Talk tonight: why this year is perfect for return of Oasis

Rumours of a reunion have dragged on for as long as a soppy soap storyline... but with Blur and Pulp playing this summer, Mark Beaumont says the time is now for Manchester's finest

- Mark Beaumont

The 1975 have some things to say about 1995, as well. "Get back together, stop messing around," singer Matty Healy advised Oasis in a recent Canadian radio interview. "Can you imagine being in potentially - right now, still the coolest band in the -world, and not doing it because you're in a mard with your brother?" he argued. "Grow up, headline Glastonbury, have a good time."

Indeed, at no point since their acrimonious 2009 split has the time been so perfect for an Oasis reunion. You see, Britpop has become a form of generational wonderwarfare. The most highly evolved Gen Zers have developed a reflex howl of "OK Boomer!", triggered whenever the older generations - mistyeyed behind their Lennon shades, and testing the seams of their vintage Fred Perry shirts - start banging on about the Nineties as a golden age of British pop culture. Force the average 2020s teenager to yet again hear about Sunday's NME stage line-up at Glastonbury 1994 - Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, and Echobelly! - and they might roll their eyes clean out of their heads.

If Britpop gets endlessly lauded as a champagne supernova of good times, it's only because so many of us can say we were there. The sad truth is, Britain has a long and frustrating history of missing out on its own pop culture revolutions. The stadium excesses of Beatlemania mostly took place in America. For Beatles fans in Britain - where, beyond their theatre tours, the band played only one 15-minute arena gig at Wembley Pool for the 1966 NME Poll Winners' Party - they were a largely televised phenomenon. The various late-Sixties summers of love were American affairs too, taking over Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. In the UK, you had to have been a very early Pink Floyd fan, one of the 40 or so groovers in the studio for The Beatles' "All You Need is Love" satellite broadcast, or a Kensington trust funder letting Jimi Hendrix crash on your sofa to say you'd really "lived" the Age of Aquarius.