Review: Oasis rewrites history with unified performance signaling second coming of Britpop band
https://chicago.suntimes.com/music/2025/08/29/review-oasis-soldier-field-liam-noel-gallagher-reunion-tour
You might want to check on your friends who weren’t able to make it to Oasis at Soldier Field on Thursday night. They missed the single biggest do-over in music history.
Back on Aug. 28, 2009, Oasis officially called it quits after a backstage fracas between the Gallagher brothers placed a seemingly permanent tombstone over the band. Yet exactly 16 years later, during the first American date of a once-implausible reunion tour, Noel and Liam effectively rewrote the events of that infamous date with a unified performance that signaled a second coming of the biggest Britpop band of all time.
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It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to call this tour on par with a Beatles or Zeppelin moment, especially for many in the crowd of a certain generation who never got a fair shot at the greats. To hear “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova” in the flesh, with towers of speaker stacks and 60,000 people screaming along to every word, it’s a rite of passage that you can only hope every music fan gets to experience at some point in their life. Openers Cage the Elephant even referred to the night as an “out of body experience” as the band tore through “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” and “Shake Me Down” to help rile up the crowd.
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While the brothers have spent the past 16 years creatively fulfilled in their solo works — Noel’s High Flying Birds and Liam’s eponymous catalog — there’s no comparing it to when the brothers work together. They couldn’t be more night and day, yin and yang — Liam the bawdy show boater, Noel the calm and focused captain — but you can’t have one without the other. And Oasis wouldn’t be the same without each playing his very necessary role. Yet while Liam has often been the one to consistently grab attention for his antics (Thursday he stuck to simple comments like introducing song titles as if we didn’t remember them and cheekily gripping a tambourine in his mouth), this tour puts an even bigger spotlight
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