The first night of Oasis’s long-anticipated comeback tour has received five star reviews across the board from critics.
Liam and Noel Gallagher united on stage at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium last night (4 July) to perform for the first time since their acrimonious 2009 break-up.
The Independent’s Mark Beaumont described the gig as “the rock reunion to end them all” and noted the “heartwarming closure” that came with seeing the once-feuding siblings “juxtaposed on side-by-side screen panels”.
Having previously seen the band at one of their legendary Knebworth gigs and “on many a post-Nineties slogathon”, Beaumont suggested that “this is the best they’ve been since ‘96”, or “some might say better”.
Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis hailed the show as a “triumph” in another five star review, and noted that the show’s setlist was “very much playlist Oasis”, with an emphasis on their first two albums along with “B-sides from the years when Noel Gallagher’s songwriting talent seemed so abundant he could afford to blithely confine stuff as good as ‘Acquiesce’ or ‘The Masterplan’ to an extra track on a CD single”.
The Telegraph’s critic Neil McCormick, who also awarded the gig with five stars, said that “nothing had really changed” since the band’s glory days, describing the spectacle as both “ridiculous” and “fantastic”.
Despite the high prices that some fans paid for tickets, McCormick said “I don’t think anyone who managed to get their hands on a ticket for this reunion could feel short changed”, because it “was a reunion between an audience and their favourite band, a reunion between Britain and rock and roll”.
BBC critic Mark Savage praised the way that Liam “attacked the gig with wild-eyed passion, stalking the stage and biting into the lyrics like a lion tearing apart its prey”, and noted that the younger Gallagher brother sounded “fresh and powerful” after previously grappling with vocal issues as a result of Hashimoto’s disease.
Noel, meanwhile, was described as wearing “the studious look of a man trying to remember his National Insurance number”, but Savage conceded that it was still “impossible to take your eyes off” the brothers.
The Times’ Will Hodgkinson described the atmosphere in Cardiff ahead of the gig, pinpointing it as “more like a World Cup game than a rock concert” and noting that the “whole city had gone, to use a phrase redolent of Oasis’s heyday, mad for it”.
Hodgkinson noted that the Gallagher brothers “didn’t speak much” while on stage, but said that the “quick hug” between them at the end of the show “means the world”. “Ultimately”, he added, “there was a simple question about the reunion of a simple – in the best way – band. Was it good? Yes, it was fantastic”.
NME’s Andrew Trendell, meanwhile, said the band seemed like “Oasis redesigned for the 21st century” with a setlist that “just never relents”.
“This is all you ever would have wanted from Oasis in 2025: they look cool, sound f***ing amazing, and they want to be here,” he added, noting that “Liam’s voice hasn’t sounded this good in 20-odd years”.
The band are set to perform another gig in Cardiff tonight (5 July) before heading to Heaton Park in their home city of Manchester on 11 July.
