2 weeks Ago
'Wonderwall' is all I remember. The rest of Oasis is a blur to me. I was still living in New York City when the band had their global breakthrough -- and that song was everywhere.
From the album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, it's one of the few mid-1990s songs whose lyrics this Boomer can remember. I admired its Beatles-like off-kilter poetics, its love-will-save-the-day (if not, maybe it'll just save me) sentimentality. And Liam Gallagher's voice, while not beautiful, was pure plaintive Britpop, a plangent inflexion echoing from as far back as 1962's Love Me Do by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Oasis released its sophomore album on Aug 21, 1997 -- but 10 days later, the world's attention was inexorably drawn to the aftermath of Princess Diana's death in a car crash in Paris. Or maybe it was just me. I was the duty editor for Time when we had to change the magazine's cover that long weekend -- US Labor Day -- to a portrait with "1960-1997" under her name.
For the next year or so, my journalistic career was spent writing and editing obituaries and tributes to the woman who would never be queen. By the time the next Oasis albums came out, I was the magazine's news director and too busy with the contentious 2000 US presidential election, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a global financial crisis to pay attention to music, much less the unbrotherly bickering of Liam and his older sibling Noel, the band's songwriter. In 2009, Oasis broke up with a whimper (or Liam's bout of laryngitis) that I didn't really notice.
So this week's rapturous response to the 2025 Oasis reunion tour left me puzzled, even more so because I now live in the UK and am about a week away from becoming a British subject. What exactly did I miss? I studied and passed the "Life in the UK" test -- a prerequisite for citizenship. If it had asked me for five songs by the band, I might have flunked.
The truth is, as much as I may pretend to be inspired by Shakespeare and Milton, my Britishing began with music -- and with Lennon and McCartney. I was born a citizen of the Philippines, almost 11,200 kilometres from the UK. By the time I was three, however, Filipino phonographs were spinning Love Me Do, and by the end of the following year, folks all over Manila were singing I Want to Hold Your Hand.
The deeply religious country was shocked (like the US) when John Lennon declared that his band was more popular than Jesus and that Christianity would eventually melt away. I remember my grandfather forbidding the family from listening to the Fab Four. That proscription didn't last very long.
The music was everywhere in the country -- as were fans of Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Dusty Springfield and Cliff Richard. We all lived in the Yellow Submarine. Music was making me British without my knowing it -- certainly long before I'd legally qualify to be a citizen.
Elton John echoed in my consciousness even before my family moved to the US in 1979. As did The Who via the rock opera Tommy. And Freddie Mercury's Queen.
In the US, language melded American and British pop together. Let's call it the Fleetwood Mac effect. UK acts that made it big almost always seemed to take up residence in the US.
Yet from that big global pool of pop, the Britishness of the music would emerge. I would see that in person when work took me to London. I'd always assumed that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road alluded to the song Follow the Yellow Brick Road that had Dorothy and Toto bouncing along on their quest for home in The Wizard of Oz.
But a friend told me that it's also about living in London and missing the simpler life -- real home -- in the countryside. Bernie Taupin, who wrote the lyrics, has said as much. Now, as a resident of the British capital, I look at the yellow bricks of London's Victorian housing -- made from clay and compacted dust out of the Thames -- hearing the universality of the song but also its immediacy, its place in the physical Britain.
Which takes me back to Oasis. Can I find a real-world resonance with the band as I move on toward citizenship? Is their wonderwall made of yellow brick, too? I'd like to feel the popular clamour over the reunion is tied up with subliminal regret and nostalgia for pre-Brexit Britain. After all, the UK's music industry -- and musicians themselves -- have suffered tremendously from the loss of gigs on the continent.
But that's too neat an equation -- and a little impersonal. Besides, both Gallaghers have spouted enough loutish nonsense through the years to disqualify them as exemplars of Tony Blair's golden age of Labour, if it was ever that. I can claim one degree of separation from the Gallaghers.
At the after-party for another band here in the UK, my friends Andy and Catherine were ushered through rooms of increasing exclusivity until they reached a nearly empty one reserved for the tippy-top celebrities. There they were alone with Liam and Noel until more big stars arrived. Andy is Andy Gill, one of the founders of the punk band Gang of Four.
I met him through his wife, the journalist and author Catherine Mayer, whom I worked with at Time. Like the combative Gallaghers, Gang of Four suffered from the emblematic malady of British bands: irreconcilable differences. But Andy kept it going, substituting younger musicians for the ones who went their own way.
The band's music -- aggressively political, ferociously yet deceptively haywire -- wasn't what formed me growing up, but witnessing Andy's guitarwork in concerts in New York was mind-warping. I now know that feedback is an art -- something Andy, in a tuxedo, once explained to the late Queen Elizabeth during a reception (her mannerly response: "How int-er-esting"). His was the kind of music that makes Oasis seem dull and derivative.
Andy and Catherine were the first to take me to dinner when I came to London for work; they helped me learn to call it home. I grieved when he died at the beginning of the pandemic -- and was furious when the former members of his band took back the name he'd preserved and erased eight years of work he'd done toiling to keep it alive. It's the kind of emotion that makes you feel like an insider.
I made the decision to become a citizen long before Oasis announced their reunion tour. But, in a roundabout way, the news reminded me of why I put myself on the road to become one. The music's been in me for almost all my life.
Now, I have the country to sing it in, as well as the memories. And it resonates. Bloomberg Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business.
He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion's international editor and is a former news director at 'Time' magazine..
