Loch Lomond, 1996 In tandem with their shows at Knebworth to a quarter of a million people in one weekend, Oasis did the Scottish equivalent with a pair of dates at Loch Lomond-side and as Damien Love surmises, the music was overshadowed somewhat by the occasion. ‘The cartoon had kicked in by then, as witnessed by Oasis’ ultimate stupid big kid-on entrance, choreographed with the helicopter stuff on the video screens. A nice moment in Glasgow was when Noel and then Liam left from the Hilton for the show in separate cars (Jags? Limos?) and waved at all the little kids in Celtic tops gathered on the grass by the motorway who had just minutes before been handed back bits of paper with Gallagher autographs by a security man. And they had a big fireworks display at the end too. That was nice.
“Prior to Oasis coming on stage, there was this strangely beautiful (if you were stood far enough away) sight as a hail of plastic — and some glass — bottles started raining down, thrown from
L-R: Morning Glory (1995), Maine Road (1996), Shoulder Of Giants (2000), Wondarwall (1995), original line up (1994), Wambley (2000)
the peripheries of the biblical crowd into the centre, and the people there started picking them up and chucking them back. This seemed to go on for about fifteen minutes, this rain and launch of bottles, and, after a certain point, people were throwing-in and throwing-back at about the same frequency so, from far away, it looked like the bottles were floating, a weird, static broke-up cloud at dusk. Can’t remember anything about the music though.’
From here the band turned their attentions to conquering the rest of the world but returned with two pairs of arena gigs in Aberdeen and Glasgow in late ’97 as part of the tour for their lacklustre third album Be Here Now.
1999 saw the release of Standing On The Shoulder 0f Giants, an album that — while it doesn’t enjoy the consistent quality of Morning Glory or the raw kinetics of Definitely Maybe — does see Noel live out
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his Beatles fantasies with unflinching skill on ‘Go Let It Out’ and ‘Who Feels Love?’. Naturally, it received a critical kicking but was nothing worse than flawed, and a vast improvement on the out-of- focus bluster of Be Here Now.
Murrayfiellelasgow Green, 2000
The Scottish leg of that tour came to the home of Scottish rugby. The band played down the presence of the new album by playing only a handful of its tracks, performing more of a greatest hits set.
This was yet another point of the much made-of sibling tension and the shows were hyped as their last ever. This was substantiated by Noel’s less than subtle swipes at his wee brother and his (then) ‘divvy wife’ Patsy Kensit. On the linear notes, the subsequent live album Familiar To Millions is trumpeted as ‘Britain’s finest rock ’n’
roll band at their peak’. This is clearly not the case, but found them
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in a better place than the relative muddle that was the post-Be Here Now fall-out.
They made a return trip less than a month later to the inaugural Glasgow Gig on the Green festival, playing an almost identical set to Murrayfield, making this something of an odd anti-climactic end to the summer.
And so the Gallaghers’ love affair with Scotland continues with a two-night birthday party at the Barrowland; they haven’t been there since 1994, so this will be a celebration of the past and an opportunity for them and us to reflect on what may come. The word is that completion of a fifth album — something many thought they would never see - is imminent, but just what is contained within is unlikely to be revealed at the Barrowland.
While they will never recapture the all-consuming glory of Loch Lomond or the feverish anticipation at Irvine Beach, Oasis will need to re-ignite some semblance of desire if they are to remain a vital part of British music. For them to truly shine again, they will need the will to celebrate that hedonistic, over-confident brutishness that made them so appealing way back then. We live in hope.
lngliston, 26 Jan—8 Feb 1998
Oasis play Barrowland, Glasgow, Sat 13 8. Sun 14 Oct.
Familiar To Millions, 2—16 Apr 2000
4—18 Oct 2001 THE LIST 23