“This is history” said Noel to the crowd to which Liam replied “History? I thought it was Knebworth.”
I was only one-years-old when Oasis took to the stage in Knebworth. It wasn’t just a concert. Ocean Colour Scene, The Prodigy, Manic Street Preachers, The Chemical Brothers and The Charlatans played through out the two-day mini-music festival which celebrated British music and the level it had reached.
The main act, Manchester band Oasis played two nights on the grounds to 125,000 people each night. That’s a quarter of a million people in total but it could have been a whole lot more.
Over 2.6 million people applied for tickets for the shows, making it the largest ever demand for concert tickets in British history.
Oasis could have played there for 18 days straight.
21 years since Oasis played Knebworth. 4% of the population applied for tickets! #history pic.twitter.com/yFqG233v2I
— CLICK MUSIC (@clickmusicuk) August 10, 2017
The band’s documentary which was released in October 2016 titled Supersonic started and finished with the iconic concert and some might say, it even signalled Oasis’ peak.
Director of that documentary, Mat Whitecross said the band had different views about what should have happened after Knebworth…
“Noel’s thing is, ‘If we’d had the balls to do something like that, maybe we’d be talked about in the same hallowed tones as The Beatles. On the other hand, I had more to give, more to do and I was always writing and had a stack of songs.’
“When we met Bonehead, he said they should definitely have stopped then – big mistake to carry on. Liam was adamant that wasn’t true, saying, ‘You keep going because what else we gonna do? Go home and become a plumber? Fuck that!’”
What’s funny about it, is I, a 22-year-old Oasis fanatic grew up idolising the Gallagher brothers and Noel was the reason I begged my mam to buy me a guitar for Christmas ’06.
I watched videos of Knebworth on YouTube and I wanted to be a musician. I thought about how great it would be to play in front of hundreds of thousands of adoring fans and hear the songs back that you wrote.
Lucky Noel Gallagher I thought, only to realise he doesn’t remember a thing of it.
“Genuinely, now, if I close my eyes, I can’t remember walking on stage at Knebworth,” he told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. “I know it took place because there were lots of people there.”
How did you know you were at the concert? Columbia. Bang. Acquiesce. Bang. Supersonic. Bang.
Name another band that would have you losing the shit after just a few songs?
https://twitter.com/LemonbeatsCHNL/status/895525187214594050
They finished the shows with their iconic version of The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus which was backed by a display of fireworks and whatever way you want to look at it, those fireworks signalled both the height of Oasis’ popularity and their subsequent decline there after.
John Squire of The Stone Roses even joined the band for Champagne Supernova and redesigned the song with his crazy riffs which added an extra minute or two to the already seven-minute long symphony.
We know it’s a lot to ask, but if you have an hour or two of your time, sit back, relax and enjoy when music used to be great.
And that’s coming from someone who was only in nappies when Oasis were the best band in the world…
Clip via adriantino
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