As with banking, so it is with Oasis – confidence is key. In the boom years, the swaggering Gallagher brothers and their anonymous colleagues were hailed as Britain’s best band since The Beatles. Then came the crash with their third album, Be Here Now, released in 1997 to ecstatic reviews and the fastest sales in UK chart history until everyone realised, like dimwitted investors in a pyramid scheme, that it was worthless.

The backlash continues to this day. A few diehards buy into Noel Gallagher’s customary hyping of each new album as the best since Definitely Maybe, but the rest of us, nursing burnt fingers, have learnt to invest our hopes elsewhere. The mood of disillusionment was summed up, reprehensibly but forcibly, by the drunken stage invader who pushed Noel over during a show in Canada last month, fracturing the 41-year-old guitarist’s ribs. It was a cruel illustration of the once-mighty Oasis’s fallibility.

Perhaps the elder Gallagher still feels the pain, for he was even more static than usual at Wembley Arena, bent over his guitar as though lost in a private world. His younger brother’s vocals, meanwhile, were a constipated rasp: the 36-year-old Liam (pictured) may have settled down into fatherhood and fitness regimes, but the lifestyle he boasted about on “Cigarettes and Alcohol” has done its damage.

True to Oasis’s capacity for disappointment, their new album, Dig Out Your Soul, begins excellently but then trails away. The songs featured in the set were underwhelming. “Falling Down” was a tolerable knock-off of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. “Ain’t Got Nothin” was a brutally basic stomper with the bored chorus, “Here’s a song, sing along”. The Lennon-worshipping ballad, “I’m Outta Time”, was wrecked by tuneless singing. A new drummer flailed away like a lump hammer, at one point breaking a drum; Noel’s solos were ponderous.

Liam remains an aggressively mesmerising frontman, attacking his vocals with the spite he once brought to assaulting paparazzi. But he is pettish and easily distracted. The fulcrum of the show came during “Slide Away”, into which he threw himself, but it wasn’t enough to lift the band. Afterwards, his interest seemed to drain away and he channelled his frustration into complaints about his monitor’s volume. Oasis have been deleveraged, and it isn’t a pretty sight.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008