Live in ’25
“I have a show tonight for the band that’s probably gonna have my album of the year, but instead of prepping more for that, I spent last night watching Mario Balotelli highlights and listening to ‘Supersonic’ on repeat, then made myself tea for the first time this season because it’s finally not 900 degrees outside. Think it’s fair to say I’m catching up to the rest of you lot in excitement now.” – RKID, the oldest, not older – 27/8/2025
Having plied his trade playing up front in the aughts for Manchester City FC and Liverpool, among many other places, Balotelli provided a comfortable parallel: as the guy who created the unlikeliest Premier League-winning goal in history with what is literally his only league assist to date in five seasons, he has shocked the world, too.
One year to the date of the first official reunion announcement, the aforementioned premier brother texted the group of people who would go on to see a reunited Oasis[1] at MetLife Stadium over Labor Day Weekend, sixteen years after the tumultuous last tour and Paris break-up: Oasis Live ’25 was real. What do you believe in? Here’s one way I found out an answer I’d forgotten.
Read that, and the next time you see me, ask me about Labor Day Weekend 2025, and watch my face show you joy. By a lean estimate, I’ve got something like 500+ essays to write about this band, these songs and this weekend. Time-cost of money, though, innit, and GenAI is already up to telling you how great seeing “Song 2” was live.
Surreality, relatedly, has been my personal and exceedingly anxious Zone of Oasis since they announced the reunion, and especially since Noel quoted Gil-Scott Heron in the press release[2], since that photo of the Irish Catholic siblings who are all three and possibly only one[3] debuted.
Yes: “Acquiesce” is the one that most readily hits because it features the Gallaghers dueting[4], and when you hear the former’s riff two songs in and know that both of those blokes are about to do this, the buy-in is clear. Finally, sixteen and thirty-two years later: Oasis is playing a concert.
Look, I know you think I spend my time at home watching Phish videos; the truth is that I spend those hours watching anything Gallagher-adjacent, and especially so in the past year. I saw an interview with Louis Tomlinson in which the subject was asked whether rock and roll was dead, and his answer was this: “Not as long as Liam Gallagher is alive.” To that end, the inclusion of “Up In The Sky” is especially inspired.
One of the advantages to having siblings – specifically and somewhat obviously in this case, the aforementioned oldest brother, and a couple of them to boot – is letting them have the runway for something like this. It was always going to be game on, but when Boy 1 sent that text, my earnest lock-in began. How could it not? We reeled in RFRIENDS Celia[5] and Kevin[6] for the occasion.
Watching Liam throughout this tour, and knowing what it took to get there and maintain it at least this long, he is both the living embodiment of rock and roll and also that he has absolutely gigantic littlest brother energy, maybe-definitely the most prominent of any in rock history. That’s an annoying-as-hell person who needs and, at this point, deserves to be. The best news of his life is that that he’s singularly talented and grew up alongside a singularly and separately talented sib, but that goes for the both of them.
Liam can be a bee’s nest without a suit in a way that appeals to so many of my sensibilities; Noel’s leaned into hanging out with celebrities, waffling Brexit[7] and generally acting as you’d expect of someone of his age and bank account figures, regardless of the status of his divorce. Egging along all the way and finally coming out on top because money pays the bills: it’s Liam Gallagher[8], the people’s champion of live shows in the aftermath.
What gets me about “Acquiesce” is that it’s when Noel acknowledges what’s happening here. He wrote all of the ones you know and most of the ones you don’t, but with Liam as the Roger Daltrey to his Pete Townshend, it’s a move to insert himself into the merry oddities surrounding the band at their peak with a knowing line.
“When did you lose it?”
Standing outside MetLife afterward, smirking at the guy who came specifically to see Oasis play “The Masterplan” and waiting for the interminable bus line to finally draw us in, there was talk of when we lost it. You know, when we couldn’t hang on anymore, and the emotion or whatever whelmed us, and the music carried us through.
It’s the reason Oasis resonated with council estate hoodlums in Burnage in 1997[9]; it’s the reason someone chooses to see Oasis[10] now. More than any other band in history, I choose to believe that Oasis have listened to their own music for enjoyment, justifiably. Both of the primaries tend to cite “Live Forever” as among their favorite of the band’s songs.
Because he’s rock and roll and doesn’t give a fuck what you think while making much more money than you are to say it[11]: in a stadium named for fucking life insurance, Liam dedicated “Live Forever” to “the kiddies in Minneapolis.”
Here’s the thing: I go to concerts and games and baptisms and funerals because I know people in real life, and I like being reminded of that feeling as people variously move away, physically or otherwise. To have them return and be able to return to me on a relative whim as visitors to the city I inhabit, one in the midst of a thirty-year low in gun crime as well as overall crime as self-reported by the NYPD[12], is fantastic.
We spent the mid-afternoon between leaving my apartment and heading for MetLife celebrating somebody else’s failure, a stranger’s failure, on an aircraft carrier in Harlem[13]. It was a merry time, though, honestly, I was still nervous because what if coming to New York broke the Gallaghers this time as it did in “Charlotte” way back when[14]?
One in this troupe is a parent, it’s apparent, we love it because he’s good at it, and he’s talked about how much “Live Forever” means to him in relation to an eventual relation, way ahead of time. Patrick and I met that child, shopped at their fake grocery store, tried to check out fake tomatoes and been turned down. Best shopping experience in recent memory tbh.
You can see where this might be heading: I now think of this child, along with my own godchildren, friend’s children and – uh-oh, this is where it gets tricky – anybody else’s children and godchildren when I hear “Live Forever.” That’s a lot of kids, man. That is a lot of life left to be lived.
Sopping up my various tissues because I’m a weak human who must have been raised by stupid and weak humans, because that is how we weed out stupid and weak humans. I’m told by the strongest, smartest people in history that that’s how this place works.
Say, isn’t it funny how crimes tend to happen in places you’ve heard of? In places people want to visit, maybe because more than a handful of people live there? City bias[15] starts when your chair- and couch-bound life sustains only during trips to the hospital and back despite the fact that rural areas are the most dangerous per capita in, at the very least, the United States[16].
Hearing about gun crime to the average Oasis goer of the tristate area probably didn’t hit so much in an area with so little of it like the tri-state. The Gallaghers come from a place fluent in knife crime, though, and rather than “Look at yourselves,” they have taken a “All of us need to be better” approach[17]. Huh! From the same guys who managed to actually bootstrap themselves to the top, fancy that.
In lieu of any of that, though, Liam thought of a couple of now-deceased children and the 21 wounded others at a mass shooting the Church of the Annunciation in Minnesota. I guess all those Catholic school kids probably hadn’t been to confession since that morning, and anyway, if their parents are okay with living in a place like that, they’re almost asking for it[18], surely. Nevermind all the rest of those shootings everywhere else: a distraction(?) put on by the liberal media (???), that’s all.
Well, look: I’d already started with the waterworks during “Slide Away,” a truly beautiful love song that also somehow has Noel getting closer to Neil Young with his guitar than anywhere else in Oasis’s catalog, but with the living embodiment of rock and roll as I’ve grown to understand it talking about gun crime in a foreign country[19] more clearly than most of our quote-unquote-leaders can, I continued to yield.
Despite his acknowledged love for Kurt Cobain, Noel wrote “Live Forever” partly in repudiation to Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself And I Wanna Die” because he thought kids didn’t need to listen to downer, skag-addled songs with titles like that, at least not exclusively. Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, the classic-era rhythm guitarist and a guy who agreed to go by Bonehead for the publicly-facing purposes of being in this band, didn’t believe that Noel wrote “Live Forever.”[20] I still can’t quite believe it myself.
I’ve saved a collection of Gallagher-related videos on a social media platform that I sometimes refer to when I’m down because they give just about the best interviews in rock history – Noel with great detail and candor, Liam with matter-of-fact terseness that nevertheless belies what he actually believes – but also because, again, these brothers have such faith in themselves, still.
As naïve as it is for me down here and him up there, Noel talking about having one shot at life and trying not to be unhappy[21], resonates. At our cores, I want to think that all people have this intention. I want to think that happiness can, someday, be a choice.
The problem is that unhappiness can be a choice for some on behalf of others. The problem is that many of the people in charge of many more of the people don’t want those people to be happy because they themselves are unhappy, and that would seem unfair, so rather than making anything better, they choose to make it worse.
For most of this year I was under the expectation of a layoff that eventually officially came down in the weeks leading up to the Oasis concert. Technically my last day of employment was the following Monday, in fact, despite it being Labor Day. Knowing full well the reason – that an imagination machine built on the backs of actual artists, writers, researchers and academics had rendered me the Obsolete Man – I nevertheless broke down in the HR meeting, having no idea what I could have done differently to avoid the fate.
In the short term, I could attribute my irritability to that and the circumstances surrounding it. In my own mind’s eye, I’ve been a particularly short-tempered and high-strung version of myself in 2025, building on the great successes of having forged that design over the first 33 years on this planet.
My patience used to stretch. I used to spend so much time in airports that it felt like I never actually ended up anywhere. I used to, I used to, but now I don’t do that. Now I let the slightest thing set my day ablaze, and then I’d spend the rest of it trying to pick up the pieces, or keep the ones still held intact.
The extremes at which most of us invariably live are untenable, and they’re breaking me apart. I forget things more readily than ever, misplace things I only keep in one spot and make inaccurate connections to misremembered and irrelevant stories that compel my friends to tell me to hang on because they’re going to the bathroom. Some of this, I suppose, is getting older, and plenty of it is the post-pandemic haze of my brain not ever really having readjusted to a reality and world in which I never felt comfortable in the first place.
Much of it for me, as well, is an entirely warped and incomplete sense of self-confidence, the discovery of the incompleteness of which led me to alcohol in college after growing up what you might charitably call a teetotaling nerd. That, in turn, led to the full-on ism, which has come and gone in waves but has more or less stuck since 2020, riding the waves of sadness, bitterness, disillusionment and flippancy that have contributed to whatever adulthood this is. I know it isn’t the one the kid in the back of the van listening to “Champagne Supernova” on the way home from basketball practice in 1998 would’ve wanted, but that young lad also didn’t tuck his jersey into his shorts, so it looked like he was pantsless in the team photo. He also hadn’t experienced 9/11 or several financial crises yet, so what does he know?
To quote the poet laureate of Britpop on the coke and everything else of the scene, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, “You don’t often hear people saying, ‘Ooh, since he’s been taking them drugs, he’s such a nice person. He’s really nice. He’s blossomed.” Trying for most of this year specifically to put a concerted effort to cutting down on the number of times I see the bottom of the bottle has been, well, trying.
Therapy helps; a community helps more. Feeling the loss of community because of age and circumstance is difficult, but reacting to your own shortest fuses and quickest impulses resulting in that loss is much more so. Do you know what you can put into your body so that your fuses become shorter and impulses quicker? You guessed it.
Not unlike the other RKID, I’ve been reliably annoying for most of my life, with the real-time fact-checks and punny references and grammatical shit that everyone else – including some heads of major media corporations – left behind in the ninth grade. Unlike him, despite the put-ons, I have never thought of myself as anything approaching cool, let alone its corporeal pinnacle. Alcohol helps this and is the unreliable narrator-operator of the rest of it.
Attempting to rediscover a more sober version of myself has been a hit-but-mostly-miss proposition that has resulted in different kinds of irritability, the kinds that have to confront a reality constructed by and for people who force themselves upon others, whose guiding principles are “Fuck you” and “Bless your heart, and also: fuck you.” It has the noted side effect of trying to be comfortable with whomever it is you find yourself to be, which…oof. No, I haven’t given up drinking yet.
Bringing it back on down: if people are to believe that art responds to troubling times, Oasis springing out of Thatcher’s England is a sign of life, even if it did happen three decades ago. Does it matter that the first two records came out before Noel visited 10 Downing Street, and that Be Here Now came out a month after that[22]? Who cares: make the art anyway, and believe in it.
You need to be yourseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelf. That is the enduring lesson of the Gallaghers to me despite how ineffective I am at living it. They broke up and became estranged, but they never stopped believing in what they had done together. Liam cleaned up his act, apparently stayed sober for the tour and is an avid runner. Noel got divorced and got back with the only person who understands him, having left the drugs years ago but having kept the drink.
Before “Don’t Look Back in Anger” in the encore, Noel told us that he had experienced that song being sung by 80,000 people, and now we were all going to experience that. Celia’s favorite and my first Oasis love as well as, notably, the one Manchester hooked onto after the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in 2017: hearing it in that space with that many people, all at the top of their lungs after a mega night of singalongs, was an indelible four minutes of life.
“Wonderwall” followed, and then the closing “Champagne Supernova,” complete with show-closing fireworks. We all knew it was coming, yet it hit us like the celestial waterfall it is. You look up, and after Liam’s taken the tambourine off his noggin, the Gallaghers stand next to each other in embrace, sixteen years later. They made it. I said mayyyybe…actually, better leave that to them. There they were, at OASIS LIVE ’25: here you are.
[1] “No, really? Both of them?” b/w “…wait, they do ‘Champagne Supernova’ too, okay.” – sample dialogue asked among us over the month leading up to the show.
[2] Hell of a way to shoehorn One Battle After Another into something else that would’ve put Benicio del Toro to great use imo
[3] They go back and forth on all of this; Noel’s got a tenuous relationship with the Christian God of his youth but has seemed to cling to a belief there is a higher power, or energy, or something else dictating, at the very least, which songs fall from the sky and to whom as opposed to which ones are born on the soundboard after snorting your way there. I submit it makes him more Catholic than not, earthly reconciliation leading to a life everlasting after acknowledging great pain brought to yourself and/or to others, but that’s between him and Him. Liam, on the other hand, seems to believe that either John Lennon or himself, reincarnated as John Lennon despite being born eight years before his death, is God. BIBLICAL.
[4] General fan consensus seems to be that “Up In The Sky” has the Definitely Maybe-era slot that “Columbia” would otherwise have. As vitalizing as it was to absolutely scream “Do you think you’ll go/before you start falling?” right now, I mean: “There we were, now here we are,” imminently scouse though it may be by Noel’s admission, is one of the quintessential Oasis lyrics, stupid and aspirational before it all happens that becomes self-prophecy in hindsight.
[5] Three things about her: A friend of Pat’s from college; WNXP in the mornings (and in your hearts); and the woman that registered me to vote, at Bonnaroo in 2010.
[6] You know him, but three things about him: SanFran Giants fan; Reno native; and he once sent me an XXL t-shirt with Mike Trout’s face on it that I wore exactly one (1) time in public, and which got a street shoutout during that trip to the grocery store on Lenox.
[7] On the one hand: why should anybody care what a celebrity thinks? On the other, smaller hand, one waving from across a giant and growing body of water–
[8] In the meantime, the oldest, not older Gallagher has been facing charges of rape, sexual assault and bodily harm since right before this tour started.
[9] Probably also, welp, the reason Noel turned down the Trainspotting soundtrack – because he took the title literally. Literacy matters.
[10] No, when I meant a band like “Oasis,” I meant Oasis, so I’m going to say Oasis because this was an experience unlike anything I’ve ever had in my life. The only nearby memory mixes FC Barcelona fan bands, the ones in the Camp Nou during the Champions League, with everyone singing Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics for him just so that he can enjoy them a little bit himself and, now, with LSU fans and band in Baton Rouge.
[11] And, yes, because he can afford to say it, but ONLY NOW, AFTER HE WAS A GOOD BOY AND APOLOGIZED–
[12] Either they are lying or they’re wrong, right? Ah, but who can you trust in a world of cruelly joyful obfuscation;
[13] The person finished last in their fantasy league, which completes what I’m at liberty to say about it.
[14] The first (the date when that happened, look it up, you’ll see), as I call it, was supposed to happen at the Charlotte Hornets training facility, which at the time was in *checking notes, repeating many times to make sure the concert venue is truly that place* Fort Mill, South Carolina. Oasis nearly broke up in 1996 because Noel Gallagher didn’t want to visit my hometown. The parking lot where I learned to drive manual! C’MON YOU KNOW
[15] Not Man City, obviously, though: probably that too, in hindsight.
[16] Nobody ever asked me to pray for the eleven people (11??) shot at a boat cruise in, oh, let’s just pick a town, Little River, South Carolina, in May 2025, for instance. My stars, PLEASE do not go onto the Intercoastal Waterway until we straighten all of this out by fixing some roads and instituting checks to make sure nobody’s too drunk driving to or from the harbor to operate a separate powered vessel. Heavens no, we would not want that state’s tax dollars – the ones already going to the PD there doing everything they can to stop things like this and absolutely not knuckling their buddy Cal while a blacked-out guy gets behind the wheel of said powered vessel, yes indeed they are hard at work – going to something like THAT. “Some driver 30 yards away is responsible for the next blown tire because they had too much fun just before I did, thank you, and I’m innocent of all charges because I didn’t know they existed. Ignorance of the crime is no excuse? Ah, that’s alright, I’ll just pay the fine. Apologies to that other man’s mama, though.” P.S. New maxim: People shouldn’t buy beer on a Friday in Peaches Corner.
[17] Let us finally let nature take its course and have the almighty Remington atop the food chain, with you – yes, YOU, the final and one true arbiter of reality, the guy (probably a man) with the PBA card – behind the trigger. How much do you want it?
[18] Not long after the shooting deaths of Minnesota state rep Melissa Hortman and her husband and shortly before that of a rather prominent conservative figure, but the gun talks loudest in a free speech world.
[19] These guys grew up under Margaret Thatcher’s “thirteen wonderful years” of knife crime as prime minister of the scandalous and absconding United Kingdom, which still owes the Republic six counties to the north. Despite the Union Jack guitar in 1996 – “Popart, innit?,” Noel once said of it – they both identify as Irish, partly in shared pride with their mother and partly in shame of their ruinous homeland. Surely there is no way the economic policy of the day had anything to do with the growing desperation of lower classes, particularly not immigrants like *checking my notes now, and…yup!* Peggy and Tom Gallagher, the Irish parents who gave us Oasis in, hmm, varying ways. Suffice to say, Peggy Gallagher is the one everyone is extremely happy for, because nothing brings an Irish mother more joy than seeing her kids get along. Source: C’MON YOU KNOW.
[20] “You’ve not just written that!” is an all-time instant response to an all-time song, to Bonehead’s credit.
[21] Ahem, in talking about the 2009 Oasis breakup, but–!
[22] Nobody talks about Creation Records head Alan McGee, a much bigger wig relatively speaking, also having been there because, ha, well! You know what capital tends to follow, and who gets to report on it.
Tuesdays With Horry 