Live Forever

Mr. Market September 12, 2025

We live in the shadows and we had the chance and threw it away

And it’s never going to be the same

‘Cause the years are falling by like the rain

It’s never gonna be the same

Noel Gallagher famously wrote “Live Forever” as an attempt to reject the angst and negativity of grunge which had grown popular in the early 1990s. More specifically, he apparently remarked after hearing Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die”: “I’m not fucking having that”. And now, 30 years later, at Oasis’s long awaited reunion tour, a mix of mostly Gen Xers trying to live out their old glory days (frequently with their Gen Z children in tow) and older Millennials also don’t seem like they are “fucking having it” in terms of accepting Britain’s managed decline.

It is probably strange for many to see the popularity with which the Oasis Live ‘25 Tour has been greeted. All this for a band that has spent nearly half their existence broken up (their last show famously being a very disjointed affair in 2009)? The set list for the tour also only includes one song that doesn’t come from the three albums or B-sides they released during their peak years of 1994-1997 (that one exception being 2002’s “Little by Little”). So in many ways the tour can’t be compared with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (the highest grossing concert series of all time). No, it really can’t be, because for its fans, this Oasis tour means far more.

You’re the outcast - you’re the underclass

But you don’t care - because you’re living fast

You’re the un-invited guest who stays ‘til the end

I know you’ve got a problem that the devil sends

Oasis are in part famous for the rivalry between them (the Northern working class “lads” band) and Blur (the more artsy middle class Southern group). Despite Blur winning 1995’s “Battle of Britpop” (their single “Country House” went #1 over Oasis’s “Roll With It”), Blur’s 2023 reunion tour came and went with little real cultural fanfare. Instead it was the Irish immigrant working class boys from Manchester who were able to crash Ticketmaster’s site by drawing a reported 14 million requests for 1.4 million tickets.

Watching the performance, one can perhaps start to understand why. The band appears larger than life on the big screen with a mix of carefully curated “Cool Britannia” era images and clever camera angles. The two formerly warring brothers now look like imposing icons that form part of a rock opera rather than what you can see if you just look at the stage, a bunch of 50+ year old men playing music like you’d expect them to (other than perhaps the always energetic Liam). The images on screen are reminiscent of two related eras, firstly the Swinging Sixties and secondly the dark period of the 70s which is associated with de-industrialization in the North. The flowering, colorful images evoking the 1960s are in sharp contrast to the emptying council estates and factories that would have littered the Manchester area of the Gallagher brother’s youth.

 But why the 1960s? Noel has never shied away from noting he was heavily inspired by the Beatles whether indirectly (in songs like “Whatever” with its soaring string arrangement) or directly (the piano opening to “Don’t Look Back in Anger”). The Beatles and the Swinging Sixties evoke a sense of possibility in contrast to the Britain of the 1950s (which is associated with continued rationing and the collapse of the empire). Politically, it was a time filled with possibility through the New Left and Harold Wilson’s “modernization”. And so the culture of the 1990s (when of course “Things Could Only Get Better”) has always been tinged with 1960s nostalgia in Britain.

Oasis never hid from making music for the fans who “are like us - normal blokes, who like a pint, a laugh, and a good tune”. But they also didn’t just leave it there. Their music is also for “poets, dreamers, people who feel the music”. There’s nothing to say that one can’t fit into both camps (the Gallagher brothers at least seemingly do). But at the same time to say that Oasis (or Britpop more generally) really resulted in any lasting innovation in music would be a stretch. Instead, it always felt like a return to good old fashioned rock and roll. 

Perhaps that was because Noel (like many other famous guitarists) was self taught and to this day apparently cannot read or write traditional musical notation. He for example learned to play guitar right handed (despite actually being left handed) at age 13 by copying The Beatles, the Smiths and the Stone Roses. And so maybe it is the self-educated nature of the guitar that has meant each generation has returned to rock music. The inherent accessibility of the guitar as an artistic tool allows it to record both what is specific but also universal about each generation. And so perhaps in the 1990s, that‘s what came from some normal bloke poets and dreamers working day laborer jobs in post Thatcher Revolution Britain.

So here I go, I’m still scratchin’ around in the same old hole

My body feels young but my mind is very old

So what do you say?

You can’t give me the dreams that are mine anyway

But more than the music, it's the lyrics that seem to hold the most resonance for Oasis fans today. Anyone who has attended any of the recent concerts can tell you that almost every song has fans singing along the entire time, even during more obscure B-sides. To experience it in person with 80,000+ people is a truly collective experience above and beyond even a hotly contested football match. It becomes even more enchanting when one sees many people bellowing the words to songs that were released while they were still in diapers (your present author included).

For the artist, it must be somewhat surreal to sing the words to a song that you wrote nearly 30 years ago. Especially songs about someone who you must have loved intensely (at least enough to write a song about them) but now probably no longer even know. Mix in the substance abuse and constant travel that comes with living a rock star lifestyle and it must be close to impossible to recall the particular feeling you were capturing when you wrote the song. 

But Oasis, like many great bands, don’t seem to struggle with this. Noel has said “the bit in Champagne Supernova about 'slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball'. What does that mean? And the answer is, I don't know what it means. I don’t care what it means. It must mean something though, because I play it to a sea of people every night and they seem to understand it. That’s all that matters I guess”. His experience is eerily reminiscent of perhaps one of Paul McCartney's most famous lines. When he played the song “Hey Jude” for John Lennon for the first time he said the lyric “the movement you need is on your shoulder” was just a placeholder and he would change it later. John Lennon’s simple response “It’s great, don’t change it”. To this day it may be one of the most debated and moving lyrics in all of rock music. And so much like their idols, 30 years later, stripped away from any particular heartbreak or memory, those seemingly imperceptible lyrics might have the chance to reflect something larger than the moment of conception when the fans chant them in the stadiums. The art finally escapes beyond the artist.

Maybe I will never be, all the things that I wanna be

Now is not the time to cry, now’s the time to find out why

I think you’re the same as me

We see things they’ll never see

Each generation reflects back on the 1990s in various ways. For the Millennials, they are the 90s kids and there is a tinge of optimism for the early internet and tech boom of their childhood. The 90s also looks far lighter than the post 9/11 and 2008 moments. For Gen Xers, it was not great (or at least that’s what they tell me) but at least better than today (isn’t it always?). For the Zoomers, it is the moment of their parent’s youth which comes with some degree of fascination and curiosity (as shown by the return of 90s and early 00s fashion amongst Zoomers). And so each generation is drawn back to not only Oasis, but that mid 1990s moment itself. As Chris Cutrone said in a 2017 panel on The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” was never nostalgia  to return to Jim Crow 1950s America but rather a call to return to the 1990s and its relatively brief economic boom and end of history moment. Does Britain similarly merely want to make Oasis (and Britpop) Great Again? 

But Oasis were never really that overtly political. The 90s were a post political moment anyways. The only notable political interaction from that period was when Noel got in trouble for visiting 10 Downing Street and Tony Blair after his landslide victory in 1997 (Noel had expressed sympathy for New Labour as standing up to Thatcherism). However, by the mid 2010s any enchantment with them had faded. In the Corbyn moment he said “the Tories don’t care about the vulnerable and the communists don’t care about the aspirational”. During Covid he was somewhat infamously captured refusing to wear a face mask and he decried the 2024 political statements by artists at Glastonbury around Palestine as “kind of preachy and a bit virtue signaling”. The closest thing to a political statement at the concert was dedicating “Half The World Away” to our Royle Family (referencing the early 2000s sitcom set almost entirely in the front room of a working class family in Manchester which used the song as its theme) versus “their” Royal Family (i.e. expressing typical Irish disdain for the House of Windsor). 

And that’s perhaps all the concert goers were looking for. Not more preachy virtue signaling but perhaps a cathartic chance to clear away the political baggage that had weighed on them since the glory days of Britpop. Much in the same way the late 1980s and 1990s may have been looking to clear away the darkness of the 1970s through recapturing the 1960s. And so the nostalgia for the 1990s may be the nostalgia of both forgetting and remembering. 

And all the roads we have to walk are winding

And all the lights that lead us there are blinding

There are many things that I would like to say to you

But I don’t know how

It’s hard for even Oasis to reckon with arguably their most famous song, 1995’s “Wonderwall”. During the tour Liam introduced it by saying nothing more than “It’s that song again”. Of course everyone knew what had to come next. It’s a song that has been played enough times that it should have become nothing but kitsch. The band apparently hate playing it (or at least used to). Yet, even after the thousandth listen on the radio it still seems to maintain some degree of sincerity. While the media famously tried to tie the song to Noel’s then girlfriend (and later wife and now ex-wife), he has clarified that it was always more open ended than that. It instead apparently relates to an imaginary friend who can come and save you from yourself. Liam has speculated it may just relate to a wall from their shared childhood bedroom where they used to “just write shit on” and dream.

In the 2000 film High Fidelity the main character (an angsty, neurotic and bitter Gen Xer who runs a failing record store) famously says to the camera “What came first the music or the misery? Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”. It’s hard to come away from the Oasis tour feeling miserable. Wonderwall might be cheesy, but it isn’t neurotic. It isn’t pure pining. If anything, it is about openness to the possibilities, even if they are beyond one's own comprehension or articulation. A possibility to save yourself, from yourself. And even if it ends in pain, reflection does not just have to be bitter regret. For aren’t we told not to “look back in anger”, at least “not today”?