How Oasis Turned L.A. Into Glorious Britannia for a Weekend

Los Angeles would go to almost any limit to express its love for Oasis, it would seem. But in a pair of reunion tour appearances at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Stadium this weekend, the band bumped into the sole limitation that L.A. put on its adoration of the Gallagher brothers. And that bridge too far was being asked to learn and properly execute the Poznan, Manchester’s favorite dance.

Liam Gallagher did not do a great deal of talking during Saturday’s show, but when he did finally speak at length, it was to tell an apocryphal story leading into “Cigarettes and Alcohol,” the song in which this dance was to take place. “As I was swimming this morning in Santa Monica in the sea, this fucking shark jumps out,” the singer recalled. “’Mr. Gallagher…’ I said, ‘It’s Liam.’ He said, ‘Good luck trying to get that lot to do the Poznan. You know what L.A. crowds are like; they’re all stoned out of their heads, in the sun all day…’” The shark explained to Gallagher that the best he could expect was “more of a Grateful Dead kind of dance,” a swaying which the singer mockingly demonstrated. But he had faith in us. “You got it in you?” Gallagher challenged the crowd, describing the shark itself doing the Poznan as he last sighted it about two miles out to sea.

(Mind you, Gallagher does a shifting version of this story every night on tour, one that does not usually involve a shark… one that the singer identified as “Mack,” by the way, presumably in honor of “Mack the Knife.”)

Did Los Angeles pass the test? No … we failed miserably, as some hardcore Brits grumbled on social media the next day. It was not for lack of pure enthusiasm: Virtually the entire crowd seemed to be jumping up and down in unison during the following number, having some kind of grasp on what the Poznan might be supposed to look like, if not the fundamentals. But Angelenos might have mistaken it for basic pogo-ing. Simply put, the Poznan — first popularized by Polish football team Lech Poznan in the ‘60s, and picked broadly adopted by Manchester City fans a decade and a half ago — consists of audience members wrapping arms around one another’s shoulders and jumping in place with their backs to the central action. Faced with this nuance, California was largely clueless.

To be fair to L.A., though, all laziness or dance learning disabilities aside… After spending nearly two decades thinking Oasis was over and done with for good, now that they deigned to come back, would it really feel right to turn your back on them… even for the length of a song?

It would be hard to overstate just how much emotion a majority of the capacity crowd had invested in this resurrection. Thinking back on some of the other acts who have headlined the Rose Bowl over the years, it was as if the Rolling Stones, ‘N Sync and Billy Graham somehow all joined forces and came back to lead an ecstatically cultish mass-scale rock ‘n’ roll ceremony, reaffirming for the elders in the audience that they are not nearly dead, and initiating the younger enthusiasts in a kind of Britpop bar-or-bat mitzvah. Near the end of their two-hour performance, Noel Gallagher had the visuals team train a camera on a young woman in the front whom he said had been weeping throughout the whole show, and indeed, she looked like she’d been directly transported from the Ed Sullivan Theatre in 1964 to this spot. If this stuff tended to get written off back in the ‘90s as phony Beatlemania, it certainly hasn’t bitten the dust.

The audience demographics at these two SoCal shows was certainly interesting… a mixture of aspirational and actual Englishness, united in a tempory new world order marked by seemingly compulsory bucket hats.

When it comes to the true Brits, the very short U.S. leg of the band’s reunion tour seems like the inverse of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, when it moved through Europe last summer. Just as Swift’s shows overseas seemed to attract audiences that were as much as one-third American, so did Oasis’ Pasadena shows appear to draw a crowd that was about 30% European, if eavesdropping on accents could offer any indication. (Usage of the word “mate” seemed to have increased by about one-billion percent in L.A. County over the course of a weekend.)

I walked the concourse at the Rose Bowl between acts, trying to see how easy it was to distinguish the Welshmen from the wanna-bes, and so on. I went up to one middle-aged guy who just felt like he had foreignness wafting off him and asked if he had come from overseas. He turned out to be an Australian, and informed me he’d given up his left testicle to get over here, along with his eye tooth. Then he gave me a big grin that revealed, yes, a big gap where a tooth should be, and I felt grateful he did not offer to demonstate whether the other was true.

The Australian took off without further giving me the time of day about his trip to America, but I did soon come across a more chatty, less drunken quartet of young British men who were catching Oasis dates around the world.                   

“Seeing the best band in the world, traveling overseas with your best mates, it’s an atraction in itself,” said a guy who identified himself only as Kieran, from Wolverhampton, England, waiting in a beer line with his fellow travelers. He’d already caught Oasis closer to home in Cardiff, then come over to catch a Toronto date before this. “It’s crazy — we’ve seen people that live down the road from us and we are seeing people that live 5000 miles away. We were at the Whisky-a-Go-Go last night to see a tribute act [the Canadian-based band Supersonic], and it was, I’d say, 70% English. We were talking to people from Coventry, Birmingham, London, Cornwall, Glasgow — everyone we spoke to seemed to be British.”

Had Kieran and his buddies seen Oasis back in the day, in the band’s original run, I asked? They looked at me like I was daft. “We’re too young! They split up when I was only 8!” Anyway, besides a chance to go on holiday overseas, the international dates are allowing hardcore fans — those who were on board the first time, and those, like Kieran, who demographically just missed ‘em then — to indulge in Oasis hoarding before the possible long winter ahead. “There was no way I was not seeing Oasis multiple times. If they come again next year,” he said, “we’ll see ‘em multiple times next year. We’ve waited long enough.”

And because the Gallagher brothers might break up again? Well, that went without saying. “There’s a high chance,” Kieran affirmed.

Further down the concourse, I ran into another quartet of friends, but these were a mixture of L.A. and Seattle residents. Their bucket hats were unusually colorful… not store-bought, much less merch-stand-bought, but made of yarn. “My wife knitted them,” said Walt, 53, from Thousand Oaks. (This was as close as anything I found to Eras Tour-style cosplay; Oasis fandom is not much about doing crafts.)

What did Oasis represent, I asked Walt? “Oasis reminds me of a time when I didn’t have as much to worry about. When I still had light in my eyes,” he added, as the rest of his group laughed. “How’s that for a quote? It’s one step beyond nostalgia. This is desperation for a more fun time.” (He declined to give his last name because “I don’t want to be in Variety sounding like a suicide.”)

On the brighter side, he was looking forward to the encore numbers, which he’d already spoiled himself with online. “I’m a sucker for the finale: it’s ‘Champagne Supernova.’ Liam’s plantive yelling – it’s more than plaintive, it’s desperate – ‘Why why why why,’ over and over again… wait till that hits this place tonight.”

Friend Jess Dolan, 43, in from Washington state, said attending the show was “super nostalgic for me. These albums came out when I was in middle school, and my daughter is in middle school right now, so it’s weird to me to be the same age she is, thinking back on music that came out when I was her age.” Jess was the rare person I talked to who had actually seen the band back in their heyday, but it was “in San Francisco, at one of those Christmas Jingle Ball-type things, ’95 or ‘96, and I was 14 then.” She marveled at the different attitude in the States toward Oasis at the end of their initial run and now. “All they had to do was break up for 16 years. They couldn’t even sell out arenas here in 2009, and now they can do this.”

Craig Detweiler, a filmmaker and academic, was at the show with his wife and grown son, doing the passing-down-of-Oasis ritual. “I think Gen Z is interested in Liam in part as this fashion icon,” said Detweiler after the concert, “and he hasn’t had the chance to be the rock star in his 50s who has sort of stuck around and everyone’s seen enough of.” For the audience, he said, “I think it’s honestly the simplicity and solidarity of the lyrics. There’s that anthemic quality, and they’re easy to pick up on and easy to repeat and join in on, so there’s no real requirements to participate. No homework required.”

And for him personally? “I’d say for me, the collective joy of this show was almost overwhelming. People shouting at the top of their lungs, including my son and I; there were a lot of dads and sons around us. And it was like they were at a church service — a lot of hands up, raised and joyous. Exaltation, for sure.”

But an Oasis show doesn’t offer the attempts of, say, a Coldplay show to offer a more bounteous joy. There is a stiff-upper-lip-ness to their personal and stage personas that gives at least the appearance of an edge to the anthems. Noel Gallagher’s most memorable vintage songs in the Rose Bowl performance tended toward real emo sentiment. Yet he and his brother could only be seen breaking into a smile once or twice each, all night. Liam, the brother who clearly wanted this reunion the most, and wore the inability to re-consummate the brotherly relationship like an open wound, is still given mostly to jokes on stage more than serious statements or anything that patronizes the audience. (He dedicated one song, mysteriously, to Woody Woodpecker.) He doesn’t dance, he mostly scowls, he keeps his hands folded behind his back when he’s not shaking a tambourine or maracas, and his voice nearly sounds like a sneer — even when he’s singing a song insisting to their mum that they’re all going to live forever. Are they rude boys, or mama’s boys? Part of the accidental genius of Oasis is that they’re both, and the audience can pick its poison, or its sweet tooth. But it feeds into why men, in particular, relate to the Gallaghers: They brusquely pretend not to wear their heart on their sleeves, though we know they do.

And in that way there is something especially stoically British that continues to resonate with American fans as well as the home country followers that flocked over here for an additional dose. On the outside, you’re having a pint with them, or four, and on the inside, you’re that weepy girl on camera in the front row. Maybe this is a paradox that will live forever, even if the band doesn’t. But for now, we had 90,000 people a night dancing with tears in their eyes. Dancing the Poznan really ineptly, mind you, but dancing nonetheless.