For a while, I worried that I would ruin it for everyone by singing along too loudly. I have, to the best of my knowledge, never hit a note in my life. It’s just one of those things I’m wonderfully, terribly bad at. Still, I knew I probably wouldn’t have a choice: when faced with two of my favourite bands playing some of my favourite songs, of course I’d bellow every word at the top of my lungs.
In the end, something quite different happened. At the beginning of Phoenix’s set I was elsewhere, as it was a festival and there was a clash with a different band I wanted to see. I ran across the field a few songs in, then settled somewhere in the middle of the audience for a short while.
I quickly realised it wouldn’t be enough so I elbowed my way through the crowd, and somehow managed to make my way to the front row. At that point, I became overwhelmed. Phoenix were there, the band I first started listening to around 20 years ago, and had already seen live three times. They were playing all these songs I’d listened to a million times, alone in my living room, in my headphones while walking around, at house parties when friends let me choose the music.
I could have sung along but I didn’t; instead, I just smiled beatifically. It wasn’t even done on purpose; my face was just doing it, like a reflex. It was absurd and beautiful, and the second time that day that I’d found myself in a crowd sharing something that had grown to be so personal to me.
Earlier that evening I’d watched Gossip, another band that became famous in the early 2000s. When they played Yr Mangled Heart, one of my all-time favourite songs, I briefly thought – ironically, perhaps – that my own heart was going to burst.
This is why I struggled to be cynical when, the very next day, it was announced that Oasis were getting back together and due to tour across the UK again in 2025. I’ve never really liked Oasis but watched them play, mostly against my will, back in 2009. Truly, there’s nothing in there for me.
Still, it was hard not to find people’s excitement incredibly infectious. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there – millions, perhaps – who grew up with Oasis, listened to their songs on the way to school, put them on at 2am at a friend’s flat and drunkenly sang along with everyone else.
What a joy to get to see them again, what a privilege! Truly, I wish them the best.
I also hope they realise, like I did with Phoenix, that ageing isn’t all bad. Watching a band play when you’ve loved them for several decades is an entirely unique experience. I watched them play songs from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and was suddenly transported back to high school in France, where everyone would go mad when someone started playing Lisztomania or 1901.
It wasn’t exactly as thrilling as those first few times I watched them live, when I was a teenager or in my very early 20s and drunk and just so full of life, but it was a much deeper experience. I could feel every past and present version of myself merging, as if time had never passed. That’s not something I had back then; I’d not accumulated all those layers yet.
There are few things I’d like to do less than to go to Wembley to watch Oasis next summer, but that’s fine; not everything is for everyone. It does make me happy, however, to think of all those people who will get to be 17 again, even if just for a night. If the two brothers don’t manage to fall out again in the meantime, that is.
As for me? Patrick Wolf is playing in London at the end of the year, and his music was yet another soundtrack to my youth. I’ll be there with bells on.
