In case you haven’t heard, Oasis are back. A decade and a half after a split which lent new weight to the term ‘acrimonious’ – the red Gibson guitar smashed on the night it happened sold at auction in 2022 for £325,000 – the brothers Gallagher are finally to reunite for a series of concerts next year.
They will perform in Cardiff, London and Manchester (natch) before playing three nights at Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh on August 8 and 9. “The guns have fallen silent,” band said on Tuesday in a statement announcing the dates. “The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”
That wait has indeed been long, though anticipation began building last week as the rumours started to fly. Music journalists who served their time in the trenches of the 1990s were wheeled out to pronounce upon the band’s greatness both as a cultural force and a rock’n’roll powerhouse.
Deploying that most convenient of journalistic devices – it’s called selective memory – they chose not to mention the undercurrent of disdain evident in some coverage of the band back then. “Quoasis” was Blur frontman Damon Albarn’s famous put-down, comparing the Mancunians to formulaic, by-the-numbers rockers Status Quo. But it was an attitude shared by many at publications such as NME and Melody Maker (though not at lads’ mags like Loaded, which embraced Oasis fully).
The UK no longer has a weekly music press, but it does have a collective sense of nostalgia for its bona fide rock greats. And there’s no doubt that time has proved Noel Gallagher right in his estimation of the band’s worth. Sure, it sounded like gobby braggadocio at the time, but you only have to look at the group’s inter-generational purchase to realise they have achieved rock’s holy grail: a back catalogue loved by Gen Z as well as by their parents. Ker-ching.
Tickets for next year’s money-spinning shows go on sale on Saturday. Expect internet meltdown. When the band played at Knebworth in 1996, 2.5 million people tried to buy tickets, 10 times more than the capacity for the two day event. If you’re one of the unlucky millions this time, take solace: tribute act Definitely Oasis are currently touring and, though next Friday’s show at Airdrie Town Hall is sold out, there are still tickets available for their appearance at Fife Fest in Lundin Links the following day.
As for the real Oasis, here you can read more about the reunion, about the background to the split, and a rundown of all the gigs they played in Scotland after they were famously ‘discovered’ and signed at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow in 1993 (for the record, I saw them in Aberdeen in 1997):
The curtain falls The final salvo of Edinburgh festival reviews are in, and all eyes are on the Royal Lyceum Theatre where home-grown hero Jack Lowden (still running at odds of 14/1 to be the next James Bond) was appearing in David Ireland’s new play The Fifth Step alongside his Slow Horses co-star, Sean Gilder.
Theatre critic Neil Cooper was in his seat for that one and found much to praise ahead of its transfer to Glasgow for a sell-out four day run at the Pavilion Theatre beginning on August 28. He also took in After The Silence, Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy’s powerful take-down of the country’s history of “land grabs, assassination and abuse of Brazil’s indigenous black culture” as told by a cast of three women and one man.
Keen festival-goers may remember Dusk, Jatahy’s adaptation of the Lars von Trier’s film Dogville, which featured in last year’s Edinburgh International Festival programme. Elsewhere, dance critic Mary Brennan was in attendance for the premiere of Assembly Hall, a “weird and wonderful” new work by acclaimed Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and her company Kidd Pivot.
Here you can read all those reviews, along with Brian Beacom’s interview with Jack Lowden.
And if you want more context on this year’s festival, and the Fringe in particular, I spent the last day of this year’s event wandering the capital’s streets and venues to take the temperature and gauge the mood. Against a backdrop of dire warnings from Fringe chief executive Shona McCarthy and last week’s news that Creative Scotland is having to cut an import source of funding, what is the price of safeguarding this most valuable of cultural assets? Read it here.
Crime aboard As the nights draw in, thoughts inevitably turn to – stick with me here – murder. At least they do if you like to spend your autumns tucked up with a Scandi Noir boxset or diving into home-grown hits like Slow Horses (season four drops on September 4, if you’re interested).
But the nights haven’t yet drawn in so much that you need never leave the house, so if crime fiction is your bag, Stirling’s three day Bloody Scotland festival is the place to be. This year’s event starts on September 13 and among the authors appearing are Ambrose Parry (pseudonym of historical crime duo Chris Brookmyre and his wife, Dr Marisa Haetzman), Ann Cleeves (whose novels form the Shetland TV crime series), Anglo-Indian writer Abir Mukherjee, Peter May, Mark Billingham and the Welshes (Irvine and Louise, no relation of course).
Underpinning all that is a genre of fiction which more than any other is able to encompasses politics, science and about every -ology you can think of – and one which is constantly morphing and adapting to changes in society, personal mores and collective attitudes. In a wide ranging interview with Bloody Scotland festival director Bob McDevitt, The Herald’s Ann Fotheringham runs her eye over this year’s offering. You can read that piece here:
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