Oasis deliver The Rapture at Croke Park homecoming...

Oasis slay Ireland. We’ve been here before, haven’t we, since they debuted at Tivoli Theatre, Dublin and The Limelight, Belfast in 1994. Can we count ‘em all?

Supporting REM at Slane in 1995; headlining at The Point in March 1996 during Morning Glory peak delirium and, ditto, two swell evenings at Pairc Ui Chaoimh in August 1996, hot on the tail of Knebworth lunacy; a duo of wintry December Point nights whilst touring Be Here Now in 1997; across the River Liffey at Lansdowne Road in 2000; after two nights at the Odyssey in Belfast, touching down at the Witness Festival and the Prehen Playing Fields, Derry in 2002; the Point again for two nights in December 2003 for Heathen Chemistry; Marlay Park in summer 2005 for Don’t Believe the Truth followed by two Christmas nights at The Point later that year; two nights at the Odyssey for Dig Your Own Soul saw and then – finally – that epic day at Slane in 2009.

Sixteen years spun by. The feeling that it would never happen like a lump in the throat.

It was a despairing wait that was finally ended with those long-desired words issued from Oasis HQ: "The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised." Magic stuff.

And thus it was written: Oasis remain Kings.

14 million frantic fans scrambled for tickets, breaking the internet, with only the possibility of a tenth of that number being satisfied. These Croke Park gigs are the last of 17 stadium concerts in the U.K. and Ireland before the band arrive in North America later this month for a nine-show run. Seats for the US gigs sold out in less than an hour. Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, referred to the scale of the trade as “the biggest on-sale in history.” Two additional London gigs will follow, then dates in Asia, Australia and South America.

And that’s all before 2026 and if we’re to believe the leak – Oasis Reunion 2.0 – gigs in St James’ Park in Newcastle, followed by two shows at Glasgow's Hampden Park, then five at Manchester's Etihad Stadium, culminating in a play for four shows at Knebworth.

It’s Oasismania. The scene is well set. Here we go.

Let’s start with the ritual team roll-call. Joey Waronker’s here. Gem’s here. Andy Bell’s here. Bonehead’s here. Noel and Liam are damn well here.

Oasis @ Croke Park 16-08-25

Of course, Noel has been here before. He played, and scored for, a Manchester Gaelic football team – CLG Oisín – at Croke Park in 1983. That it’s great to have him back is clear: even the sun, swell at north of 20 degrees, is here to welcome him, as it is RKID. In fact, every Oasis nut in Ireland seems to be here – 80,000 of them, all together on the one field. Pure madness!

The band strut on to the sounds of ‘The Auld Triangle’ – a nice touch – amidst a swirl of headlines documenting aspects of the band’s history on mammoth screens. ‘Hello’ kicks off the evening’s proceedings, just like it kicked off sophomore (What’s The Story?) Morning Glory. “It’s good to be back,” Liam bellows and 80,000 Oasis heads chant their agreement and we’re off, rows of thousands on the pitch with hands aloft in the air, while in the stands, no one is sitting.

The Wall of Sound of ‘Acquiesce’, one of the greatest tracks Oasis ever committed to wax, offers a perfect illustration of the fact that, in another world, Oasis may very well have gone pound for pound with The Jesus & Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine. Its abiding lines of fraternal dependency – “We need each other/ We believe in one another” – always strikes me as Castor & Pollux for the Jilted Generation. Of course, it also doubles as a statement of universal fraternity – and looking around tonight, the magnificent bonhomie surging through the crowd attests to one of the greatest B-Sides ever released – right up there with The Beatles’ ‘Rain’ or ‘I Am the Walrus’, the Stones’ ‘Bitch’, Nirvana’s ‘Dive’, VU’s ‘Here She Comes Now’, Valen’s ‘La Bamba’, Young’s ‘Sugar Mountain’ or indeed ‘The Masterplan’ – but more of that anon.

The Apocalypse Now-esque corkscrew of choppers propels us into ‘Morning Glory’, before ‘Some Might Say’, the band’s first No. 1 single and original drummer Tony McCarroll’s last stand. Side note: All these Morning Glory cuts will be available on a remastered 30th Anniversary edition of the record, released 3 October – which is more than recommended as a balm for the post-Oasis tour hangover.

For the most part, the setlist doesn’t go beyond 1997. Sure, if they wanted to, they could just play post-1997, and it would still be mental in here. The way I see it, post-1997 Oasis possess a catalogue that any band would kill for. Take a sample potential setlist – ‘Go Let It Out’, ‘Gas Panic!’, ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’,’ Sunday Morning Call’, ‘Roll Over’, ‘The Hindu Times’, ‘Force of Nature’, ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’, ‘Lyla’, ‘The Importance of Being Idle’, ‘Bag It Up’, ‘Waiting for The Rapture’, ‘Falling Down’, ‘I’m Outta Time’ and ‘Mucky Fingers’, twice for the encore. And if you don’t agree, I’ll fight you – or at least Liam will.

But this is super-golden era stuff more or less all the way!

From the debut album there's a pair of bangers – ‘Bring It On Down’ and ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’.

The spirit of the former was well encapsulated by Noel, speaking in a 1994 NME interview: “With Oasis, like the Roses and the Mondays, it’s the bottom line: here’s a guitar, here’s the songs, you have them. We’re not preaching about ye olde Englande or how it was in the ‘60s. We’re not preaching about our sexuality; we’re not telling people how to act.”

As for C&E, it’s not for nothing that Liam pitches himself as finding the golden mean between Lennon and Lydon. Yet sonically, here it’s a type of punk closer to Buzzcocks than to the Pistols – it’s melody an Ariadne cord, somehow making it through the grunge, it screams: Neil Young eat your heart out.

Meanwhile, the rather brilliant ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ B-side, ‘Fade Away’, provides a further boost to the argument that The Masterplan is Oasis’ third best album and the greatest collection of non-album tracks ever assembled.

Oasis @ Croke Park 16-08-25

First ever single ‘Supersonic’ with its caterwauling, spidery, scratching guitar opening, G&T toast and clarion call – “You need to be yourself/ You can't be no one else”, introduced by Liam with a call out to Charleston, Mayo – has everyone immensely delighted to be here, even those who shelled out the four figures (indeed especially them, you might reckon).

Into ‘Roll With It’ we groove, but let’s not talk about the war tonight, it’s heaving in here and Noel even receives a wee kiss from Liam as he leaves the stage for a dyad of Masterplan cuts – ‘Talk Tonight’ and ‘Half the World Away’ – complete with brass section and Mr. Christian Madden on keys, which allows the heaving masses take a breath.

‘Little By Little’ is next – an outlier, it's the youngest track here and only song post-Be Here Now (and by some distance, as they leap-frog Standing On The Shoulder of Giants to magpie a song from 2002’s Heathen Chemistry. There’s mass delirium now, greeting the proggy opening of , 'D’You Know What I Mean?’ from Be Here Now, complete with its NWA sample beat, the whole thing lasting just south of eight high minutes, the upper reaches of the colosseum that is Croke Park illuminated now and looking marvellous.

‘Stand By Me’, has the far reaches of the Davin Stand bathed in blue, the brothers talking to one another a la Blood on the Tracks. ‘Cast No Shadow” may be about earlier support act Richard Ashcroft, but to pen such insightful, melancholic brilliance, Noel channels Everyman.

Perhaps the greatest love song in the Oasis canon, ‘Slide Away’ – “Two of a kind/ We'll find a way/ To do what we've done/ Let me be the one who shines with you/ And we can slide away” – is loaded with Oasis DNA. Think Burt Bacharach and Neil Young, while the grainy footage on the mammoth screens takes us back to early Creation days, which is simply boss.

‘Whatever’ reminds those who recall that it’s not for nothing that Liam referred to The Stone Roses and The La’s as The Beatles and Stones of his generation and is all the better for the ‘Octopus Garden’ coda added tonight.

Then ‘Live Forever’ rolls over us, an anthem for an epoch, a lyrical benediction to the days of acid house, which – though it might seem counter-intuitive – is perhaps the greatest musical influence on Oasis. That acid house egalitarianism, and the DIY culture birthed during the Second Summer of Love in Manchester, created the thread that led Noel through the labyrinth to the light of Morning Glory. Whilst The Stone Roses version of paradise is always achingly a fingertip away, the paradise of Oasis, less esoteric, can be grasped by every soul in the Croke Park colosseum. Their’s is a primal vision of rock and roll.

And so ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’ – “I need some time in the SUN-SHEEYIIINE” – is ultimate Oasis, “you and me” as opposed to “us versus them.” That’s followed by the most profligate B-side of them all, ‘The Masterplan’ – “Please brother, let it be” – which remains immense.

Just when you think they can’t possibly take it higher, they do just that with three prime Morning Glory cuts – heavenly, Lennon-doused ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’; multi-billion streamed ‘Wonderwall’; and the magic trick of ‘Champagne Supernova’ where everyone in here, all 80,000, think Liam is singing specifically to them.

(What’s The Story?) Evening Glory. The songs rang out triumphantly into the Dublin night. These Irish men had come home.

And it was more than worth the wait. Magic stuff indeed.

Gigs don’t come any better than this.