Oasis: If feuding brothers can get together again, maybe the country can too

Some might say Liam and Noel Gallagher’s reunion is reminiscent of Joseph, Prince of Egypt.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two middle age rock star brothers pose for the camera in a black and white picture

Any dream will do.

Liamgallagher.com.

Get updates

There’s a man with a black rainhat and jacket on the stage swearing at over 50,000 teenagers. It’s Liam Gallagher, the lead singer of Oasis, that iconic 90s rock band. He’s singing his way through the entire Definitely Maybe album to mark the 30-year anniversary of its release. Somehow, these 50,000 teenagers know all the words, as they sing along on a warm summer evening for their rite of passage that is the Reading Festival.

I feel strangely alone in the crowd. I remember where I was when the album was first released - nobody around me was even born then. On the stage, Liam too is strangely alone. For 15 years he’s been estranged from his brother Noel – the song-writing genius behind all of Oasis’ greatest hits. He’s in a reflective mood as he sings ‘Live Forever’:

“Maybe I will never be, all the things that Ii want to be, now is not the time to cry, now’s the time to find out why”

(Live Forever)

This lyric has aged well. Back when Liam was 21 years old, about to be biggest band in the world, about to see their album become the fastest selling debut album of all time, he wasn’t seriously considering the question.

Back then, fame didn’t seem to suit him. He famously ditched a huge US tour with the band, when he was about to board the plane from Heathrow. He stubbornly refused to go on stage for the MTV unplugged concert at the Royal Festival Hall despite a packed-out audience and a full orchestra on the stage. Maybe it was youth. Maybe it was anxiety. Maybe it was some illegal substance.

Even now, at Reading, with rumours rife of a reunion tour, Liam seems a little vulnerable. He delivers a brilliant vocal performance to a huge crowd, but his hat covers most of his face for the entire concert. He mentions that he had thought the young people getting their GCSEs might have let their academic excellence go to their heads, but they turned out to be “alright” after all. And then, with more swearing, more swaggering guitar chords and more defiant sneering vocals, there comes more vulnerability:

Their song brought the country together in a pledge of hope. While terrible things are going on around us in our world, we need all the togetherness and hope we can get.

“All this confusion, nothings the same to me, I can’t tell you the way I feel, because the way I feel is oh so new to me”

(Columbia)

Liam dedicates “Half a World Away” to his brother Noel, and then the promise of something more… “27/08/2024 8am” is revealed on the huge screen. Is there going to be more to the Oasis story? Could the feuding brothers have buried the hatchet? Have they listened to their own lyric – don’t look back in anger – and decided to drop the bitterness and animosity and find a new way forward?

I wonder how the reconciliation happened. I like to imagine it was like Joseph, Prince of Egypt and wearer of coat-of-many-colours, finding himself face-to-face with the brother who tried to murder him all those years earlier, and privately breaking down in tears before declaring “God meant it for good”.

I like to imagine it was like Joseph’s father Jacob, Patriarch of Israel and hot-headed runaway, returning to his twin brother Esau after two decades of separation, praying he would be received favourably, and overwhelmed when his prayer was answered.

‘Some might say’, excuse the pun, that the timing of this impossible reconciliation is less to do with making peace and more to do with making money. The Gallagher brothers have both been through costly divorces. Perhaps they have seen the appetite for megatours as demonstrated by Taylor Swift’s Era’s extravaganza.

A few days later there is controversy brewing around dynamic pricing which is adding to the rumours of extortionate profiteering. Presale tickets initially range from £73 to £205, with standing tickets priced around £150. Then resale prices skyrocket, with some tickets listed for as much as £6,000—approximately 40 times the original price. It remains uncertain how much of these profits Oasis directly receives.

And then there is the timing. Next year the ownership of the Oasis back-catalogue reverts back to Noel. Only a few months ago Queen sold the rights to their back-catalogue to Sony Music in a record-breaking $1.27 billion, surpassing previous deals such as Bruce Springsteen's sale for $500 million. A sell-out tour will go a long way to upping the value of the Oasis catalogue.

Whatever the motivations, whoever is profiting, and however genuine the reconciliation, the reforming of Oasis, in my eyes, is a great moment for our country. I’ll never forget the woman who spontaneously sang “Don’t Look Back in Anger” after the minute’s silence to remember the 22 Ariana Grande fans killed at the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017. While Noel and Liam were still feuding, their song brought the country together in a pledge of hope. While terrible things are going on around us in our world, we need all the togetherness and hope we can get.

Article

Culture

Mental Health

Music

25 October 2024

5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.