It is easy (and therefore fashionable) to hate Oasis for what the band did to British rock ’n’ roll, for paving the way for the painfully regressive and inexplicably popular music of groups like Ocean Colour Scene and Embrace, to name just two. As the heir to the Manchester rock throne in the mid-1990s, Noel Gallagher somehow managed to ignore all the more interesting aspects of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, instead homing in on three sweet chords that turned him into the greatest pub-rocking tunesmith on the planet. Next to the art-school chutzpah of fellow Britpop icons Pulp and Blur, Oasis seemed like poor, uncultured brutes.
Of course, it is precisely the band’s blue-collar banality that made it so popular in Britain and elsewhere. From 1994 onward, millions of university-aged males saw themselves reflected and glorified in the Gallagher brothers, who were portrayed, like most guys their age, as loutish, arrogant, and, above all, inarticulate. This was a band, remember, which at the peak of its popularity kicked off its ill-fated third album (1997’s Be Here Now) with a single called “D’You Know What I Mean?”, a song which took inarticulateness and made it into a badge of honour. No wonder the lads loved them.
Ten years on from Oasis’s first local appearance at the Commodore, the lads are still in love, if more so with their memories than with the band in its current state. Liam and Noel Gallagher are the only remaining original members, joined now by a trio of reformed session players who tried their best not to look too bored as the brothers blasted their way through their sizable catalogue of hits.
At their high point in the mid-’90s, the Gallagher boys always seemed on the verge of imploding, nowhere more memorably than here in Vancouver, where they stormed off-stage under an imagined hail of debris at the Pacific Coliseum in 1995. The bickering-brothers routine always seemed more like a prolonged publicity stunt than anything else, but given their coldly workmanlike demeanour at G.M. Place, it was hard not to pine for the days when Liam and Noel acted like infants.
Unfortunately, there was little in the way of intelligible banter from the boys last Thursday, just polished takes on the stadium rockers (like “Live Forever” and “Morning Glory”) that marked their first two albums. Ever since Be Here Now, Noel hasn’t managed any new bona fide anthems, instead trying his hand at trip-hop-style production (on 2000’s underrated Standing on the Shoulder of Giants) and stripped-down garage rock (2002’s forgettable Heathen Chemistry) before settling on the understated acoustic sound of this year’s Don’t Believe the Truth.
That album loomed largest of any in the group’s catalogue, taking up a good third of its brisk 90-minute set. A lifetime’s worth of cigarettes and alcohol has trimmed off Liam’s sweetest vocal registers, but the singer was in top form otherwise, whether sneering up at the microphone from his trademark crouch or assuming statuelike poses at either side of the stage. The crowd, at least 10,000 strong, sang along to all the hits, carrying the chorus during Noel’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and harmonizing with Liam on the mandatory version of “Wonderwall”. For me, the show’s highlight came during a midset rendition of a decade-old B-side called “Acquiesce”, a sappy duet by the brothers in which they sing about needing each other and believing in each other. Straining against every critical bone in my body, I sang along.
