Ask people over the last year and they’ll tell you a hundred different reasons why Oasis are back together. “Liam and Noel have finally buried the hatchet!” “The paycheck was just too good to refuse!” “They’re doing it for their mum!”
The show didn’t need any extra hype, but hosting it at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on a Friday night certainly helped. An outlier in the U.K. stadium circuit, the venue sits slap bang in the middle of the Welsh capital, within a five-minute walk of the train station and with countless pubs and bars along that route.
“Cardiff’s bouncing already!” came a report over 24 hours before the gig, and there were merch pop-ups, murals made entirely from bucket hats and more in the bustling streets around the stadium. It felt more like FA Cup Final day than a gig, such is the jubilant, raucous atmosphere around the city. Once inside, it also helped that the stadium had a retractable roof which, when closed like it was tonight, made this feel more like a comparatively intimate arena show than a stadium gig.
All this led to a thick, fervent energy in the stadium by the time Oasis took the stage just after 8 p.m. and launched into the opening song from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. Questions around set-lists, the band line-up (poor Zak Starkey isn’t here, on top of being fired multiple times from The Who this year), murky phone recordings of rehearsals in London warehouses and beyond swirled around ahead of the tour opener, but it all melted into insignificance once the ear-splitting singalongs began.
The band sound, to use Liam’s favorite phrase, absolutely biblical. Within half an hour, we’re through “Acquiesce, “Morning Glory,” “Supersonic” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” at tremendous volume. Oasis’ arsenal of generation-defining hits is hardly a secret, but when confronted with them one after another like this, it was truly overwhelming and didn’t let up for over two hours.
A mid-set couplet from Noel — “Half the World Away” and “Little By Little” — surprisingly got some of the biggest singalongs of the night, while Liam sang “Slide Away” and “Whatever” with impassioned energy. There was also time for a little poignancy, when the shirt of late Liverpool striker Diogo Jota, killed in a car crash yesterday, came on screen for the final bars of “Live Forever.”
