Seeing Oasis At Wembley Blew My Mind

Plus: My favorite music of July 2025 and a killer Bob Dylan/Jerry Garcia collaboration

I hinted in last week’s newsletter about my experience seeing Oasis at London’s Wembley Stadium on July 25. Well, this week I finally dropped a lengthy column about the concert and why seeing Oasis in England was such a special experience. The degree to which their music is embedded in British culture is something I thought I understood intellectually before the concert. But seeing it firsthand completely transformed how I view this band I have been been listening to and loving for more than 30 years. The communal vibe (which I’ve heard has been true of the entire tour) was unique for a tour of this size, and that feeling put it at the top of my personal favorite stadium-rock experiences.

The most overwhelming manifestation of that vibe were the massive sing-alongs that accompanied each song. Those 90,000 fans know the Oasis catalog backward and forward, from the classics to B-sides.

The importance of this sing-along aspect cannot be overestimated when assessing Oasis’ music. After this concert, I’m now convinced that it’s the cornerstone of their appeal. Noel Gallagher is not a great or even cogent lyricist, and his melodies can sometimes seem a little samey. But when it comes to writing songs that large groups of individuals in various states of inebriation can sing in unison, perfectly, Bob Dylan and Beethoven have nothing on him. He is the absolute genius of that very specific art form. Oasis is constantly compared to the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, and the other iconic British rock bands. But their songs actually have more in common with “Happy Birthday” or nursery rhymes. (In the case of “Some Might Say,” and “my dog’s been itchin’/itchin’ in the kitchen once again,” I’m talking literal nursey rhymes.) In England, for a certain generation, I imagine they are the kind of tunes you don’t remember ever learning, they just seem implanted in your brain from the time you’re born.

I’m not normally a sing-along guy at concerts. And I generally don’t like it when other people do it at shows. This was different. This was transformational, and a key part to the home-field advantage. When Oasis plays “Half The World Away” in America, will the audience care? Or will they hit the bathroom until “Wonderwall” comes on? At Wembley, the performance of the audience elevated the performance of the band. It shrank the expanse of the stadium down to the size of a cozy pub. And it made strangers feel, for about 120 minutes, like lifelong friends.

I’ve actually seen some incredible acts in stadiums: Springsteen, U2, McCartney, the Stones, GNR, etc. And I’ve always had a soft spot for shows of that scale, despite the obvious drawbacks. Seeing a band in a club or theater is preferable, clearly, but in a way that mass communal thing I felt at Oasis is only possible when you’re in a space that large.

Stadium shows get a bad rap for good reasons — the sound is lousy, the sightlines are worse, the drinks are overpriced, and getting in and out of the parking lot feels like it takes twice as long as the concert. But at their best, they have a sense of scale that is emotionally overwhelming. They create a temporary world that feels vast and utopian, where the only tasks at hand are music and revelry, where you don’t even care that an extremely high yob karate-chopped your drink because you’re also psyched to hear “The Masterplan.” A great stadium show connects you to a hive mind the size of a decently populated Middle American city, and that’s a very powerful feeling.

Oasis is back because Liam and Noel are (relatively) young middle-aged men, and because there are so few other bands in their lane. The world’s stadiums require groups that have 12 to 15 songs that tens of thousands of people know by heart and want to experience one more time as part of a mass-population event. Oasis can do that, and I suspect they will be on the road for a very long time and will make an extreme amount of money in the process.

Of course, it’s possible the spell will break soon and Liam and Noel will go back to hating each other. I would bet on that happening, given the laws of nature and the nature of brotherhood. But at Wembley, Oasis played and they played brilliantly. The audience came and they left satisfied. The band wrapped, as they must, with “Champagne Supernova,” one of our finest stadium-rock anthems. And Liam concluded by balancing a tambourine on his head, a gesture both ridiculous and grand, just like the band he sings for. And on that night, at least, the tambourine did not fall.

I also published a round up of my favorite music of July 2025, a lot of which I have already covered recently in this newsletter (including Alex G, Ryan Davis, and Geese). I do want to make a special shoutout to Cory Hanson, who released his latest album I Love People last week. I also loved his previous LP, Western Cum, which landed on my 2023 year-end list, as I explain here:

That record was a pleasure cruise through the sounds of 1970s FM radio, like the first Boston album refracted via a punk-rock sensibility. Hanson’s latest I Love People exists on the opposite end of the radio dial, delving the luscious soft-rock soundscapes outfitted with warm-toned pianos and jangly guitars. As always, Hanson’s unerring pop sense is on display, and with I Love People it’s like he’s made a lost prime-era McCartney album.

We are currently in the midst of “the days between” Jerry Garcia’s birthday (August 1) and his death day (August 9). Over on Never Ending Stories, we marked the occasion by talking about an historic Bob Dylan show from 1980 featuring Jerry on nearly a dozen tracks. The show is killer, and our pod about it isn’t bad either.