In October 2024, the three members of Cast received a phone call that changed everything. Oasis’ long-awaited reunion tour had finally been announced three months previously, sending the rumour mill into overdrive over who the Gallagher brothers would choose to be their support acts.
‘We thought we might have a chance with one [date],’ Cast drummer Keith O’Neill tells M a year later. ‘We thought, “If we can do one gig, then that’d be great.”’
Just after they finished soundcheck at The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen, frontman John Power’s phone buzzed with a call from a withheld number. ‘John’s very private,’ Keith explains. ‘He’s like, “I’m not gonna answer — it’s an unknown number.”’
After the drummer encouraged the singer to take the call (‘You can always tell them to fuck off’), they learned it was none other than Liam Gallagher on the other end of the line. Keith and guitarist Liam ‘Skin’ Tyson impatiently listened to one side of the conversation before a clearly awestruck John finally put down the phone. Cast, John finally revealed, had been asked to support Oasis on their entire run of UK and Ireland tour dates.
‘We were just jumping up and down,’ Keith recalls. ‘I was in tears. That’s how crazy it got. Later that night, before we were about to go on stage, I threw up in the cuff of John’s trouser. I’d just had a shot of tequila, but I think it was the excitement.’
‘It was history in the making, wasn’t it?’ – Keith O’Neill, Cast
Screaming, crying, throwing up: it was the only reasonable response to a coveted slot on the event of 2025, which kicked off at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on 4 July. Oasis’ Live ’25 tour has been gargantuan in every sense: numerically (14m fans reportedly vied for 1.4m tickets in the UK and Ireland alone), financially (the University of Salford estimated its total economic impact on the UK to be just shy of £1bn) and culturally. That last one is harder to quantify, although you need only to have taken a cursory glance at the news and social media over the last 15 months to know that the Gallaghers have dominated the cultural conversation in this country.
‘I think everyone — Noel and Liam included — has been blown away by the sheer success of the Live ’25 reunion tour,’ says Thomas Smith, editor of Billboard UK. ‘These shows cemented the fact that live experiences are so sought-after by fans. The Oasis team were canny by opting for a limited run of shows, rather than extending their residencies to meet demand. It made every show feel like a unique, can’t-miss-this event.
‘Pairing that with local initiatives [such as Manchester City Council’s decision to funnel £250,000 of income from the gigs into its grassroots venues] and their knockout Adidas campaign meant that against a busy summer of shows, they stood out against names like Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and SZA.’
In the dying days before Oasis’ acrimonious split in 2009, the band’s crowds had a reputation for being distinctly male and middle-aged. While that’s not an inherently bad thing, it’s been refreshing to see fans old and young, male and female coming together to celebrate the Gallaghers’ incredible legacy during the Live ’25 tour.
Many of them, too, donned official merch from Adidas’ Original Forever collection. Referencing the cross-generational appeal of the tour, its announcement video featured a young fan heading into a show before melding archive footage with new visuals — all soundtracked by Live Forever, of course. The grand reveal comes at the end as Liam and Noel are seen peering down the camera, ready for business. The accompanying clothing line was similarly simple but effective, consisting of classically styled, football-inspired attire adorned with subtle band logos.
‘It was important from the outset that we didn’t ignore nostalgia, but we also didn’t want to get stuck in it,’ says Steve Marks, senior director brand communications at Adidas. ‘The archive was key, as it showcases the historic relationship between Adidas and Oasis, but the real magic came from how we were able to recontextualise that heritage for today. We wanted to create something timeless — a piece of work that resonated just as much with fans who grew up with Oasis in the nineties as it did with a new generation discovering this cultural moment for the first time.’
The Gallaghers infamously never cracked America the first time around, yet roughly half a million fans snapped up tickets for Live ‘25’s North American leg. Oasis last played the continent as part of 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul Tour, which opened at Seattle’s WaMu Theater — according to Pollstar, they shifted just 4,593 tickets to sell out the venue. When the band returned to the US for Live ’25, they packed out Pasadena’s 90,000-capacity Rose Bowl twice, with the likes of Sir Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish and Leonardo DiCaprio in the audience. The lads’ intervening 16 years of bickering clearly only intensified their legacy.
48-year-old Erin McGee, who hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, travelled to London for two Wembley shows over the summer. Although she was aware of the band back in their ‘90s heyday, she didn’t officially become a convert until January 2024 when the Apple Music algorithm played her Some Might Say. Cue a ‘deep dive’ into the Gallaghers’ back catalogue. Eight months later, as amazed by the reunion as the rest of us, she scrambled for tickets to her first-ever Oasis gig.
She was ‘a bit concerned’ about the band’s aforementioned ‘blokey’ reputation (‘I’m still horrified that piss-throwing was really a thing that happened back in the day!’). On 25 July, though, McGee was struck not just by the gender split in the audience, but its wholesome vibe too: ‘Everyone I encountered was in a good mood and I didn’t witness any bad behaviour in my sections. People just seemed really thrilled to be there and were happy to have a chat.’
23-year-old Azizi Abd Rahman, who is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and has lived in Bristol for the past seven years, also attended his first Oasis show this summer, having bagged a ticket for the second of the opening two nights in Cardiff. ‘This is my first year of going to concerts,’ he says. ‘Of all the concerts I've been to, Oasis is the best one.’
Azizi was just seven years old when Liam and Noel split in 2009. When he learned to play guitar at the age of 14, he incorporated Don’t Look Back In Anger into his repertoire; the song later became the first song he performed in front of an audience. The reunion, he says, ‘is a full circle moment for me, as Oasis have influenced me to write my own songs and aspire to a career in the music industry. I’m trying to write songs in the vein of The Beatles, Oasis, The La’s and Arctic Monkeys.’
Is Azizi an anomaly, or might we see a generation of musicians inspired by Oasis’ sound and, crucially, confidence? ‘A close friend of mine who’s a big manager in the industry came to Heaton Park [in Manchester, where Live ‘25 touched down for five glorious nights],’ Cast’s Keith tells M. ‘I met him after the show and he was like, “Keith, this has changed my whole attitude with the bands I am going to try and get signed up and develop. I’m just gonna focus on guitar music again now.”’
‘Oasis' Live '25 tour cemented the fact that live experiences are so sought-after by fans.’ – Thomas Smith, Billboard UK
On a wider scale, Thomas Smith suggests that the success of Live ’25 will have a knock-on effect across the entire UK live sector: ‘The fact Oasis are a British band that’s being exported globally should give the UK industry a real boost. Our local stories still translate internationally and have real commercial opportunities.’
Ultimately, the Oasis reunion has brought a serious feel-good factor in what is an otherwise tough financial and political climate — it’s worth noting that young Brits have only known economic stasis throughout the band’s entire 16-year absence. Even if you’re not a fan, surely everyone can relate to two brothers settling their differences to perform a crowd-pleasing set for an audience that spans generations.
‘There’s a great sporting analogy I would use,’ says Adidas’ Steve. ‘Being at the Oasis gigs was like being at the World Cup finals, where both sides are winning and every song was a goal. I don’t think I’ve experienced anything that came close to the euphoria that was experienced this summer.’
Besides any impact on the live industry or guitar music in general, it’s this euphoria that may prove to be Live ‘25’s legacy (especially if there are more shows to come next year, as has been rumoured).
‘It was history in the making, wasn’t it?’ Keith concludes. ‘It felt to us like were part of something a lot bigger than what we had to deal with — on a sort of spiritual level, d’you know what I mean?’
Oasis conclude their Live '25 tour in São Paulo, Brazil this weekend (22-23 November). Main image credit: Big Brother Recordings / Joshua Haling
