Full Circle: Oasis Summer

What Oasis means to me, my experience of Live 25 and visiting my Grandma for her 100th Birthday, and my take on authenticity in music..

I was a young, shy, quiet kid growing up in a council house near Reading and felt at odds with the world around me, due to having selective mutism whilst also going to school with more wealthy school friends. I was bullied at school and couldn't talk when I was there. Home was a loving place, though at times the atmosphere was unsettled by occasional tensions and financial strain. I shied away, with few friends and little space to be me.

I found music. Picked up from family members who played folk, blues and rock in pub sessions and family occasions, led by my Dad, who brought me up on Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath, I dabbled on the guitar from a young age.

One day, in my living room, a green CD from Virgin Megastore was sitting on the table. I don't know how it got there. It was ‘Definitely Maybe’. I had seen Oasis on 'The White Room' from a VHS tape my dad had recorded late at night. I was intrigued.

Most of my family was out, so I put it on my dad's system at full volume. The sun shone through the windows, and I could smell cigarettes and cooking onions from the neighbours’ houses as Live Forever washed through the sunbeams. I couldn't stop looking ‘Up in the Sky' at the clouds, my sight directed upwards by the song, finding escape and contentment in the ever-changing landscape of the sky, as the chords changed underneath that riff. I sat drinking apple juice, completely lost in the ethereal wash of guitars and melodies, and clear, positive vocals, steering me through the clouds.

The album gets to 'Slide Away' and I'm deep into a new kind of mindset, a new feeling of movement, flying, through the colours of the sky and the music; imagination and a feeling of hope and dreams coming alive. I had slid away, feeling like I owned something new. A new feeling, that was all mine, that I could keep in a secret jar inside of me that I can release at any moment and slide away into absolute bliss. I had found my space. The world around me had a new filter. A second dimension. That filter from this new secret jar I could just access, and remember that feeling that music gave me. The world was brighter, more colourful and less rigid.

"What a life it would beee.."

It related to everything about my life lyrically. Made my life feel relevant and validated in a colourful, positive way. The council house estate is coloured in with brighter colours. It gave me confidence.

My dad walks in, "What's that riff?" As he skips back to the start of Slide Away. The open arpeggiated chords of the intro bellowing into the sky once again. My dad picks up an old, battered guitar and tries to work out the 3 chords. Am G and F. We then realised that it sustains a G string and a high G throughout all the chords, which gives it that element of ethereal freedom, which I had not heard anywhere else.

I had found how to CREATE this new space!

From then on, I couldn't put the guitar down until today. I had found my space in life through music, and Definitely Maybe gave me that space. Oasis gave me that space.

I found myself at music shops in Reading and took mental notes of the chords and tabs for Definitely Maybe, Morning Glory and eventually owning the Be Here Now TAB book as a birthday present. But after a short while, I realised I could figure them out for myself. I would sit and figure out all the B-sides from each single. I had a moment when I could hear the chord progression of 'Whatever', and work it out without a guitar in my hand. It was like Wonderwall, but the other way round, almost.

Oasis gave me tools and an ear to create my own space. And that space grew bigger. The world around me is now my world, which I can colour in and shape with my new musical tools.

It was the beginning of what my life became. You have been, unless you are new to this space, reading about my travels across the world via music. Well, you can thank Oasis for those stories. That's how it manifested. Oasis gifted me that space, as I slid away into a world of music. It just hit me right.

Fast forward 31 years, and it's Live 25. Oasis are back. A year after announcing the reunion, the rush for tickets back in 2024 has ended. I was lucky. I got into the presale and bagged some Wembley tickets for me and my mates. That didn't stop me from trying unsuccessfully on the official release day, and right up until July 25, when I managed to secure a standing ticket through the resales. I would be going twice.

After the world seemed to get darker under 14 years of Tory rule, which looks to be continued under Kier Starmer’s Labour, music venue's shutting down, covid nearly killing of the music industry completely and the internet and streaming making it impossible for musical artists to gain the weight and relevance of band like Oasis; Oasis have become the coolest and most relevant band in the world again. And my world seems much more colourful, vivid and positive again. Filter applied. Jar open.

"What a life it IS!"

It was only an announcement, and I’d already spent countless hours revisiting Oasis during the dark years of Covid. Still, that surge of movement and hope now felt indulgent, steeped in nostalgia. In today’s changed and difficult world, it seemed almost unhealthy. Liam and Noel’s solo projects, justifying some kind of plot to the nostalgia.

After the initial announcement of the reunion and my WhatsApp kicking off with message's from fellow Oasis fans, I found myself going for run around Ally Pally park listening to Morning Glory, but now; guilt and nostalgia free, reveling in the sea of bliss that album creates, whilst running along a path that Noel Gallaghers High Flying Birds likely drove down when they played in this park just a week before.

There is something about the space of What's the Story (Morning Glory) that gets me. It's where the drums sit in the mix and the sound of the bass. There are about a million guitar tracks on each song, but you can't hear them unless you tune in. But you certainly feel them. Creating a subtle and unique space using those sustained chords to give each song that cathartic and comforting bed for Liam’s vocals to shine through.

The world was piecing itself back together after years of turmoil triggered by COVID. It was all linking up, and I started to see my current world become validated and relevant again, as Liam sang and the endorphins flowed. It felt right. It felt present. It felt necessary and fuckin needed.

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Those of you who are aware or have been part of my career as a musician so far, you may be surprised or judgmental of the fact that a guitarist who has found himself largely on the soul & reggae circuits is a huge Oasis fan. In fact, in my growing years between 1999, all through the 00s and teens, in the circles I found myself in, you would keep incredibly quiet about liking Oasis. They were fully mainstream by the early 00s, and those ethereal escapism sounds that I loved were now lumped in with whatever you saw on the front page of The Sun and a societal-enforced guilt for loving a Cadd9 chord.

The advent of the Internet triggered a move towards the obscure, and it levelled the musical playing field.

And I was fully in. New boutique festivals started popping up in the early-mid 00s, with crazy decor and food trucks selling more than just burgers and hot dogs. Now you could wander through tree forests with fairies while holding a pint of rhubarb cider and munching on an onion bhaji and fried halloumi poke bowl (lardy dar!), walk through an old red telephone box and find yourself in a pink, smoke-filled tent full of people going crazy to Balkan bands with a dirty dubby bass lines.

It was from Dubstep that the dirty dub bassline became popular in the mid-00s. Harking back to Dub from Jamaica, this new form of Dub had the aesthetic of Drum and Bass but its fundamentals in Dub. It also spawned a whole explosion of live reggae bands in the UK. Partly thanks to a dubstep remix of Midnight Marauders by reggae/soul band Fat Freddies Drop - the biggest, unsigned and underground band of the time, thanks to this new internet thingy. My band, The Drop, is one of these bands.

The Drop, was my free access to all these festivals. Our gigs felt like the centre of many circles of friends who would meet at our gigs and escape into the less rigid. The Drop and the UK mid-late 00s festival became the vessel that exposed me to getting gigs with Joss, Natty & Hempolics.

Music had provided me with space to express, escape, make friends and collectively feel something. Thanks, Oasis.

If you listen to The Drop, you can hear I'm constantly pushing that ethereal wash into the music. Mostly unknowingly. That thing I got from Oasis. Thinking back, what gave me the inspirational keys to do that in a reggae setting was Dubstep and its cross-genre sound at times.

Dubstep died a bit of a quick death once it got to the U.S, and for a while after, it felt as though playing reggae or any other music too far away from its past, original form, was deemed inauthentic in the UK.

My take on this? How far are you gonna go to find the original form of any music? Read that again.

Authenticity in music and beyond is about being true to yourself and expressing yourself with your own colour palette and brush styles you picked up along your painting of life. And everyone's is different. And that's the beauty of it. It should be celebrated, not criticised.

Music is the universal language everyone can understand, and within that, just like a normal language has its different styles and sounds; Respect and internalisation of these sounds is how we learn from them, and inevitably use them to express ourselves, vulnerably and authentically.

Music is painting pictures with feelings, like a painting does with colours. Like talking does with words.

My sound palette included this feeling I had picked from Oasis. And that feeling was what gifted a space in life that is music.

"People will never forget the way you made them feel", Noel Gallagher.

Too right, Noel.

As you can imagine. These gigs were great. Oasis on top form, with THREE guitarists this time, creating that huge ethereal wall of sound I love so much. I've always loved those outros to Oasis songs where it’s just Noel playing around, painting pictures and textures with guitars. At the end of Fade Away, I remember walking back into the stadium on my way back from the bar, as Oasis fell into that last musical outro. My eyes caught the yellow London sky as the Wembley Arch at the scene for those musical paintings to fill and give me that feeling again. I was lost in that space.

I don't need to tell you too much about the live 25 gigs. I'm sure you'll hear a lot of the same things associated with the words nostalgia and middle-aged. But I hope that this offering from me debunks that notion just a tiny bit at least. It's deeper than adidas t-shirts, beer and nost****a. All of which I had and enjoyed. But for me, with the music at least, it goes deeper, right to where it all began.

Music is what it means to you.

As I left Wembley Stadium, Oasis songs being chanted and played over mini speakers by the fans, I got that whiff of cooked onions from a hot dog stall. Cigarette smoke filled the warm, humid summer air as people lit up on their rush to the station. I looked up to the high summer, urban Wembley sky as the orange light pollution filled the gaps which the dark clouds didn't.

I felt that space as genuinely as I had back in my parents’ house in ‘94. Only now, I am unmuted and much more self-assured, I have many wonderful friends and have toured the world just like Oasis. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I love a Cadd9 chord.

I had come full circle.

Not nostalgia…honest…

The day after the 1st night, I was blessed to be on a train back up to Teeside for my Grandma’s 100th Birthday party. I was sitting in her living room, sipping tea and eating cake, chatting to cousins of cousins, Uncles, Aunties, Great Uncles and Aunties. My Grandma sang the Welsh National Anthem. Tears left my eyes. Everything felt right, even the minor hangover.

What a life it IS.

Full Circle.