FORGET MANCHESTER. LONDON MADE OASIS

As the Gallagher brothers take over Wembley this weekend, Sylvia Patterson looks back in wonder at how they stormed 1990s London

- Sylvia Patterson

This Friday, July 25, the Oasis Live '25 juggernaut arrives in London for the initial run of five nights at Wembley Stadium. London, as much as their native Manchester, is entwined with Oasis, the city and band a symbiotic double-helix of opportunity and opportunism, of hedonism and heartbreak, of inevitable comedowns and unexpected comebacks. No wonder so many of those early Oasis songs were about dreams, romance and yearning for escape — it's what defines Noel Gallagher's spirit.

“When I first met Noel around the Supersonic single release (April 1994) he said he wanted to move to London,” says music journalist Ted Kessler, coauthor of the fascinating new book, A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Recorded. “He said, ‘I wanna live in a big flat on Abbey Road and live like The Beatles.’ He'd been travelling around the world with the Inspiral Carpets, came back, was living in Manchester with his girlfriend and they split up. Maybe when you end a big relationship and become a pop star it's ‘let’s leave this city now’. Manchester is quite small. Every time he goes out in London he has a good time. With his pop star friends and the Creation [Records] crew.”

Noel was the first of the Gallaghers to arrive, settling in Camden in '94, the place he deemed “the centre of the universe for music”. Liam finally arrived in '96, the year Oasis were so enormous they played Manchester's Maine Road Stadium, twice, and the landmark Knebworth mega gigs. Staggeringly, that Maine Road weekend the 23-year-old Liam was still living at home in Burnage, sleeping in the bedroom he and Noel grew up in.