Britpop carpark aka my adventures in Oasis, from outside Murrayfield
I was in the Glastonbury dance tent when the toilet cleaning machine malfunctioned and spit raw human waste all over the dance floor; I spent a night at a “techno” festival in France where a gabber soundsystem set up next door to our tent and it still wasn’t among the top five worst things that happened that night; and I once saw The Fieldmice play a converted church hall on a Monday night in Norwich. But the worst rock and roll excess I have ever witnessed was in the streets surrounding the Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh before Oasis played there last week.
Or that was what I was hoping for, anyway, as I made the way up the old train track from my parents’ house in northern Edinburgh to the home of Scottish rugby on Friday August 8, when Oasis played their first gig in the Scottish capital in 16 years.
I have been thinking a lot about Oasis and specifically how much I like them, since they announced their reunion in August 2024. I certainly used to like them a lot. I saw the youthful five piece play Norwich Arts Centre on June 6 1994, a few weeks before the release of Shaker Maker, and drank deep on their venomous cool; and I bought Definitely Maybe on its day of release a few months later.
Since then, not so much. I skipped their Glastonbury 1995 gig in favour of The Prodigy and, despite living in Manchester, I didn’t attend the band’s Maine Road show in April 1996 on the grounds that I was entirely sick of hearing (What’s The Story) Morning Glory blasting from student flats. So Oasis: behind Suede, Blur and Pulp in the Britpop stakes; and behind New Order / Joy Division, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays and The Fall in the Manchester rankings.
None of those bands, though, have had anywhere near the effect that Oasis have had on British culture. Oasis were - and probably still are - as big as all those bands put together in the UK. There’s something about Oasis that connects with a huge amount of British people: that combination of melancholy but huge melody, easily bellowed along to after a few drinks, with buzzsaw guitars and Liam Gallagher’s perfectly rock and roll voice.
Noel might write the songs in Oasis. But Liam is the essence of the band, a ball of contradictory energy who marries vast star power to an every-man spirit, sunk deep in the British soul. Napoleon once called the English a nation of shopkeepers. Today Britain is a land of Liam Gallaghers.
There are a million Liams in the UK: people with swagger, cheek and spirit, who live their lives around the interphase of football, booze, rock and pub cocaine. The Liams can be kind of annoying and very loud, particularly when pissed, but are basically alright, with a brusque sense of humour you don’t want to be on the end of; people who live their weekends as rock and roll stars even when their weekdays are spent selling insurance. They are the reason that Liam Gallagher can top the British charts in the 2020s and play two sold-out solo gigs at Knebworth. They want to be Liam. Failing that, they will go and see him be Liam, alongside thousands of other people who also want to be Liam, living out the collective fantasy.
I’ve never wanted to be Liam. I’m just too wimpy. But I have found myself listening to a lot of Oasis since the band announced their reunion. And they’re really fun, an instant dopamine hit of rough guitars and catchy melodies that you want to come back to again and again, punctuated by unexpected moments of extreme sensitiveness. Listening to Oasis make me feel like a twisted lab rat, relentlessly hitting the lever that will give me rodent cocaine and ignoring the food and fresh water on offer. Oasis are the kind of band who make you feel like you are twelve foot tall, the Sex Beatles in excelsis
I was also surprised to realise how Oasis’s lyrics - which I had long thought to be the group’s Achilles’ Heel - really connected in my later years; how words that once seemed so stupidly obvious now sounded like universal truths. “While we’re living, the dreams we have as children, fade away.” Amen to that! “Is it my imagination, or have I finally found something worth living for?” Preach it Liam!
How much I would pay to see Oasis? €50, I thought, was my limit. No, €100. €150. If pushed. OK €200. That’s an obscene amount for a ticket but it didn’t make much difference: the band weren’t playing Barcelona, where I live, and the tickets for the whole tour sold out in record time anyway. I thought I wasn’t that bothered. But when the band played their first reunion gig earlier this summer I was one of hundreds of thousands of people watching someone on YouTube re-broadcast someone else’s TikTok stream from the gig, in awe.
And then I realised I would be in Edinburgh when Oasis played their three summer gigs there. My parents live in the Scottish capital and we always go there in August. I looked at the ticket resale sites, tentatively. The cheapest tickets were £450; the next ones up £815. I decided I didn’t love Oasis that much.
And yet and yet… The Oasis reunion, whatever you may think of the group, is the musical event of 2025, certainly in Europe. It’s rock history unfurling before our eyes. And I felt like I had to be there. And so a plan was hatched. I could go along to the gig, I just wouldn’t go inside it; I could soak in the atmosphere, take casual part in rock history and then go home, with hundreds of pounds still in my pocket.
The atmosphere, I reasoned, would be excellent. Oasis were discovered in Scotland (in Glasgow, admittedly, but they aren’t playing there on this tour) by a Scotsman (again, a Glaswegian) and so these Edinburgh gigs would be a kind of homecoming. What’s more, Edinburgh might have a reputation for being slightly genteel but it can let its hair down with the rest of them when it wants to - see Hogmanay - and I was sure that people would be coming from all over Scotland for the gigs.
Edinburgh was ready for Oasis too. The band’s three gigs coincided with the Festival, which meant that the city centre - never the most spacious place at the best of times - was teeming with people, the mass influx of tourists making summer Barcelona feel like a moonlight graveyard of space and calm.
Even among all this, though, Oasis mania was very much in evidence: a queue stretched relentlessly down George Street to the band’s pop-up store; countless shops had their own Oasis merch on display, legal or otherwise; Oasis T shirts were everywhere; and the local media went mad for any Oasis story, no matter how small or unimportant. If I didn’t hear someone busking Wonderwall on the bagpipes then I realised my life would be in vain.
Friday night arrives and it initially looks like my plan is ill-fated. Most residents of Pilton, where my parents live, don’t have a spare £150 to throw at Oasis tickets and the first half an hour of my walk to the stadium is entirely unaccompanied by Oasis frenzy.
Slowly, though, things start to build: I spot my first bucket hats - which I still think of as Reni hats, even though the Oasis reunion has trounced The Stone Roses’ comeback - as I approach the path that will take me off the former railway and towards Murrayfield. The bucket hat people are wearing Oasis T-shirts, too, with the patriotic Union Jack swirl that I always found so unnecessary.
Two minutes later, a man from Queensferry gives me a beer. “Are you going to the concert?” he asks, in a splendid Fife accent. I confess that I am not. “I’ll have that beer back then!” He laughs and cracks his own can. “Cheers!” Well you don’t get that at an Autechre gig.
As I turn off the path onto Chapelhill Road, I am hit by full-on Oasis mania. The stadium is half a mile away but the advancing multitude is already vast. This is what I came for: the splendour of the crowd. I join them, beer in hand, and we march triumphantly on towards Murrayfield.
I see: 10,000 bucket hats; 10 bucket hat stalls; two buskers playing Oasis songs on bagpipes; one busker with an electric piano also playing Oasis songs; one busker with an acoustic guitar offering Oasis karaoke; one busker on a drum kit playing…. well it might be Oasis but it’s hard to tell.
I stop to watch the first bagpipe player. I normally hate the bagpipes - that’s what happens when you grow up in Scotland and your grandparents live near a bagpipe school - but I find the combination of pipes and Oasis strangely moving, folk tradition married to modern folk anthems. He plays Don’t Look Back in Anger. He plays Wonderwall. He plays Don’t Look Back in Anger again. Does he know any Water From Your Eyes? He doesn’t. I guess he didn’t expect anyone to stop and actually listen to him for too long.
I see 100 people wielding Liam-style tambourines; there are whole stalls selling tambourines, I realise, but no one selling second-hand tickets. Oh hang on, there’s one person, surrounded by his severe looking mates. He’ll sell me a ticket for £600. Much as a tourist getting wildly ripped off by a granite-faced local is very much in the Edinburgh spirit, I decide to pass.
From within the stadium, I can hear Cast playing Walkaway. Cast! What a runt of the Britpop litter. And what a runt of the Britpop litter that actually sounds fabulous on a sunny evening in Edinburgh, surrounded by some drunk Scottish people. I find myself wondering if Cast are underrated, which is pretty comprehensive evidence of some magic in the air.
I see a lot of booze, in cans, in hands and on the floor, plus swilling around mouths that seem in constant motion. I see beer, gin and tonic, Buckfast, canned cocktails, cider. But no one seems that drunk. I only see one person fall over pissed. And they get back up in a remarkably good mood. I see precisely one goth and 500 people pissing in the street. One person throws his empty cans at the local primary school. But the overall mood is friendly and well behaved. People are even trying to recycle, leaving their used cans on top of the appropriate, if stuffed-to-bursting, recycling bin. A few neighbours watch on over their fences, bewildered and a little nervous.
I see a few Union Jacks, a few Irish flags, more Scotland flags; I see inexplicably sunburnt Scottish people, one Blur T shirt and surprisingly little drug use, one trio of middle-aged men fingering a small packet as they march towards the Stadium. About one third of the people I see are in Oasis merchandise of some sort, from the basic white T-shirt to posh Adidas jackets that go for upwards of 100 quid. Which, for a concert apparently set to be Scotland’s biggest stadium gig, isn’t a bad percentage at all.
I look around for aggro. I’ve heard tales of booze-fuelled fights at Oasis stadium gigs in the late 200s, when everything around the band felt a little bit septic. But there is none. Everyone feels united in a purpose. And that purpose is Oasis. It’s not exactly a diverse crowd. But more, perhaps, than you might think. It’s younger too - children with their parents - and not all blokes.
After about half an hour outside the stadium it feels like I’ve seen it all: hats, booze, hats, hats, booze. I could pay £600 for a ticket now or hang around the touts and see if they get any cheaper. I could maybe listen to Oasis from outside Murrayfield, as I had vaguely planned to do. There is a crowd gathering in Roseburn park, wielding alcohol-heavy picnics, that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. I could join them and sing along.
But at the same time I feel like I’ve pretty much got what I needed from the Oasis reunion: not exactly rock and roll excess but a sense of something happening that is bigger than the individual experience; a moment of mundane but worthwhile cultural history; and a celebration of music that doesn’t have that much to do with the music itself but definitely needs the music to make it happen.
Oasis are the biggest band in Britain. But they are also an excuse - a history-making, highly lucrative one - but an excuse nonetheless, a tentpole idea for people to gather around on a Friday evening in Edinburgh. Oasis are a way to get away from the relentless shit of 2025 and believe once again in living forever.
Oasis’ music isn’t particularly clever, ground-breaking or even much good when you get beyond the first two albums. But maybe it doesn’t need to be. Oasis’ music is plain and obvious - but gloriously so, like a perfectly made sandwich or glass of cold water after exercise. And, on a Friday night in August, that’s more than enough. And so I wander back home through the Oasis crowds and watch the fireworks out of the window of my parents’ flat, in bed. A rock and roll star, just for tonight, albeit quite a tired one.
PS Thanks to Philip Sherburne for the Britpop Carpark title. In the unlikely event you don’t already do so, go and subscribe to his Substack.
PPS I will get back to dance music next week. Promise.
Some listening
I am sure loads of great music has been released this week. I am equally sure that I have been on holiday, so haven’t had time to write about it. Apologies.
Things I’ve Done
Line Noise podcast - Barker at Primavera Sound 2025
I could have talked to Sam Barker for hours about his album of the year, Stochastic Drift, dance music without drums and un-footing his audience; instead, I had 11 minutes, live at Primavera Sound 2025. Hell, I’ll take it.
The playlists
I have two: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. They are both on Spotify, in the name of reaching the largest amount of people. Does that justify it? Maybe not. Funnily enough, I personally use Apple Music, so maybe I should shift to there, although the functionality isn’t as good. I don’t know. What do you think?