Oasis: the bigger picture
Though it did cause the cancellation of a slew of Fringe shows, Edinburgh largely escaped the worst Storm Floris had to offer. But the buffeting, tumult and upheaval predicted of the next pressure front to sweep into the capital – high or low, you decide – may better match the doom-mongers’ expectations.
The Oasis reunion tour – part rock’n’roll circus, part nostalgia-fest, part lager-fuelled money-making machine – sets up at Murrayfield on Friday for the first of its three Scottish dates. In its slipstream, a procession of sometimes strained, sometimes fawning though often genuinely adulatory reviews of the shows played so far.
But also a death – this at the conclusion of Saturday’s show at Wembley show – and, perhaps not unconnected, data on how much beer is driving that money-making machine. Fans at the London shows downed a staggering 250,000 pints each night. Because somebody actually counts such things, we can now hail that as a record.
Ahead of the Scottish shows there has been much talk. About the strain the event will put on transport infrastructure in Edinburgh and the wider Central Belt. About the effect on the Edinburgh Festival in terms of ticketing and stresses on accommodation. About crowd behaviour and crowd control, both of which often correlate tidily to bladder and bowel control – in other words how many fans end up relieving themselves in front gardens.
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For some, then, the Oasis tour is a nuisance. But for others it’s boon and blessing. Either way, it has allowed us a useful moment in which to take stock and to ask wider questions.
Such as: when the dust settles, where do they really stand in the Pantheon? How did they fit into the whole Cool Britannia thing, what did it mean anyway, could it be revived? Is Britpop actually deserving of its place as the musical movement nonpareil of the 1990s or are we better concentrating on the legacies of other important bands from that decade such as Portishead, Massive Attack, Mogwai, or on influential genres such as post-rock, trip-hop, jungle, drum and bass? I’ll say first ‘No’ then ‘Yes’ to that last one.
Panning out even further, more questions. What does the appetite for the band and its music tell us about our general appetite for nostalgia, and do Oasis only really matter to younger fans only because they epitomise celebrity in the long ago, pre-digital era? How and why did the band’s music become lodged in the nation’s cultural memory bank anyway? Is it actually just about the clothes?
Writing in The Herald, Professor Gregor Gall of Glasgow University’s School of Social & Political Sciences places Oasis in a political context, matching the quality of their output to the efficacy and lifetime of the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Interestingly (and correctly) he places the band’s Golden Years in the period before New Labour came to power but when it was clear they were headed for government, implying (I think) that it was optimism for an as-yet-unrealised future which added the sheen.
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However much Edinburgh does or does not notice the arrival of 200,000 Oasis fans over the next week or so, the event will pass. But memories will linger of the phenomenon (and that doesn’t seem too strong a word for this reunion tour) and we would do well to consider it carefully, thoughtfully and from every angle. Having a good look in the rear-view mirror before facing forward again is always a useful exercise, whether we’re talking culture or politics or a fusion of the two. If nothing else, this roistering summer of bucket hats and Adidas Sambas provides the perfect opportunity for that. So if you feel a thesis coming on, be my guest: I’d love to read it.
Edinburgh Festival round-up
The first of the Edinburgh Festival reviews are in, with Storm Floris having made only a small dent in the sterling efforts of The Herald’s team of critics.
Sticking with sterling, chief theatre reviewer Neil Cooper has already cast his eye over the big beast of this year’s offerings – Brian Cox in Make It Happen, James Graham’s Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) play about the rise of banker Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin and his ultimate fall in the 2008 financial crisis. Both Cox, as Kirkcaldy-born Scottish Enlightenment-era economist and philosopher Adam Smith, and co-star Sandy Grierson, as Goodwin, offer “towering performances” writes Neil. Elsewhere he checks in with The Traverse for Gary McNair’s single-hander A Gambler’s Guide To Dying. Still at The Traverse he also took in Gabriel Jason Dean’s play Rift, performed by US-based company Luna Stage and detailing the relationship between two brothers, one an idealistic liberal, the other a Swastika-tattooed white supremacist four years into a life sentence for murder.
Moving to comedy and stand-up – not something there is a shortage of in Edinburgh in August – Gayle Anderson serves up a five star review of a show by US actress and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell, feted by some though not all. Donald Trump is no fan (he called her “a threat to humanity”) though the feeling of antipathy is entirely mutual. Gayle also enjoyed Alison Spittle’s new offering Big, “a carefully-crafted, expertly-delivered show” about extreme weight loss.
Finally to music and dance. Keith Bruce enjoyed The King’s Singers, performing at the Queen’s Hall as part of the EIF programme, while dance critic Mary Brennan was at the ever-lively Zoo Southside venue for a performance of Panoptikum by Prague-based outfit Lenka Vagnerová & Company. Five stars for what Mary describes as “a feast of wickedly strange episodes that conjure up the sideshow freaks of times gone by.” She also dipped into the EIF dance programme at the Royal Lyceum Theatre where Australian dancer Dan Daw, who self describes as a “queer, crip artist”, was performing a show which also explores the concept of ‘kink’. Perfect August Edinburgh fare, in other words.
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