Oasis Ends a 15-Year Pause With a Familiar Goal: Conquering America
Last August, when Oasis announced a reunion for its first tour since 2009, the fractious British band led by the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher released a statement filled with exactly the sort of full-throated grandeur and bravado that marked its rise in the 1990s: 'The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.'
When the band trumpeted the North American leg of the tour a few weeks later, the tone was a bit more passive-aggressive: 'America. Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.'
The distance between those two proclamations says a lot about the trans-Atlantic legacy of this combative band, which performs the first show of its sold-out reunion tour in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday. Oasis will play 17 stadium concerts in the U.K. and Ireland before arriving in North America in late August for a nine-show run; two additional London gigs will follow, then dates in Asia, Australia and South America.
When tickets went on sale for the U.K. shows last August, a reported 14 million people tried to buy them, crashing ticketing websites and angering fans. In October, seats for the gigs in North America went fast too, selling out in an hour. Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, later called it 'the biggest on-sale in history.'
Reunions generate interest, and the improbability of this one, with the Gallaghers sniping at each other for a decade-plus, almost certainly turbocharged it. The music has also aged well: So much of the band's seven-album catalog, which stretched from 1994 to 2008, already sounded like classic rock when it first emerged.
'Wonderwall,' in particular, has become an inescapable anthem. On Spotify, it's the third-most played song from the 1990s, with over 2.3 billion streams. Covers of the track in every imaginable style — rap-rock, country-soul, punk-pop, chillwave, metalcore, big band, lounge-pop, electro-funk, cool jazz, bossa nova, dubstep, mariachi — have tallied hundreds of millions more plays. The wistful singles 'Don't Look Back in Anger' and 'Champagne Supernova' are nearly as popular and have proven similarly durable to wide-ranging reinterpretation.
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