Four Australians, three of us women, would be no match for the 80,000 scallywags gathering at Manchester’s Heaton Park on July 11 to celebrate the reunion of two paragons in arrogance, Liam and Noel Gallagher. Add an uncharacteristically sweltering 30°C day to the petri dish and it seemed the perfect conditions for all the peculiarities of British lad-culture to run riot. Contemplating the logistical acrobatics necessary to stay safe in a crowd that big and that boisterous was enough to make my stomach curdle, no matter how much I told myself the music would make it worthwhile.
The most obvious disadvantage our predominantly female group faced was one of simple biology. We knew there would be portaloos aplenty, but we also knew that needing to go at the wrong time would mean negotiating a mass of Mancunian males, every last one hell-bent on having the best day of his life – possibly at the risk of ours. Preemptively tackling the day’s logistics, the group chat abounded with statements like, “I’m scared of needing a toilet and not getting one lol” and “I’m getting a she-wee”. While British festival-goers are famous for their willingness to wee into cups and fling the refuse into the crowd, the women among us felt it would be a hard move to pull off wearing weather-appropriate denim shorts.
There was only one thing for it: an embargo on beers. No one was allowed to drink more than a single pint.
It wasn’t a popular approach. I recall one man, whose lack of T-shirt betrayed a perfectly shorn chest, standing in a rigid A-frame over a tray of 20 pints. Others amid the sea of Adidas and bucket hats might have argued for a different means of beer-based fun: hurling it into the crowd in a spiralling cascade to the tune of your favourite song. Long before frontman Liam Gallagher sang his first “sun-shee-yine”, falling lager had thoroughly matted my hair – and all I could do was be grateful it wasn’t urine.
Many a man hoisted himself onto a mate’s shoulders throughout the show. A trio in front of us did so with the grace of a synchronised swimming team, simultaneously extending their arms up and out into a forward-slanting “V” shape, a posture which seems to denote musical enjoyment in British culture.
Watching sweat trail down their bare backs, my imagination had the length of ‘Wonderwall’ to run wild. It was just enough time to imagine two things: the Gallagher brothers intimately embracing on stage, the very thing I’d emptied my bank account to see; and the jealous rage I would experience watching the scene for the first time via social media the next day.
But before the crowd sang its last “maybeeeee”, the trio dismounted. Through a northern drawl, one turned to me and barked, “Right then, up ya get!” My pleasantly bewildered refusal was met with the aggressive insistence that it was only fair I get to have my own moments aloft, having been at the arse-end of his.
It was this sort of compassionate, if slightly transactional, thinking that characterised the day. People were going to do exactly what they wanted, when they wanted, but when it impacted someone else’s experience, they’d make sure to return the favour.
Once I understood the rules that governed the hypermasculine space we’d once so feared entering, there was nothing left to worry about but the band I was there to see – and they too soared above expectation. Despite years of cigarettes and alcohol, plus a bent-necked crooning posture that would make any singing teacher shudder, Liam Gallagher’s voice kept an impressively even keel. Noel was characteristically serious, never breaking a sweat or a smile as he got the job done. And the rest of the band followed suit. The fact that they maintained their composure wearing the parkas that so define Oasis’s aesthetic, while the rest of us practically expired under the balmy northern sun, is a feat beyond comprehension.
Much less the toxic masculine nightmare I’d envisaged, the Oasis reunion was a euphoric, bucket hat-clad dream.
