Oasis – Heaton Park, Manchester | 16 July 2025
Rating: 10/10
There’s a version of Wednesday night at Heaton Park that exists only as myth — the one you’ll tell your children about, the one that gets slightly more extraordinary with every retelling until it’s practically biblical. Except this one actually happened, and fifty thousand people were there to witness it, and no amount of embellishment is going to make it more remarkable than the truth.
Oasis walked back onto a stage together for the first time since Noel stormed off at Rock en Seine in August 2009, and the world — or at least the stretch of north Manchester that could squeeze through the gates — briefly lost its mind. The Oasis Live ‘25 Tour had already opened in Cardiff and ploughed through the first Heaton Park weekend, but July 16 felt like its own distinct event: a midweek show, capacity capped at fifty thousand rather than eighty, the crowd denser and more feverish for it, the energy nowhere left to go but straight up.
When the opening salvo of “Fuckin’ in the Bushes” detonated through the PA — that Stones-ish loop of guitar and tape manipulation announcing the whole charade before a note had been sung — the roar from the crowd wasn’t applause so much as collective release. Sixteen years of “will they, won’t they.” Fourteen million people who tried and failed to get a ticket. And then this: Liam and Noel emerging hand in hand, the screens behind them blazing the words This is it… This is Happening… Manchester. Understated it was not. Perfect it absolutely was.
“Hello” came next, followed immediately by “Acquiesce”, and right there in the first fifteen minutes the band had already answered every sceptic. Because “Acquiesce” — the great lost classic that Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? somehow didn’t have room for — is one of the finest things this band ever committed to tape, and hearing Liam snarl through the verses before Noel steps up to deliver the chorus felt not like nostalgia but like correction. A reminder of what we’d been missing.
“We need each other, we believe in one another.”
On a night when the two of them stood together on a stage for the first time in a generation and a half, you’d have had to be made of something considerably harder than flesh to hear that and not feel it somewhere genuine.
The pacing of the set was ruthless in the best possible way. “Morning Glory” shook the bones. “Cigarettes & Alcohol” was almost comically cocky, Liam adopting a swagger that suggested the intervening years had happened to everyone else. “Supersonic” — the song that started all of this, really — reduced fifty thousand adults to teenagers in real time, every word bellowed back at the stage with the kind of conviction that makes you question what else in your life you’ve ever believed in quite this much.
The mid-set acoustic detour was the evening’s most quietly devastating passage. “Talk Tonight”, a song Noel wrote in San Francisco in 1994 when the original band was on the verge of collapse, sat next to “Half the World Away” with a tenderness the Gallaghers aren’t supposed to be capable of. It earned every second of its silence between chords.
Richard Ashcroft had opened proceedings with a set that felt genuinely worthy of the occasion — he remains one of British rock’s most magnetic frontmen, even if the crowd was saving its voice — and Cast before him made a solid case for their own rehabilitation. But support slots are prologue, and everyone in Heaton Park knew it.
The encore was the encore. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” with fifty thousand voices carrying every note back to the sky. “Wonderwall”, which has been mocked and overplayed and weaponised at every open mic night since 1995 and which somehow, in this context, at this volume, with this crowd, sounded like it was being played for the first time and the last time simultaneously. And then “Champagne Supernova” stretched wide enough to contain the whole evening — the woozy, yearning centrepiece of Morning Glory blooming into something that felt less like a song and more like a weather system.
They closed on “Those Were the Days”, a track that nods back to the early chaos with enough self-awareness to avoid smugness, and then they were gone. No extended farewell. No “we love you Manchester” x twelve. Just the deed, done.
The setlist across the Heaton Park run had been consistent from night one — no surprises, no deep cuts thrown in to reward the obsessives — and in lesser hands that predictability would be a criticism. Here it functions as confidence. These are the songs. You know them. We know them. Let’s not waste time pretending otherwise.
There’s a generation that missed Oasis the first time, who inherited the records from older siblings and parents and now know every word without having seen a single show. Wednesday night at Heaton Park was theirs too. It belonged to all of us — the lifers, the latecomers, the converted and the reluctant. Manchester gave itself over completely, and Oasis, apparently, were more than ready to catch it.
Thirty years on from Definitely Maybe, they remain, improbably and undeniably, the best band in the world at being Oasis. That sounds like faint praise. It isn’t.