Why are Oasis reuniting? It may stir the emotions – but mostly this is all about good business

And why shouldn’t they? The myth and mystery has grown since they split in 2009. Noel Gallagher previously turned down £10 million to tour, or so reports claim. But then, he hadn’t just lost £20 million in a divorce, at that point. And no matter how wealthy you might be and how much you earn from song-writing royalties, the money that an Oasis reunion will generate is not to be sniffed at.

The more nuanced question is this – to paraphrase a lyric from Cigarettes and Alcohol: Is it worth the aggravation?

The answer to that, almost certainly, is yes. Because there’s never going to be a better time for Noel and Liam to reunite than right now.

Noel’s brilliant High Flying Birds have plateaued. They’re on a good plateau, of course, where they can headline festivals, though medium-sized, rather than the biggest of all. New records are greeted with a lukewarm response, rather than the giddy frenzy that greeted his first two records. He’s in a great place, though it’s more of a holding pattern than a (champagne) supernova.

Liam, meanwhile, has reached a new peak, having fallen far and fast, following his days in Oasis, and Beady Eye. He’s climbed back to the summit, outdoing Noel by playing Knebworth on his own. From here, the only way is down (again) as he takes another turn on the rock’n’roll rollercoaster. He can’t write songs, certainly, not the way that his older brother does, and he craves the limelight in the way of a bona ride rock’n’roll star. For him, the show makes perfect sense. And for Noel, as he looks to plug the gap that divorce left, it does too.

So, just as Led Zeppelin came back for a gig at the O2 Arena in memory of the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun in 2007, so Oasis are back in memory of Noel Gallagher’s once colossal bank account.

Oasis were – are – a one-off. There are a handful of bands who shift the dial – The Beatles, The Stones, The Sex Pistols, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, and Oasis. For a couple of mad summers, during the mid-1990s, they were the hottest band on the planet. Men dressed like them, their Mancunian swagger and braggadocio propelled laddism into the national psyche and they captured the zeitgeist with the sort of good-time tunes that no other band had successfully strung together since Slade dominated the charts in the 1970s.

Noel Gallagher was the boss. He still is. For all of Liam’s front, his older brother is the one who holds all the aces. The songwriter, the brains, the guy with the right sort of temperament, he was the heart and soul of Oasis and wrote tunes that soundtracked many lives, not just the summers of the mid-1990s. They were better together. Liam needs his brother’s soaring melodies. Noel needs a singer who can spark his tunes into life. Answer this question honestly: is there a single person who’d rather listen to a Liam Gallagher record than the best of Oasis?

And yet by the end of the 2000s, they’d long been the subject of diminishing musical returns. Too many drugs, too much money, too much over-blown pomp, and too little artistic endeavour meant they were better off apart. Their great first record and their improbably big second album had faded from view.

When Oasis finally confirm their reunion, they may well relive some of their former glories. There will be vast numbers of people who’ll pay good money to see them – both the masses who were there in the mid-1990s as well as the TikTok generation that’s grown up listening to Wonderwall and Live Forever. Any shows will sell out on the first day.

It’s been 30 years since Definitely Maybe – a record released by Alan McGee’s Creation Records on 29 August 1994. Those were heady days. Liam and Noel were constantly generating headlines, getting into fights, or being thrown off ferries for something or other. It was one of the truly great rock’n’roll records – better than anything they went on to record, including the out-sized (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, which sold 345,000 records in its first week on its way to selling 22 million copies and securing 17 platinum discs for selling five million in the UK alone.

Those were heady times and as a journalist on the NME, I’d regularly interview Noel, or see their shows in London, Dublin, Kansas City, Toronto, or St Louis, as you do. Amusingly, having seen them more than my fair share of times, the two shows I missed were at Maine Road, in Manchester, in 1996, when I was flying home from Bosnia, and then their final UK show in 2009 at Weston Park, when the lure of a chicken satay from my local Chinese takeaway was too much to resist. The takeaway was great, incidentally, though reportedly their final British gig was not.

I interviewed Noel, spent time with a handful of those closest to him. He was a gent, a star, a brilliant songwriter, and a man who’ll remain in the pantheon of musical greats.

Oasis may return for a couple of shows and then go. More interestingly, they might make new music, with Noel digging deep to create more tunes that his brother’s brilliant vocals bring to life. Or it may just be enough that they come back for a few gigs, Noel pays off his divorce, then they go their separate ways.

Tickets for Oasis' 2025 shows go on sale on Ticketmaster this Saturday.