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Stan Grant
An Oasis of rock’n’roll romance at Wembley Stadium

As I pour out of a crowded Wembley Stadium with the last chords of “Champagne Supernova” still ringing in my ears, I lean into my wife and whisper: “You defend a nation on these songs.”

Alongside a hundred thousand others, I have just been entranced by Oasis. Two hours ago these people were strangers. Now they are my people. I am not English, but tonight I am an Englishman.

The ghost of Churchill, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the fantasies of Tolkien, Sherlock Holmes, Waterloo and Dunkirk, Trooping the Colour, double-decker buses, moss-stained stone cathedrals, a full English breakfast and now, tonight, Oasis.

Myth, kitsch, romance, all of that, but by God tonight it is real.

The voices of the terraces are swelling my soul. This band, once faux-rebellious, Beatles-worshipping Britpop icons, now middle-aged Mancunian multimillionaires, have just answered a question that haunts me: can we still speak to one another?

The answer is yes. Or, to steal the title of their debut album: definitely maybe.

Even the famously, venomously feuding Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, have embraced. Potentially tens of millions of pounds in ticket sales and merchandise might have helped, but this reunion tour has a value greater than money.

When Liam Gallagher opens his mouth, he is not singing for money; he is singing to live.

That’s what all of us this day are doing, joining in a celebration of life.

For sheer cost alone, I doubt many of us in the stadium could justify what we have shelled out for tickets, mostly to watch giant screens projecting what would otherwise be microscopic images of a distant band whose heyday was 30 years ago.

But the memories I am making are priceless.

I am looking out on a sea of people all moving and singing as one. My son is beside me. He was a boy when we lived in London at the height of Oasis’s fame. I sat him on my knee when we listened to “Wonderwall”. He’s a man now and a musician himself. Tonight we are here together and he is on his feet and singing too.

This is about more than the music, more than nostalgia. I am alive tonight. I have missed this. My craving for solitude has cost me communion. I yearn for silent places. I savour introspection. Normally I avoid crowds. Tonight I realise that I need people. At Wembley, the audience is as important as the band. The audience takes these songs and turns them into an affirmation.

This is magical.

Despite the boasting of Noel and Liam, Oasis are not better than The Beatles. Not even better than Radiohead. Oasis are not musically the most creative or interesting act. But the band have something ineffable: Oasis have charm.

The French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch called charm, or charme, the unknowable, the unsayable. Charm is lovesickness, the “transfiguration of an inspired heart”.

Jankélévitch, the greatest writer about music of the 20th century, says charm lifts us out of ourselves. Charm calls us to do, to take part. In the wrong hands charm might deceive us but when it is sincere it elevates us.

Jankélévitch says “we live music as we live time”. Like time, music is beyond our grasp, it is fleeting.

Music once heard is gone, but its perfume remains, the scent of all memories: joy and heartache and regret. We cannot merely write about music as we cannot merely read about love. Just as we cannot merely name God.

Jankélévitch spoke to refined tastes: Debussy, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky. Oasis offers a more profane kind of music, but ours is a more profane time. This is their alchemy, to reach into the mundane, the everyday, and find the transcendent.

In their charm, Oasis turn us away from the mirror to look into the eyes of each other. Here, together, we find our souls, our chosen land.

Oasis conjure their Kitezh, their mythical place of dreams, a spot beyond the map. Theirs is a mystical England.

Admittedly, I am an unlikely Anglophile. It has been my family’s fate to dwell in the dark shadow of the British Empire. That is Australia’s burden. Here, though, history slackens its hold. I seek enchantment in a Britishness that charms me.

The irony is the Gallaghers are not British, either. They are Irish and they will frequently tell you so. Their parents were born and raised in Ireland. They grew up in a staunchly Irish community in Manchester.

Yet they make being British accessible. Their Britain is not bombastic. It is not triumphant. It is not exclusive. It is romantic and in its way it is patriotic.

In another age, another Irishman, Edmund Burke, captured the essence of community, of Britishness, in what he called the “little platoons”. They are, he said, “the first link in the series by which we proceed towards our love of country and to mankind”.

Oasis sing to the little platoons.

The Gallagher brothers sing to our need for roots. Simone Weil said of the many needs of the soul, “rootedness is perhaps the most essential”.

We are not rooted in empire, or in the state, which Weil called “a cold concern which cannot inspire love”. We are rooted in what the Greeks called oikos: home, family. We are rooted in tradition.

Weil wrote that roots require preservation of “certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future”.

The loss of the past, she said, “is the great human tragedy, and we have discarded ours the way a child tears off rose petals”.

Weil despaired at the loss of tradition in her native France, at how industrialisation had stripped the souls of French working people “who have experienced the sensation of no longer existing”.

In the English pub, Weil saw the beating heart of a working-class tradition, something that reaches way back. Weil wrote that there is “no break in continuity between Shakespeare’s drinking scenes and the atmosphere of London pubs today”.

Oasis keep alive the rowdy bonhomie of an English pub. Yet I have to wonder if the voice of this crowd is not the roar of the past. Today is not the England of Shakespeare. It is not even the England of Cool Britannia.

England is a diverse country. Chicken tikka masala is reportedly the unofficial national dish. Muhammad is the nation’s most popular name for boys.

Inside Wembley Stadium, a band of Irish brothers holds an idea of England open for us all, wherever we are from. They hold it open for an Aboriginal Anglophile. It is an England of the heart more than the head. With their backs to the wall, this is what people will fight for. Better, what they will live for.

I treasure that this England is still here. I would hate to come looking someday and not know where to find her.

If this England is lost, England is lost.

As I leave I don’t want this feeling to pass. For two hours I have not needed to ask questions. I have known exactly where I am.

It is something we cannot always say about our lives. We are tossed into the world. Uprooted. Strife and money have recast our borders and our nations. We are a blur of faces and a babble of voices.

We can feel more and more like nations of strangers trying and failing to speak to one another. We are prey to bad faith politicians and a feeding frenzy media, barred from the mystery of life.

Jankélévitch says, “nowadays one talks too much to have anything to say musically”.

Not tonight. As unlikely as it may sound – preposterous even – the Gallagher brothers have opened a sacred place. In their songs I can escape the brute noise of the news. Amid the crowd I find a silence, deep inside, where I can hear my heart beat.

At the border of silence, music translates the unsayable.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 13, 2025 as "Oasis show the Weil".

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