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.

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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.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

Music

11 December 2024

1 min read

Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope

On the edge of ‘Nobody's Empire’: something good will come.

Jonathan Evens

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

A singer, wearing a hat, pulls his head back holding a note, and a mic.

Stuart Murdoch performs, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2024.

Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.

The book has two Belle and Sebastian songs as its keystones. The first, ‘Nobody's Empire’, gives the book its title and is a description of how it feels to have ME:

‘I clung to the bed and I clung to the past

I clung to the welcome darkness

But at the end of the night there's a green green light

It's the quiet before the madness’

Murdoch has been living with ME since the 1980s and is an outspoken advocate for those who have the condition. His experience, as described in ‘Nobody’s Empire’, has been that ‘We are out of practice, we're out of sight / On the edge of nobody's empire’. That is also the experience of Stephen, the central character in Nobody’s Empire, a music loving romantic in Glasgow in the early 1990s who has just emerged from a lengthy hospital stay having been robbed by ME of any prospects of work, a social life or independent living. In Glasgow, he meets fellow ME strugglers who form their own support group and try to get by in life as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.

As the story progresses, he finds he has the ability to write songs and wakes to the possibility of a spiritual life beyond the everyday. Later, he leaves Glasgow with his friend Richard in search of a cure in the mythic warmth of California. Because Murdoch is fictionalising his own experience, Nobody’s Empire offers its readers compelling insights into the experience of ME, particularly the experience of having the condition in the early days when it was little understood. He writes, too, with an engaging ingenuous and childlike curiosity about life and his own experiences.

Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars.

The second song ‘Ever Had a Little Faith?’ is included towards the end of the novel as one of the early songs written by Stephen. This song, in which the line ‘Something good will come from nothing’ is repeated, is actually an early Belle and Sebastian song that was only recorded for a later album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. It is a song that was inspired by a sermon preached by Rev John Christie, Minister at Hyndland Parish Church in Glasgow, the church Murdoch attends. He has said of the song: "The sentiment was based on a sermon that our then minister, John Christie, preached about simply getting through a dark night, and the hope of morning."

This Easter morning sense that good will come from the nothingness of being on the edge of nobody’s empire is an experience of transfiguration. Revd Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields has preached perceptively on prayer in terms of incarnation, resurrection, and transfiguration. The prayer of incarnation is a prayer for God to be with us in our difficult circumstances. The prayer of resurrection is a prayer for God to change and fix our difficult circumstances. Then, in response to a possible situation of need, Wells says of a prayer of transfiguration:

“God in your son’s transfiguration we see a whole new reality within, beneath and beyond what we thought we understood. In their times of bewilderment and confusion show my friend and her father that they may find a deeper truth to their life than they ever knew, make firmer friends than they ever had, find reasons for living beyond what they ever imagined and be folded into your grace like never before. Peel back the beauty and strength of their true humanity, transform and transfigure from this chaos and pain something new, something good, something of life.”

This is where Stephen’s story and Murdoch’s experience takes us as there is no fix for ME, as for many other health conditions or disabilities, and Stephen/Murdoch ultimately has no desire to be fixed, as ME becomes an important part of identity for them. Instead, Nobody’s Empire takes us up the mountain through Stephen and Richard’s California experiences, as was the case for Jesus and his disciples at the Transfiguration, so we can see beyond and come to know a deeper reality. As Wells puts it, the prayer of transfiguration is to “Make this trial and tragedy, this problem and pain a glimpse of your glory, a window into your world, where I can see your face, sense the mystery in all things, and walk with angels and saints.”

Faith has featured compellingly in a significant number of relatively recent books by rock stars including, among others, Surrender by U2’s Bono, Walking Back Home by Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, and Faith, Hope, and Carnage, the record of conversations by Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O'Hagan. Murdoch’s Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars and how that is expressed through their music but offers an alternative take both as fiction and as a story in which faith and music combine to transfigure life and ME in ways that enable good to come from nothing:

“Do you spend your day?

Second guessing faith

Looking for a way

To live so divine

Drop your sad pretence

You'll be doing fine

You will flourish like a rose in June

You will flourish like a rose in June

Ever had a little faith?

Ever had a little faith?”