JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The British rock band Oasis has made more headlines than music over the past 15 years. That's because the brothers behind the band, Liam and Noel Gallagher, have been embroiled in a long-standing public beef since Oasis broke up back in 2009. That family feud appears to be on pause, with the band announcing on Tuesday that they'll be reuniting next year to play a series of shows in England, Ireland and Wales, and maybe the United States later next year, if the reunion lasts that long. NPR music columnist Stephen Thompson is here to tell us why that's not a given. Hey there.
STEPHEN THOMPSON, BYLINE: Hello, Juana.
SUMMERS: So, all right, Stephen, before we get into all of the drama, I just want to start by asking you why this is such a big deal. I mean, tons of bands reunite for nostalgia tours. Why is this announcement by Oasis generating just so much attention?
THOMPSON: Well, I think the first thing you have to consider is just how big a band Oasis was, especially in its early years. You're talking about a band that put out some of the biggest Britpop albums of the '90s, records like "Definitely Maybe" in 1994...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUPERSONIC")
OASIS: (Singing) I need to be myself. I can't be no one else.
THOMPSON: ..."(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" in 1995. Those records were colossal bestsellers, and they included some of the signature songs of the '90s.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA")
OASIS: (Singing) Someday you will find me caught beneath the landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky.
THOMPSON: Also, they were a huge tabloid fixation because Liam and Noel Gallagher could not stop fighting with each other, sometimes physically, very often publicly, and so there became a lot of notoriety around them off stage.
SUMMERS: OK, I have a lot of questions, but first, I'm going to need you to fill in some of the details for me here because fans of the band know that these brothers fight like cats and dogs. But I need you to tell me how this all even started.
THOMPSON: Well, I'm guessing that it started in the 1970s when...
(LAUGHTER)
THOMPSON: ...They were kids, kind of coming up and kind of fighting the way siblings often fight, you know? So in terms of identifying an origin story, you'd have to bear witness to their childhoods, but it's kind of gone on really throughout the history of the band. There have been altercations and, you know, fights in hotel rooms, occasional fights on stage where, like, one will bop the other on the head with a tambourine and storm off. The kind of primary 2009 breakup of Oasis was sort of precipitated by a fight before a concert. You know, so there's - it's kind of a combination of just these two guys rubbing each other the wrong way, combined with all the standard things that cause rock bands to fight.
SUMMERS: OK. As I'm listening to you kind of tick through all of this fighting over so many years, I am, I have to confess, a little bit skeptical that these shows might even happen. Do you think that they're really going to take place?
THOMPSON: Well, I think that's one of the things that's interesting about this, right? There's a sense that this is so fragile and so tenuous, that these guys have kind of reached this tentative detente but that it could all blow up at any moment the way some of, you know, past conversations around Oasis getting back together have done. And so I think that's part of what makes it interesting to people because look, like, if they had wanted to get back together for the money, they could have done it any time in the last 15 years, right? This is something where these guys have, like, on some fundamental, cellular level, been unable to get along enough to make themselves tens of millions of dollars. They have left tens of millions of dollars on the table just simply because they don't get along. And I think that's one of the things that's really interesting to people, is this idea, like, OK, we can have this nostalgia tour. And we can go back and revisit this band performing their best-known songs, and won't that be fun and special? But there's also this sense of, like, also, are they going to punch each other? And I think that in and of itself, like, makes this more interesting than a standard reunion tour.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIVE FOREVER")
OASIS: (Singing) Maybe I don't really wanna know how your garden grows.
SUMMERS: That's NPR's Stephen Thompson. Stephen, thank you.
THOMPSON: Thank you, Juana.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIVE FOREVER")
OASIS: (Singing) Lately, did you ever feel the pain in the morning rain as it soaks you to the bone? Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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