Matthew Magee reviews Oasis at Hampden Park



Oasis made good records for two years. They have been making bad records for 10. Critics have rather generously agreed that this year's derivative album Don't Believe the Truth and the promotional theatre tour that accompanied it constituted the return to form Oasis so badly needed.

But will the feelgood factor extend to this arena tour, kicking off in Glasgow? Can the chugging rock that took over the world in 1995 still win over 60,000 punters in an echoing stadium?

At times it seemed that a resounding "yes" was the answer, with Oasis sounding more limber, more sprightly and more crisply savage than they have in years. Lyla sprang from the speakers like a song possessed, a snarling whirl of a battle between singer Liam Gallagher and crowd to get the words out first. The iconic sneer of Cigarettes and Alcohol heralded a blistering, cordite-singed performance whose closing bars descended into an almost AC/DC-like rock groove.

Too often, though, the dead-foot drag of mid-tempo wrangles with mediocre songs pulled the fragile chemistry of the band out of line. If it wasn't the often mercurial Liam Gallagher coming over all listless on Love Like a Bomb, it was the band turning in a by-rote version of Wonderwall. It felt as if there were two acts on stage, Liam and the band, and only occasionally did both parties deliver on the same song.

Champagne Supernova exemplified the problem. It opened more tenderly than ought to be possible, Liam injecting a rasping, nuanced soul into the harmonic suspense of the track's opening lines, the band falling in behind almost delicately, with nudges and pushes along its pulsing path. By the song's triumphalist middle, though, the band were mired in a leaden workout, stuck in a blustering rumble of a song that had lost its way.

The Gallaghers promise great, era-defining, epiphanic rock and roll, and there were glimpses here of the fiery elemental beauty of the magically simple, tucked away in the shallows of this romp through past glories.

Those moments only came, though, when Liam's increasingly expressive voice lifted a line here or a chorus there into the realm of the great. And this only happened on the handful of songs where the capricious dandy in the pin-stripes deigned to put in the effort.


telegraph