Oasis live in Cardiff: the Gallaghers make their mighty return

It only feels truly real when Liam and Noel Gallagher stride out on stage together in Cardiff hand-in-hand, raising them aloft as one to a crowd that have waited 16 years for this moment. “It’s good to be back,” Liam sings a few minutes later, opening a gig many thought would never happen with ‘Hello’.

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!’ Come out of Cardiff Central train station on this muggy summer night though, and it feels like no other reason could exist above reuniting for the millions upon millions of fans who who built their lives on this band. “Was it worth the £40,000 you paid for the ticket?” Liam grins half way through the show, not even waiting around for the affirmative reply.

The cultural moment of the year – possibly even the decade – doesn’t need any extra hype, but hosting it at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on a Friday night certainly helps. An outlier in the UK 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!” comes a report over 24 hours before the gig, and there are merch pop-ups, murals made entirely from bucket hats and more in the bustling streets around the stadium. It feels more like FA Cup Final day than a gig, such is the jubilant, raucous atmosphere around the city. Once inside, it also helps that the stadium has a retractable roof which, when closed like it is tonight, makes this feel more like a comparatively intimate arena show than a stadium gig.

All this leads to a thick, fervent energy in the stadium by the time Oasis take to the stage just after 8pm and launch 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 have swirled around ahead of the tour opener, but it all melts into insignificance once the ear-splitting singalongs begin.

The band sound, to use Liam’s favourite 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’s truly overwhelming and doesn’t let up for over two hours.

A mid-set couplet from Noel — ‘Half the World Away’ and ‘Little By Little’ — surprisingly get some of the biggest singalongs of the night, while Liam sings ‘Slide Away’ and ‘Whatever’ with impassioned energy. There’s also time for a little poignancy, when the shirt of late Liverpool striker Diogo Jota, killed in a car crash yesterday, comes on screen for the final bars of ‘Live Forever’.

British music’s greatest sitcom took a pause on a particularly apt note in 2009, when Noel left the band in a blaze of glory before a gig at Paris’ Rock en Seine festival. The subsequent 16 years have been a swirl of solo projects, reunion rumours and consistently entertaining mud-slinging between the brothers. Since the tour was actually announced, fans speculated that the press images shared of the pair were actually composites, and that Liam and Noel hadn’t met face-to-face once in the process of agreeing to reunite. When tickets went on sale, it sparked a global conversation about ‘dynamic pricing’ that was investigated by the UK government. So far, so dramatic. Or as Liam puts it before closing the show with ‘Champagne Supernova’: “We’re hard work, I know.”

Compared to the build-up, the gig itself is largely drama-free. They play the hits superbly, backed by a band on top form, and look suitably nonplussed while doing it. The brothers take up their old roles — Liam is the rabble rouser, asking fans to do the Poznan dance of his beloved Manchester City during ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’; Noel is his composed sidekick – as if they never left.

The symbolic arm-raising at the start of the gig is bookended by a truly enormous cheer when the brothers embrace slightly gingerly before leaving the stage. Largely though, they let the tunes do the talking, which feels fitting. Through all the scuffles and spats, the High Flying Birds and Beady Eyes, these generation-defining anthems are what have always remained, and will continue to do so long after Cardiff gets one of its best nights out in history.

Oasis played:

‘Fuckin’ in the Bushes’ (tape)
‘Hello’
‘Acquiesce’
‘Morning Glory’
‘Some Might Say’
‘Bring It on Down’
‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’
‘Fade Away’
‘Supersonic’
‘Roll With It’
‘Talk Tonight’
‘Half the World Away’
‘Little By Little’
‘D’You Know What I Mean?’
‘Stand By Me’
‘Cast No Shadow’
‘Slide Away’
‘Whatever’
‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’

ENCORE:
‘The Masterplan’
‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’
‘Wonderwall’
‘Champagne Supernova’