They premiered the film in Venice on Friday night. 'Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger', Liam and Noel on a red carpet together, the first joint interview the pair have given in more than fifteen years. A big ovation and the photos of the lads coming down the river on a fancy canal boat. Slightly odd, but hey ho.
The film's in IMAX and cinemas from the 9th. And underneath all of that, a drip that's very hard to ignore. A leaked schedule doing the rounds with 23 UK gigs next summer, Knebworth thirty years on from 1996, a stack of nights at the Etihad, Glasgow in there too. Nothing in the works at Pittodrie sadly. Liam posting "Ffs RKID announce the tour we're all losing our minds" like he's a fan refreshing the same page as the rest of us.
But here's the annoying thought I can't really shake. Would it have been better if they'd just done it once?
One summer. 2025. Back together, they play the songs, the whole country loses its mind for eight weeks. And then they go away again. Back to legendary status. No film, no second lap, no third act. Just a thing that happened, once, that you were either at or you weren't.
Last year's reunion hit hard, not because of the songs. We've had the songs the whole time. It was the fifteen years of it being impossible. That was the value. Scarcity is the product, and every extra date sold spends a bit of it.
Why is this even a question? Well, I guess there's a version of Oasis I don't want back. Not the Knebworth one. The other one, the mid-2000s one, the one where Liam's voice had gone and the albums were landing with a shrug and everyone was too polite to say it out loud. Not to mention, the weird clothes Liam started to wear.
That band toured for years after the thing that made them special had left the building. Nobody's saying a 2027 stadium run brings that back. Playing 'Live Forever' to 80,000 people isn't the same as putting out another record nobody needs. But there is a point where a reunion stops being an event and starts being a touring operation, and I don't know exactly where that line is, only that it exists. And it's somewhere. And maybe it's approaching.
Now, the honest bit. I didn't get tickets last year. Sat there in the queue like a goon, watched it go, moved on with my life. And when the 2027 dates go on sale I will be absolutely first in the queue, sweating, with three devices open, doing the exact thing I'm sitting here questioning. So take all of this with the appropriate pinch of salt. I'm not above it. It's Oasis FFS.
Credit where it's due as well, because whoever is running this is very good at their job. Tour first, prove the thing works, prove the two of them can stand next to each other for eight weeks without it collapsing. Then the film, a year later, while the goodwill is still warm and the footage is fresh. Then the big one. That's not an accident. That might have started life as "let's just get them through one tour and see", but the way it's unspooled feels really smart.
Apart from the teasers, of course. They keep trying to recreate the estate. Kids in cars, kids on bikes, kids with just enough crazy in them to think of starting a band and taking over the world. But it always looks too clean. Too shiny. Everyone in it looks like a model. Because everyone in it is a model.
The real version of that world was never colour-graded. It's the one bit of the whole rollout that feels like it was made by people who have read about it rather than been in it.
And maybe that's the argument in miniature. The further you get from the thing, the more you have to reconstruct it, and the reconstruction is never as good.
But look, they can do whatever they want. Genuinely. There are about four bands alive who have earned the right to do exactly as they please and Oasis are one of them, and if what they want is 23 nights and a film and another lap after that, then good, they should have it, and I'll be there. This isn't a complaint. It's a question, and it's a question I don't think has a clean answer.
Would the story of Oasis have been better served by one beautiful, heady summer, and then the door closing again?
I think it might have. I also think I'll have forgotten I ever said that the second the presale link goes live.