How Oasis made a divided UK feel supersonic again

The reunion tour offered a rare burst of unity, joy and national pride in a bleak summer

- Mark Beaumont

Summer 2025: a season of discontent. Wars raged, mobs descended on hotels housing refugees, and far-right figureheads swigged their ordinary-bloke-cosplay pints while admiring their formidable polling. Yet, while the rest of the summer marched for Palestine, against immigrants or to sing sweary versions of “Hey Baby” at Donald Trump, Manchester perfected its duck-like swagger and went for a Wonderwalk.

“You came out into Piccadilly station and there’s huge murals, massive pictures of Liam and Noel everywhere you look,” says Hamish MacBain - coauthor of recent Oasis book A Sound So Very Loud - who followed the signposted trail from the station to Heaton Park for the band’s first hometown gig in 16 years in July. “[I] went into WH Smiths to get a drink and ‘Columbia’ was blaring out. Every café had ‘soup and a roll with it’ or ‘Digsy’s Dinner’... All the way, every bar, every café, at 10 in the morning, was celebrating Oasis. It felt like the takeover of a city.”

On what’s been dubbed Gallagher Hill, overlooking Heaton Park, ticketless fans gathered in their thousands to sing along to the show; across the city, bars were crammed with roaring fans insisting that Sally wait. Out in the scrum of it, Inspiral Carpets’ Clint Boon was DJing to the crowds. “I’ve never seen [the city] like that ever,” he tells me. “It was a sea of people in bucket hats and the mood was like the end of World War II.”