How Oasis allowed hard men to be soft

Two thoughts struck me when I first saw Oasis on television in the spring of 1994. The video for “Supersonic” was playing, and I wondered out loud to my student flatmates why a band had named themselves after a leisure centre in Swindon.

My second thought, and the one that really stayed with me, was how uncompromising they looked. Edgy and hard with an air of threatening insouciance. There was something about Liam Gallagher’s unmoving posture – his “stillism”, as older brother and guitarist Noel would later call it – that suggested a don’t-mess-with-me toughness.

The kings of the indie world at the time were Suede, Blur and the Manic Street Preachers; they were a little more posey and contrived. Oasis seemed real. Their grit appealed. Take That were No 1 at the time. I – and I’m sure countless other men – was immediately drawn to, and slightly intimidated by, this brazen new gang.

But later that summer I heard Definitely Maybe, and the mental gymnastics began. I was immediately struck by the album’s unexpected vulnerability. Just beneath the surface cover of scuzzy tracks like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” lay “Live Forever” and “Slide Away”, two deeply romantic songs, dreamy in their scope. “Now that you’re mine/ We’ll find a way of chasing the sun/ Let me be the one who shines with you,” Liam sang on the latter track.

Oasis were outwardly harder than Blur or Suede. Far harder. But at their most sentimental they were softer too. It’s borderline impossible to imagine Damon Albarn or Brett Anderson singing, without irony, that “you and I are gonna live forever”.

And this duality explains why men love Oasis. They combined the punk snarl and hammering guitars of the Sex Pistols with the romantic and melodic impulses – if not the songwriting chops – of the Beatles. Oasis were two of Britain’s most beloved bands rolled into one – indeed, some early commentators referred to them as the Sex Beatles. Oasis allowed hard men to be soft and soft men to be hard, or at least pretend to be.

Melody Maker’s review of Definitely Maybe summed up this melange of influences. The Creation-released album fused “the concise songs of mid-60s Beatles and the sprawling indulgence of early-70s Rolling Stones with a dash of Neil Young, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses and Merseybeat thrown in”. Fans from Totnes to Inverness lapped it up.

Definitely Maybe sold 100,000 copies in its first four days and went straight to No 1. It was, at the time, the fastest-selling debut album in British history. It’s why next summer’s 14-date Oasis reunion tour – the band’s first shows since they split up in acrimony in 2009 – will sell out in minutes when tickets go on sale this weekend. Extra dates have already been announced.

Alongside the music was Liam and Noel’s relationship. Their dynamic as siblings caused instant fascination. Two brothers from Manchester, a frontman and a guitarist, both ambitious and quick-witted, both with the gift of the gab but of different temperaments.

Liam, better-looking and cocky. Noel, shy and dry. They’d bicker and banter. “Liam and Noel’s charisma – and dangerousness – was winning everyone over,” wrote Creation boss Alan McGee in his 2013 autobiography. “It was the first time in years there’d been such an outspoken band, the first time in ages there’d been two huge personalities who weren’t scared to say what they thought.”

The band’s 1995 song “Acquiesce” addressed the issue of friendship and, seemingly, brotherly love. “Because we need each other/ We believe in one another,” went Noel’s chorus after Liam’s verse. This lyric didn’t age well, as evidenced by the siblings’ 15-year, high-profile, very public cold war, now apparently over.

Yet people were just as interested in their fall-out as they were in their previous closeness. Neither brother could leave an interview without having been asked about the chances of a reunion or the state of their relationship, such was the interest. It must have been draining. Still, the pair managed to stay endlessly funny amid the soap opera, with Noel famously comparing Liam to “a man with a fork in a world of soup”.

Inextricably linked to the rise of Oasis in the mid-90s was the rise of laddism, the cultural movement that put Britpop, pubs, hedonism and football at its heart and gave blokes licence to be blokes (and women license to be “ladettes”). The symbiosis was in one sense totally manufactured. With Creation Records short of money just before Definitely Maybe’s release, the label’s managing director, Tim Abbot, had to think creatively about how to spend his limited advertising budget.

He decided to take out advertising space in non-mainstream publications. “Adverts for Definitely Maybe were placed in such football magazines as Shoot!, Match and 90 Minutes,” wrote John Harris in The Last Party, his book about the Britpop era. “Abbot even went so far as to take out space in a handful of match programmes. On top of that, he built bridges to the UK’s dance music magazines, booking ads in such publications as Mixmag and Jockey Slut.”

Oasis found affinity on the terraces and in the clubs. Mixmag gave the guitar album a five-star review, notes Harris.

It wasn’t long before you’d see people walking down the street with what Elbow’s Guy Garvey calls “that simian stroll” – shoulders back, a big swagger, feet out, just like Liam. As the Gallagher brothers, and particularly Liam, became higher-profile tabloid fodder – such as his first marriage to actress Patsy Kensit in 1997 – so laddism and Oasis became arguably even more intertwined.

As can happen, the cart can get separated from the horse that’s pulling it and careen off in the wrong direction. The laddism of Oasis fans seemed at times to take on a life of its own, separate from the music. Historian Alywn W Turner has accused Oasis of “a lumpen Beatles obsession that steamrolled through Britpop, flattening out the subtleties, ambiguities and diversity”.

I disagree, but I’d argue that Oasis fans in large numbers could steamroll through concert crowds, flattening out subtlety, ambiguity and diversity. Simian strollers en masse could be a nasty bunch. In 2002, I spent the day working in a bar in Finsbury Park during an Oasis gig. The rain poured and the lager flowed. Rarely have I encountered such a crowd of objectionable, rude buffoons. Puffed-up Frank Spencers with Liam hairdos. Not my band, I thought.

The irony is that Oasis were never like that, not really. Take the front cover of Definitely Maybe. It’s a picture taken in Oasis co-founder Bonehead’s house in West Didsbury, Manchester. It has polished wooden floors, stained glass windows, potted plants and a picture of easy listening legend Burt Bacharach. Liam is lying next to a glass of red wine, of all drinks. Laddism shmaddism.

Would the Oasis story be repeated in our culture now, should a band like them emerge again (which is unlikely, as bands seem to have gone the way of the dodo)? It’s doubtful. We live in atomised times, when musicians with nationwide mass appeal don’t exist so much. And as Noel Gallagher has pointed out, the ’90s world – and all that went with it – was a pre-9/11 and pre-smartphone place. It was a different era. We are simultaneously more guarded and more exposed these days. We’ve changed.

But one thing that Oasis did tap into, and something that still exists today, is the sense that our country can do better.

Explaining the symbolism of the cover of a 1993 Oasis demo tape that had red, white and blue colours swirling inwards, Liam once said, “It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter. We’re here to do something about it.” Millions of people – as ticket sales on Saturday will testify – would agree.