Oasis reunion tour: follow the first gig in Cardiff – live!

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First pic of Cast has dropped in. It looks like a doom metaller, Madchester refugee and a white reggae artist have collaborated. That would go some way towards explaining the strange genre-mash Laura mentioned.

Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA

Cast have just played Flying. Even for a something of a landfill indie band, they’re a bit incoherent – tuneful whimsy; tuneless space-prog; this is a bit Americana lite.

But wait, now it’s Guiding Star – I actually do know this one! It provokes what I would call the first sign of life among the crowd. “So good to be here on a momentous occasion”, says frontman John Power.

In an example of opportunistic branding so brazen that we simply must applaud it and post it on the live blog, we turn briefly to Graham Conway, managing director of Select Car Leasing. “How can we crowbar our motoring company into the Oasis conversation, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with Oasis?” Graham beseeches his marketing corps in a break-out huddle-pod. “Erm, paint our EV fleet pink and dub it She’s Electric?”, someone suggests, but Graham senses the wokerati won’t like it.

Instead, he does some truly cerulean sky thinking and comes up with this, reported entirely straight by the Manchester Evening News.

“While it’s not illegal to wear a hat while you’re driving, there are rules around fashion items obstructing you while behind the wheel. Rule 97 of the Highway Code states you must have ‘footwear and clothing which does not prevent you using the controls in the correct manner’, while the Road Traffic Act says that anything obstructing a driver’s view is considered a hazard – including hats. And because bucket hats are generally pulled down low over the eyes to complete the look, that could be a serious problem when it comes to getting a full view of the road.”

Perhaps it was Graham’s influence that has so dented the aforementioned bucket hat sales trajectory. Your move, Adidas.

Thank you to X user Miss S, who posted this clip of sound emanating from the Principality Stadium on Monday. We must presume from this that Oasis are going in a bold industrial/musique concrete direction for a live album to be released on Black Truffle or the resurrected Table of the Elements.

Oasis Mania had this rather better quality recording:

Though Liam scotched the idea that he was actually doing the singing:

Just now there was some fretboard tapping going on, creating absolutely horrible, squelchy spacey zapping sounds. Awful. From Alexis: “That response to that song indicates a crowd determined to enjoy themselves.”

But then there’s a really touching moment when they dedicate Walkaway to Diogo Jota, the Portuguese footballer who died in a car crash yesterday, aged 28. Jota had a storied career at Liverpool, in Cast’s home city, winning the Premier League and FA Cup with them.

I love watching Top of the Pops reruns on iPlayer, and especially discovering the megahits of the time that have no lasting cultural footprint – such as 80s megastar Howard Jones: who he? Etc.

Cast seem like a classic example of this. I was born in 1989 and grew up familiar with Oasis, Pulp etc, and have been a music journalist my entire adult life, but until I listened to them as homework for seeing Oasis, I’d never knowingly heard a note of Cast. And as Alexis reminds me, they had two platinum albums! The 90s: a hell of a drug.

We’ve got our hands on a programme. There’s a lavish photo feature with specifics on the equipment used by each band member. The best bit is Liam’s spread: just a Shure mic and a chrome stand and base. Curiously, no tambourine – major stylistic shifts could be afoot.

Cast's set begins

Cast have now started and are unbelievably loud. The sound is a real cement mixer churn; they’re much more beefed up than on record. One of them looks like ZZ Top or Warren Ellis. As Alexis says, they’ve “been on a journey”. They open with Sandstorm – no, not that Sandstorm – and then it’s into Finetime.

Of the two discount supermarkets generating Oasis-related lols, who did it better: Lidl’s Lidl by Lidl jacket, or Aldi’s Aldeh rebrand in Prestwich?

Photograph: Lidl

Photograph: Andy Kelvin/PA

Laura and Alexis have taken their seats and this is their view. Pretty great!

Photograph: Laura Snapes/The Guardian

Here they are with their best Liam impressions. Apologies for the offensive hand gestures.

Photograph: Laura Snapes/The Guardian

We are tactfully drawing a veil over the supposed leaked setlist, because we can’t remotely verify it – it’s based on the sound of production rehearsals floating over the air from the stadium. But! If it’s correct, there really won’t be much from the post Be Here Now albums. Alexis’s fave from that era is The Shock of the Lightning: “a potent, motorik-powered 2008 single – rare evidence that Oasis didn’t always consider the concept of musical development to be something to be avoided at all costs,” he wrote this week.

In the course of going back to those old album, I found I hadn’t even noticed before that Oasis had a song called (Get Off Your) High Horse Lady.

Further to Ben’s shopping data mention, Oasis-themed press releases – from the legit to the highly spurious – have been off their clackers in recent weeks. Just a quick scan of my inbox details an auction of the handwritten Wonderwall lyrics, a giant Oasis mural in Cardiff made entirely of “their iconic bucket hats”, and Google launching “several exciting Easter eggs” ahead of the tour: if you Google Oasis, it will ask: “Did you mean: madferit”; and to Rock ’N’ Roll Star, it asks: “Did you mean: rock n roll staaaaaaaaaar”. How chucklesome!

Fans at the gig, meanwhile, are supposedly set to miss more than 17m minutes of the tour because they’re busy recording it on their phones (not sure how they’ve worked out that maths), with the average attendee expected to watch more than 12 minutes of it through their screen. And Oasis and Taylor Swift are the bookies’ favourites to headline Glastonbury on its return in 2027 after next year’s fallow year.

Noel and Liam in August 1994, a couple of months after their first Cardiff date. Photograph: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images

Oasis first played the Welsh capital on the Definitely Maybe tour on 2 June 1994, performing just nine songs in a small room in the university. At least as far as I can tell – there don’t seem to be any surviving reviews online – that show passed without incident. (Their first Welsh gig, however, came a month earlier, on 3 May at TJ’s in Newport.) Both shows preceded the release of their debut album on 29 August – itself exactly a month before the infamous gig at Whisky a Go Go in California, a total shambles in which they allegedly took crystal meth by accident, then Noel quit and disappeared to San Francisco before being tracked down by management and persuaded to rejoin the band. But when you look back at their touring schedule that year, it’s no surprise that the band started coming apart at the seams: they played 143 shows and more or less only took July off.

Our writer Huw Baines – who writes brilliant features for us as well as live reviews across the west and Wales – was out reviewing Slayer for us at Cardiff’s Blackweir Fields last night (lots of simulated blood, still very much got it, four stars). He sends this dispatch:

As I was walking up to the Blackweir a few lads selling bootleg Oasis bucket hats chanced their arms with any Slayer heads who might be pulling double duty – looking around the field later on, it appears there were a few of them – but on the way back the atmosphere was really starting to build. At 10.30-ish there were maybe a dozen tents already arranged opposite the stadium in anticipation of doors, the merch stalls were decked out, and the pubs were doing a decent trade. Outside one bar on Westgate Street a bloke pointed at me, looked me in the eye and quietly said, “Oasis”, before going back to what could have been his 12th pint of the day. There was a big drone display spelling the band’s name out above the venue the other night but this felt like real, granular excitement.

First look at the inside of the stadium here, via Spanish-language Oasis podcast Whatever.

And from superfan Chazza_Rkid:

In one of those examples of a brand trying to do something fun and lighthearted but really just revealing how much data they have on you – a bit like Spotify Wrapped – we have this from Klarna, who analysed millions of purchases and found some possibly Oasis-buoyed items. Bucket hats: up 79% year on year. Tambourine sales: up 155% in the last three months.

However, Shopify has its own set of bucket hat data, suggesting that in June, sales went up by only 32%. Combine the two studies and we must surmise that the intensity of bucket hat purchases is waning, people are becoming jaded with Oasis before the tour has even begun, and the Gallaghers should probably call the whole thing off.