half-assed nonsense. But music can bring us together, bridging gaps between cultures, beliefs, and languages giving solace from a sense of belonging to something. Music allows you to dream, to escape for a fleeting moment, to access that more hopeful side of your psyche which is crucial as you age.

On Saturday night, I popped in the headphones, turned the volume to maximum, and played my favourite Oasis song, ‘Supersonic’. For a moment, thanks to the biblical drumbeats, the great guitar tone, the euphoric chorus, and the lyric , ‘I need to be myself, I can’t be no one else, I’m feeling supersonic’, I was a young woman again with everything to play for, no major mistakes made yet, smiling up at that stage, full of hope.