Oasis reunion: can they pull off the masterplan?

After 15 years of bitter hiatus, the Gallagher brothers will reunite in 2025 to take Oasis on tour in the UK and Ireland.

A cultural force in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Manchester band divided opinion as much as their popularity soared. But their early work was driven by its "evocation of a desire for escape" and a search for "something better", establishing them as the defining band of a generation, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian.

Like their body of work and behaviour off stage, Oasis' reunion plans have quickly split opinion, with some arguing that what is suspected to be a financially motivated tour will not have the same resonance in today's Britain as it did even 20 years ago.

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'Beautiful and terrible all at once'

From a performance perspective, the Oasis reunion could "go either way", said Petridis in The Guardian. Their live act has fluctuated wildly over the years, however the tour's "commercial success is obviously assured" given the numbers of "very faithful" Oasis fans who will turn out for the gigs.

Nevertheless, their ranks will also be "bolstered by an audience who couldn't remember Oasis first time around" with streaming figures indicating that their music has "cut through to younger listeners".

The reunion will be "beautiful and terrible all at once", said Brendan O'Neill at Spiked, not only for the music but because "Britain really needs a shot of Gallagher right now", he argued. The brothers will "dent" the current "culture of conformism" with Liam's "cultural commentary" and Noel's "social wisdom".

It would be easy to be "too cynical" about the reunion tour, said Ben Sixsmith at The Critic, but there is something "odd" about the culture of being "nostalgic about the 1990s". Oasis' "optimistic" and "aspirational" songs from their first two albums may sound a "bit hollow in 2025" and "some of the magic will have been lost" given the testing social and economic situation people are now living in. It is "difficult not to look back in anger if you're looking forward with so much consternation", Sixsmith added.

'Sky-high prices'

The band and its promoters have yet to reveal how much concert tickets will cost but, in the end, there was just "too much money on the table" for the Gallagher brothers to say no to reforming, said Dylan Jones in The Standard.

As long as both brothers "remained compos mentis" there was "always the possibility" of getting the band back together, and the band's promoters "kept putting moolah on the mahogany" until they got "their way". The tour will likely stretch globally later, which could "easily generate half a billion dollars before anyone has really started doing the maths", said Jones.

Audiences are expected to pay "presumably sky-high ticket prices" to see Oasis' "lumpen, meat 'n' potatoes rock", said Alexander Larman in The Spectator. Yet, those who see them as the "people's band" will turn out "in their hundreds of thousands", possibly "older, greyer and paunchier than they were in the band's heyday.

There is unlikely to be any new music to accompany the tour, with the band not needing to "justify the scale and expense" of the concerts with a new album, given that the "music industry has changed immeasurably in the past 15 years". 

Instead, the Gallagher brothers will only need to put their "differences behind them" and get away with "simply playing the hits" to amass a fortune "too tempting to pass up".