We can only hope Oasis is not Patchwork. They (hopefully) are not. Other, better bands which were as popular in the 1990s are poised to take the Main Stage at Glastonbury Festival. But this is not a comparison list of which bands are better than Oasis. Despite this being an online publication, we would run out of space listing all of the artists with both a better discography and stronger stage presence than the Gallagher brothers. Some have called their Glastonbury 1995 performance one of the best headliner slots of all time. The bar must be rather low, considering Pulp headlined the day after, and The Cure after that. Liam Gallagher’s first words of the evening, tambourine in hand, are that they are better than Blur. The evening kicks off not with a demonstration of that lie, but a truly tame showcase of Oasis as a band that burned out fast.
At their best, Oasis can offer a steady instrumental sound as their frontman swaggers around the stage, tambourine hanging from his neck like a dog collar. Gallagher would go on to perform everything from Swamp Song to Shakermaker. A cover of The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus also features towards the end, an inevitability which still manages to surprise fans who endlessly binge grainy footage of similar-sounding sets. Therein lies the huge problem with Oasis’ Glastonbury 1995 performance. It sounds just like all the other gigs they delivered that year. There is little difference. Say what you will of the atmosphere, but apart from jumping around in the mud if close enough to the barrier, the recorded experience offers very little. There is no argument to be made for being there, either. Some of the best-ever gigs are those this generation never attended. Stop Making Sense, Newport Festival 1965, Live in Dublin, these are the benchmarks. “Mad fer it” Gallagher bounds into Acquiesce and it sounds just like the instrumental jam preceding it.
There is no mania, no feeling of spontaneity or newness to this performance. Apart from a nod to Bonehead, who celebrates his birthday on the day of this performance, Glastonbury 1995 offers the first of two dud Oasis headline slots. Times are always changing, and Oasis did well to capitalise on the ego-driven mania of the mid-1990s. They slipped up when hand-wringing with political matters, carving out the core of many of their songs and the working-class attitude they once presented, but that did not matter to those in attendance. Once more proof that, to truly enjoy Oasis, you need to be pilled up, drunk out of your mind, or lacking a grasp of grammar. Don’t Look Back in Anger remains a solid performance – an example here of how Noel Gallagher’s vocal range has barely changed. But then, singing in a monotone and limited vocal range does not exactly tax the throat.
Liam Gallagher, on the other hand, is a frontman who thrives on crowd interaction. He seems somewhat out of it when introducing Live Forever, a half-hearted performance of one of the finest songs you can listen to at three in the morning at a club in Sunderland. If it were not for the thrashing guitar tones and solid solos, this would be an almost redundant performance. Oasis remain truly impressive instrumentalists but ultimately charmless in their stage presence. Their ear for what can become catchy, anthemic numbers is their greatest strength when it comes to these performances, but the largest weakness when it comes to assessing their impact beyond album sales and influence. This much becomes agonisingly clear during their meandering Glastonbury 1995 performance, a straight-shooting adaptation of their first two albums, pulling them into a charisma vacuum on the Main Stage.
