To Be Included

I think I’ll need to take a week off from regaling you with tales of the Earlies bleak and mildly triumphant jaunt around America twenty years ago. Why, you ask? Well because the biggest tour in the world in 2025 just finished and I was a small part of it, I should reflect on that if anyone does. Obviously my words will sink into an ocean of positive hyperbole, if you want a feel for the tour you should really get onto Youtube or Instagram. Maybe even Tiktok (although I’ve never been on that and I secretly believe the Chinese Communist Party designed it to fast track Western stupidity). You can see endless reels and videos of crowds rippling with excitement, fireworks gaudily painting the sky above endless packed stadiums, Liam hugging Noel, Liam balancing tambourines on his head and people doing the Poznan. It all looks really special. It really was special.

Do I have anything to add? Only my humble perspective as the least famous person in the most famous band trotting the globe this year, a nobody in the middle of a media hurricane. I walked around the crowd at Heaton Park untroubled and joined the masses marching down Wembley way, all in uniform. They reminded me of myself dressed head to toe in claret and blue and waving a flag, off to the Sherpa Van trophy final in 1988. I met so many people in Friends and Family who asked if I’d enjoyed the gig and then followed up with “Have you seen them before or was this your first time?” Sometimes I’d go along with them, sometimes I’d say “I’m in the fucking band!” Then they’d ask for a selfie which I imagine they’ll look at in years to come and wonder “who was that guy again?” Bizarrely South America was different, we’re not talking Liam and Noel levels of fame but there were more people who knew my name there, asking for a photo or a signature, than would buy my albums here. Read that however you like.

What was it like to be in the middle of all that? If I said it was like any other gig you’d think I was downplaying it all with charmless false modesty but in many ways it was. You hang around in a room with a bunch of blokes you’re seeing every day. You break the day up into meals, how long it’ll be before you eat again. You soundcheck, you go back to the dressing room. You tell stories and jokes, you get to know each other. Onstage you watch these same blokes, you try to stay locked in with them. You notice if they make a mistake and your eyes linger on them to see if they’re okay, if they’ve mentally recovered. Maybe you smile to let them know it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you make a mistake yourself and you look around to see if any of them noticed. You’re locked in with the rest of the band, a self contained universe and nothing else matters or is even real. Except it is real and that’s where it wasn’t like other tours. You looked up and saw an endless sea of people. Sometimes it was people diving around like a 1980’s football terrace, back in the days before that all went wrong. Sometimes you’d look up and see a sea of mobile phone lights swaying with eerie beauty in the darkness. Sometimes I’d take my in-ears out and listening to the wonderous cacophony of 80,000 unified people. The crowd made everything different. Obviously they would.

The way we were treated was different too, particularly for me -fresh off a tour sleeping on a bus and eating sandwiches. This was an endless parade of five star hotels and world class catering with back stage riders that never seemed to run out, no matter how many people were pilfering them. I never expect to be treated well and more often than not I’m uncomfortable with it, I think it’ll be hard to kill off the scrubber in me. I couldn’t bring myself to accept the offer of having someone do my laundry and the idea of somebody driving me from London to Clitheroe on my own seemed too ridiculous to accept every time it came up. I did gratefully accept the amazing run of extra curricular activities we enjoyed though. A trip to the pyramids of Teotihuacan or the palace Gyeongbokgung. An excursion to bathe in hot springs in the Andes. Gigs by Neil Young, Jon Cleary, the Black Keys and Crowded House. A chamber orchestra soundtrack concert and a live performance of Handel’s Messiah. Cultural submersion in a Chicago Blues bar, an Argentine Tango club and a Sao Paolo Samba evening. One of the best meals I’ve ever eaten in Sydney. Taking my family to the bizarre and endlessly wonderful parallel universe of Japan. This was a year crammed with unforgettable experiences.

I’ll now spend the next few months repeating myself, going around the Christmas parties talking about different celebrities I briefly crossed paths with. I’ll be like Jude Law’s character in I Heart Huckabees constantly banging on about Shania Twain and her sandwich demands. I’ll start to hate the sound of my tired anecdotes coming out one last time. Maybe I’ll start embellishing stuff, everybody does sooner or later.

I’ll get asked questions too, some I might answer. Did they really get on? Yes they did, it wasn’t over the top like, it was people being genuinely warm after forgiving each other and starting to tentatively move forward. What you saw was real. Which was the best show, which city had the best crowd? They were all brilliant, everyone was amazing etc. Every South American gig was amazing. But it was Buenos Aries, night two. That crowd had to wait an hour due to safety checks too, they really went off when their time came. Are there more gigs coming in 2026 or the future more broadly? I’ll get asked that a lot. Do you honestly think I know though? I’m a worker ant when all’s said and done.

I can’t believe how universally positive the press coverage has been since we played the first notes at Cardiff back in July, I think after that nobody dared rock the boat. Before that though the knives were out. Today I scrolled backwards through the Guardian articles about dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster web trouble, fans ripped off on resale sites and more. I scrolled and scrolled all the way back to Simon Price’s article calling Oasis “the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history.” That one really got someone’s goat as it was quoted in all the end of tour social media posts. As well as a range of political and social offences he goes on to talk about how they aren’t the sole representatives of the working class, what about Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers? It’s a fair point and they’re great bands, but it’s when you compare Oasis to their peers you can see where their particular charm lies. Pulp were clearly educated, witty and cool. Jarvis’ lyrics are often autobiographical and the whole thing was quite a polished version of outsider music. The Manic Street Preachers were like A-level sociology students who wanted the world to know what they knew about its injustices. Damon Albarn and Blur were even more obvious, they wanted you to know how clever they were, how well read, how widely they listened, how inter-disciplinary they were. It’s all true too, Albarn is clever and I admire him tremendously. I’m even a bit jealous.

If Simon Price has been furiously unfollowing people who’ve been posting joyous scenes from the Live ‘25 tour and scratching his head, wondering how on earth this band of “Arndale centre townies” brought the world together with their “funkless, sexless plod,” I’ll be glad to illuminate. It’s inclusive. That’s right, Madden just said Oasis is inclusive. It gleefully borrows from the most obvious sources that we all know and love already. It uses chord progressions that children who are learning guitar nowadays learn as soon as they can. Where 35 years ago they were still learning House Of The Rising Sun or Bad Bad Leroy Brown, nowadays they’ll learn Wonderwall or Live Forever. The lyrics that he dimisses as dull platitudes are vague and open enough that people across the continents feel emboldened to invest them with their own meanings. The melodies are pitched in ranges that anyone can sing along, male or female, young or old. They are simple and memorable and you can take them away and keep them forever even if you don’t buy an album. The music is inclusive and then there’s the band. People who want to criticise it might see that there are only white men on stage and that’s fair enough. What I always found so appealing though was that it was a group of average looking men, dressed like working people on a weekend out, of average rather than virtuosic musical ability, playing songs together. Nothing about it seemed unfathomable or unachievable. Everybody looked at Oasis and thought, “they’re no better than me, I think I could do that!” So many people joined bands after seeing them back in the day. A lot of them should never have bothered to be fair, but that’s what’s so inclusive and welcoming about the band. They make it look easier and more achievable than it is, they’re not showing off and the craft is concealed. You look at Oasis and think “they’re just like me, I could be in that band.”

And for six months this year, I was.