Tommy Martin: If music was the new football for a mid ‘90s teen, Oasis were your team

I closed my laptop with a sigh, muttering about washed-up old Mancunian gits, when my sister called to say that her husband had somehow negotiated the labyrinth of registrations and presales and, presumably after donating a kidney or sacrificing a goat, had gotten his hands on a bunch of tickets for the Edinburgh shows – and would I like one?

I informed her that I was, in the words of the prophet, mad for it.

Contrary to some expectations, the Oasis reunion tour seems to be going well, with the Gallagher brothers having tens of millions of reasons not to lamp each other over the heads with guitar amps. As well as being naturally drenched in nostalgia, fans have talked about the gigs having a “football match” atmosphere, with throaty singalongs and a predominance of middle-aged men in cagoules.

The connection between Oasis and soccer – in its British, urban working-class incarnation – is well documented, even in the obvious shape of the Gallagher brothers being Manchester City diehards. Their landmark early stadium gig was at City’s old Maine Road ground and Noel usually turns up in the middle of City title celebrations. He even designed a garish away kit for the club that looked like he was back at his mid-1990s levels of chemical intake.

Their anthemic choruses sound great played on stadium PAs and when adapted into chants by supporters. The lad culture of their pomp has not aged well but had its roots and influences in British football ‘casual’ scene of the 1980s. Lest we forget the recent Bohemians Oasis away jersey. And, of course, neither Oasis nor football are understood by Americans.

Football and music have long been pop-culture bedfellows, especially in Britain, going back through the punk years and even to the Kop singing She Loves You by The Beatles in the 1960s. But with their mass appeal, Oasis seemed to solidify the ties between guitar bands and football, to the point where no edition of Soccer AM was complete without a hungover indie group being dragged onto set to promote their new album and talk about Colchester United.

Oasis also seem inextricably linked to the peak ‘Premier League Years’, both exploding in popularity at around the same time, one soundtracking the other; both grasping, optimistic and arrogant and part of a broader repackaging of working-class culture in post-Thatcher Britain. Put simply, if someone says 1990s to you, you probably think of Eric Cantona’s chip against Sunderland to the tune of Don’t Look Back In Anger.

On a more personal level, when I think of the early days of Oasis I think of supporting the band as if they were a team, probably because they were the first obsession that came after the childhood one with football. When you adopt a football team as a kid you are doing so to establish your identity as a member of a gang, whether that is with friends at school or merely under the influence of a long-suffering dad.

In my time, the apparatus of childhood football obsession meant Panini Stickers, copies of Shoot and Match magazines and avid viewership of Saint & Greavesie. It was poring through the pages of World Soccer, reading league tables from Africa and South America, marvelling at the fortunes of Newell’s Old Boys and Kaizer Chiefs (before they were a band). It was posters of random footballers pulled from magazines and stuck on the wall (Enzo Scifo! Michel Platini! Coventry City stalwart Trevor Peake!); and, for us, it was a subscription to the Celtic View and listening to Radio Scotland through a squall of static on medium wave every Saturday afternoon.

Because you understood fandom in football terms, when you got older and needed to stake out your identity in a way that was a bit cooler, more rebellious and, frankly, more appealing to girls, you approached music in the same way. When Oasis came along, I had already learned to sneer at what the charts offered, convinced that ‘proper’ music meant blokes with guitars and the deathly pallors of Dickensian orphans.

Shoot and Match were replaced by the NME and Select magazine, and instead of reading in World Soccer about the latest CONCACAF qualifying campaign, it was reviews of gigs from dingy Camden Town back rooms and interviews with scruffy four-pieces with three singles and plans for world domination.

Down came Enzo Scifo and up went Jarvis Cocker. You watched ITV’s Chart Show and the Beat Box on RTÉ with your blank video cassette ready to hit record if a decent song came on in between the rubbish by 2 Unlimited and Boyzone.

And if music was the new football for a mid ‘90s teenager, then Oasis were your team. You devoured tales of their on-tour antics as you once did the transfer gossip pages. Noel Gallagher was the gaffer, Liam the star striker. Noel’s every word was gospel, most of Liam’s words largely unintelligible and the other three said nothing at all.

The charts were the league table and you watched Top of the Pops to see them climb into the Champions League places. When they hit the top, conquering the mainstream from what had hitherto been the indie music lower leagues, it felt like the biggest giantkilling of them all.

Nick Hornby made a career out of understanding male emotion through obsession with football and music, particularly in his first two books, Fever Pitch and High Fidelity. Asked more recently whether he still felt so deeply about things, Hornby said “I don’t feel the obsessive side to my character is there anymore. When life gets more crowded, however obsessive you are, there tends not to be the same opportunity to explore it. Obsessions find space where there is space.” 

I know what he means. Three decades later, if you wanted to characterise my feelings about Oasis in football terms, it would be as a lapsed fan who keeps an eye on their results. My definition of disappointment remains their third album, Be Here Now, recorded in cocaine-blizzard at their hubristic peak in 1996 and 1997 – but then Noel did sing “please don’t put your life in the hands, of a rock and roll band”, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.

As Hornby said, life is more crowded but there’s just enough room for one night of obsession. After all, you can’t change your team, can you?