The competition watchdog has launched an investigation into the Oasis ticket sales fiasco.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will investigate Ticketmaster’s handling of sales for the band’s upcoming tour, including how “dynamic pricing” may have been used to adjust the price.
Initial excitement about the Gallagher brothers’ reconciliation soon gave way to dismay and outrage last weekend after fans complained that the prices for the 17 shows were increased without warning.
The CMA had said on Tuesday it was “urgently reviewing” the use of dynamic pricing after criticism of the “scandalous” price inflation. The brothers said on Wednesday that they had no input into how the tickets were priced.
The CMA’s investigation will consider whether Ticketmaster had engaged in unfair commercial practices and if clear and timely information was given to explain that the tickets could be subject to so-called “dynamic pricing”.
It will also examine if consumers were put under pressure to buy tickets within a short period of time – at a higher price than they understood they would have to pay.
On the CMA’s website, fans are being asked to provide their evidence and, where possible, to include any screenshots they may have taken as they progressed through the buying process. Evidence can be provided using an online form.
The authority said it would now engage with Ticketmaster and gather evidence from various other sources, which may include the band’s management and event organisers.
A furore erupted at the weekend after fans of the Manchester band told of their anger after queueing online for hours only to find that the price of the £135 standing tickets had risen to £355 for upcoming Oasis reunion shows.
Sarah Cardell, the chief executive of the CMA, said: “It’s important that fans are treated fairly when they buy tickets, which is why we’ve launched this investigation.
“It’s clear that many people felt they had a bad experience and were surprised by the price of their tickets at checkout.”
“We want to hear from fans who went through the process and may have encountered issues so that we can investigate whether existing consumer protection law has been breached.”
It should not be assumed that Ticketmaster has broken consumer protection law, the CMA stressed.
The review was welcomed by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, according to his spokesman, who said that No 10 would await its conclusions.
“Ticketing platforms should be transparent with customers over how they price their tickets so people can make informed decisions,” said a Downing Street spokesman.
Ticketmaster has been approached for comment. The company, which is owned by the US entertainment giant Live Nation, has previously defended its dynamic pricing model – similar to that used by hotels and airlines – and said it did not set any ticket prices.
The firm has argued that the system is designed to discourage ticket touts by setting prices closer to market value.
“You pay a monthly membership fee … that entitles you to attend however much you’d like. As with a gym or a streaming service, some people may go often; some, not at all. Regardless, the orchestra receives steady revenue, and you have full control of your calendar.” – The New York Times
The new Royal Opera season opens with a revival, the production’s 10th, of David McVicar’s 2006 staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, conducted by Julia Jones. As on many previous occasions, McVicar has rethought and reworked it, carefully moulding it to his new cast, and subtly shifting points of emphasis. Huw Montague Rendall’s Count, attractive if predatory, is more insistently sexual, less prone to violence than some of his predecessors. We’re also more aware here than in the past of the Countess’s (Maria Bengtsson) attraction, albeit unacknowledged, to Cherubino (Ginger Costa-Jackson). Bartolo (Peter Kálmán) and Marcellina (Rebecca Evans) are now finely rounded characters, funny without resorting to caricature. And you’re more conscious of the rest of the Almaviva household, the servants and retainers, observing, reacting to and indeed, on occasion, participating in the central action: just occasionally, though, it now also seems fractionally too busy as a result.
A real stage animal … Huw Montague Rendall as Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Clive Barda
There are some superb individual performances. Figaro and Susanna are played by Luca Micheletti and Chinese soprano Ying Fang. He is handsome, warm-voiced, morally aware and prone to anger, squaring off with tremendous dignity against Montague Rendall’s Count, who seems tellingly afraid at times of this man he is contemptuously lording it over. Fang, making her Covent Garden debut, is a curiously reflective Susanna, less immediately spirited than some, but the voice is lovely and Deh Vieni Non Tardar sounds exquisite in its sensual poise. Her silky tone is at times not unlike Bengtsson’s, so the subterfuges and mistaken identities of the final scenes seem entirely credible.
Bengtsson, a great artist, meanwhile, lays bare the Countess’s anguish of soul with understated intensity, and is meltingly beautiful at the end as she forgives her husband. Rapidly emerging as one of today’s finest baritones, Montague Rendall is real stage animal, who combines patrician finesse with dramatic fire. Costa-Jackson makes an appealing Cherubino, Evans’s Marcellina hides a touching vulnerability beneath all that brittle bravado, and Kálmán sounds really imposing in his vengeance aria.
Jones conducts with fierce energy and drive, but could on occasion hold back more. Dove Sono, for instance, propelled urgently forward rather than nostalgically reflective, feels fractionally too fast. The orchestra is on occasion slightly too prominent, sometimes obscuring the voices, but the playing is consistently fine, and Jones is right to place the emphasis on Mozart’s often extraordinary powers of orchestration.
I was working at Granada in the 1980s when I came across a photograph of Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe while going through the station’s Beatles archive. They looked confident and interesting and I wanted to know more about them. I’d heard about the Beatles becoming a great live band while playing the clubs in Hamburg, but not the background story of Stuart, the group’s first bass player, and Astrid, a brilliant German photographer. Stuart died just on the eve of the Beatles becoming big, having left the group to pursue his art and be with Astrid. I was keen to get into feature films and had been kicking a few ideas around. This story, I decided, was the one I wanted to tell.
Stuart’s mother, Millie, lived in Sevenoaks, Kent – I think she was the fifth “M Sutcliffe” I found in the phone book. She and Stuart’s sister, Pauline, showed me some of his work and helped me make contact with Astrid, who was managing a wine bar in Hamburg. Over the years, I think a lot of people had tracked her down in search of Beatles gossip, but I told her that wasn’t what I was looking for.
Astrid invited Klaus Voormann along to our meeting – he was the boyfriend who had dragged her to see the Beatles in the first place, and he went on to be in the Plastic Ono Band and play bass on the Imagine album. I spent 10 days with them recording interviews which became the basis for the screenplay.
Ian Hart came on board early and would come in to read John Lennon’s lines opposite potential Stuarts and Astrids. I liked the idea of casting the two best-known actors in the film in those roles – Stephen Dorff and Sheryl Lee brought a movie-star quality to the characters the audience would be least familiar with. Ian had already played a slightly older Lennon in The Hours and Times, but that wasn’t the character I was after – I knew people who had met John in the early days and described him as angry, insecure and sometimes cruel. It wasn’t until I met Ian that I saw he could provide that energy. A lot of people say Ian looks just like John Lennon – he doesn’t really. It’s just that he embodies him so well.
For the soundtrack, we needed someone who could put together a band with star power. Producer Nik Powell was sitting on the toilet reading a music magazine when he saw the right name for the job. He ran out yelling: “We need to get Don Was!” Don put together this supergroup – Dave Grohl, Mike Mills from REM, Thurston Moore, Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner, Henry Rollins and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs. I said to Don: “Don’t let them listen to the Beatles’ versions. Just let them kick the crap out of the songs.”
Ian Wilson was a very experienced cinematographer. For the sequence where the band arrive in Hamburg and drive down streets near the Reeperbahn, we’d asked club owners to turn off all their 1970s and 1980s neon signs and leave on the 1960s ones. Instead, they did the opposite and demanded more money. Ian said: “Get the actors in the van and be ready to go in 15 minutes – trust me.” He got a camera assistant to go round the clubs saying: “Could you leave the 70s and 80s lights on and the 60s ones off?” Again, they did the opposite of what they were asked – and we got the shots we needed.
There were certain moments in the script that Astrid didn’t particularly like, where she thought people behaved in ways they wouldn’t have in real life. I said: “Wait until you see the film – I want you to be happy with it.” I sat beside her at the screening, a little apprehensive. She waited right to the end of the credits, when the screen went black, then turned to me with tears in her eyes and hugged me.
Stephen Dorff, played Stuart Sutcliffe
I thought: “How am I going to do the Liverpool accent?” I was auditioning against lots of English actors, but I’d just done a film where I played a British kid living in South Africa, and for that I had an incredible dialect coach called Julie Adams. She taught me a lot and I ended up working with her on this movie too and I still use her tricks now.
After I was offered the part, I spent a few weeks in Liverpool with Ian Hart, who had grown up there. I visited the pubs the Beatles used to drink in and John and Stu’s old art school. Ian was my right hand, my brother. He’s also a much better guitarist than me – I grew up playing piano, but I was perhaps better at playing bass than Stu might have been. I had to remember to occasionally hit a bum note or fall out of rhythm.
Star quality … Sheryl Lee as Astrid Kirchherr and Stephen Dorff as Stuart Sutcliffe. Photograph: Channel Four/Allstar
I met Astrid a couple of weeks prior to filming. She had quite an emotional reaction, which meant I did too. I was still a teenager and wanted to embody whoever I was about to play, and to be sure she believed in what I was doing. We stayed in contact afterwards – she was very supportive and always watched my movies.
I also became close to Pauline Sutcliffe, and even bought a couple of Stu’s original paintings from her. His work was reproduced for the film by artists – some of whom may even have studied under the same teachers as he did. I know recreating art in movies can come off a bit hokey, but I had people showing me what moves I needed to do and I just tried to get in the zone and convey his pain and passion in closeup.
Nine or 10 years after the movie came out, I met Clash frontman Joe Strummer in a club. He said: “You’re the geezer from Backbeat!” We ended up hanging out until the sun came up, drinking beer on the street out of brown paper bags. It’s an awesome memory. That’s what he kept calling me: “The geezer from Backbeat.”
More than a quarter of a century has passed since the day a young violinist with the reputation of wunderkind (or enfant terrible) strode into the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s executive offices in Martin Place and gave an impromptu display of his virtuosity with the opening bars of Paganini on a borrowed violin.
“Will you buy this for me?” Richard Tognetti asked an astonished David Murray, the then CEO of the bank.
The price tag for the 1759 Giovanni Battista Guadagnini instrument was a mere $1.2m.
Was it Tognetti’s prodigious talent and unaffected charm, or the favourable economic conditions of an Australian economy having just risen from the ashes of the recession we had to have? Either way, Murray said yes.
“And then a bit later, we got another call,” Tognetti says. “‘We’ve got this Stradivarius...’”
A glamour shot of a 20-year-old Tognetti, styled by David Bowie’s makeup artist Richard Sharah. Photograph: Greg Barrett/ACO
Today the Australian Chamber Orchestra, through its patrons, benefactors and an ACO fund encouraging supporters to invest in an instrument ownership bank, is the custodian of nine of the world’s most valuable string instruments from the golden age. They are kept not behind humidity-controlled glass shrines in museums, but played and heard nightly on the stages of Australia’s and the world’s most prestigious concert halls.
The jewel in the crown, according to the ACO managing director Richard Evans, is the circa 1580 Gasparo da Salò bass played by double bassist Maxime Bibeau, which was discovered intact in a bombed out Augustinian monastery in northern Italy after the second world war.
“The wood from the instrument dates back to the late 1400s … it makes you think, how many hands has it been through,” Evans says. “It’s incredible to think of the kind of world events these instruments have seen, the survival stories these instruments must have.”
Tognetti’s Guadagnini has now been passed down the line to ensemble member Liisa Pallandi; these days Tognetti plays a 1743 Giuseppe “del Gesù” Guarneri violin, with the apocryphal backstory that it was once owned by Paganini himself, who lost it in a gambling game.
The estimated value of the instrument – praised by its player for its rich weeping sound when it was bought for the ACO by an anonymous benefactor 17 years ago – was $10m.
Tognetti and the ACO in a 1991 recording session at the ABC in Ultimo. Photograph: ACO
The point of all this?
The ACO launched its 50th anniversary season this month, and 2025 will also mark the 35th year of Tognetti’s artistic leadership. For the better part of both of these milestones, the ACO has fought against the accusations of elitism; it sets adventurous and eclectic programs that appeal to a wider audience than the traditional classical concert-going audience, which is an undeniably ageing demographic; it collaborates with jazz and rock musicians, film-makers, cabaret artists and drag queens; and it operates an outreach program at a primary school in one of the most disadvantaged areas of western Sydney where each child entering year 1 is given a violin or a cello (not a Stradivarius).
But when it comes to the instruments played by the 17 core members of the ACO, Tognetti becomes immediately and unabashedly elitist.
“Yes, it’s elitist, and some say extravagant, but these instruments are among the most exquisite artefacts, works of art, masterpieces crafted by human hands,” he says. “We know best on this, and it’s an immutable fact that when you see the instrument up close and you feel it and touch it, then you really understand the intrinsic value of these things. These days, try buying a terrace house in Paddington for the price of one of these.”
Tognetti does not own a terrace house in Paddington. But it is something of a small miracle that since 1989 he has consistently made Sydney his home. When, at the prodigious age of 25 he was appointed leader and then artistic director of the ACO, his still being there at 30 seemed just as improbable to him as it was to his Australian audiences.
The ACO performing at Sydney jazz and cabaret venue The Basement in 1994. Photograph: ACO
He had already cemented himself as a familiar soloist with the Bern Symphony Orchestra, been guest concertmaster with the Basel Sinfonietta and won best graduate performer of the year from the Bern Conservatorium.
“Ninety per cent of us thought we’d be going back to Europe, and when I say back, that’s because most of us had studied in Europe or America, mainly Europe, and we thought we were just here for the short term,” he says. “Now we have musicians from Europe who came out here to experiment at first, to try a new life in a new world, and they’ve stayed.”
A decade into Tognetti’s leadership, Australia recognised the violinist’s commitment to stay by naming him, through a popular vote, one of the country’s National Living Treasures. He was one of just four Australians in the classical music sphere to receive the honour, alongside Dame Joan Sutherland, composer Peter Sculthorpe and pianist Roger Woodward.
Tognetti directing the ACO at the Sydney Opera House in 2012. Photograph: Paul Henderson-Kelly
A decade later, Tognetti – still firmly at the helm of the ACO – was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to music.
Since then, it has been the promise of a purpose-built home for the ACO that has kept him determinedly Australia-based, a promise that was only delivered in late 2022, after almost two decades of political promises and backtracking.
The concert hall, rehearsal spaces and administration offices at Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay are what Tognetti calls “our external instrument, our meta instrument” and now the orchestra must fill it with content.
British drag, cabaret, opera and musical theatre artist Le Gateau Chocolat. Photograph: Eli Schmidt
“I’d be kind of nuts to leave now,” he says.
Looking back over 35 years’ worth of programming, Tognetti is proud of how far he has taken both the orchestra and its audience out of its comfort zone.
“There’s no way we could have done Cocteau’s Circle 30 years ago,” he says of one of the highlights of the 2025 anniversary season: a homage to Le Bœuf sur le toit, the legendary cabaret bar of 1920s Paris, which will see the return of British drag, cabaret and opera artist Le Gateau Chocolat to Australia.
“Or make a movie,” he says, of the 2025 return of the 2017 cinematic collaboration Mountain, one of five films the ACO has co-created in an ongoing experimental exploration of music and nature.
Also on the 2025 program: the South African singing cellist Abel Selaocoe who combines his classical training with deep throat singing practised by the Xhosa people; performances of Beach Boys tunes; and a new work by the Australian composer Holly Harrison; and Carolina Eyck, one of the world’s foremost virtuosi of the first – and probably the weirdest – electronic instrument, the theremin.
Even by the ACO’s standards, it is an eclectic and adventurous program.
“But we’ve got a very adventurous audience,” Evans says. “We have what I like to describe as a lean forward audience … they want to learn, they want to be pushed and pulled.
“They’re not all going to love everything … but there’s a level of engagement that is nothing like the Friday night lazy let’s-go-to-a-concert-and-doze-off kind of thing. The bolder we are, the bolder they are.”
This article was amended 28 August. The ACO have 17 core members, as opposed to the 13 listed in an earlier version; that version also numbered the films they have created as three, rather than five.
A lone horn call, then a brief, mighty climax, full orchestra playing fortissimo. The Symphony No 7 by Anton Bruckner, the 200th anniversary of whose birth falls on Wednesday, ends like an intake of breath. The noisy rampage of these final bars, which could go on at length as Bruckner often does, stops abruptly: one terse chord, a single beat in an otherwise empty bar. In a live performance, there might be a sense of surprise – is that the end? – though we can always rely on a keen (for which read maddening) bravo to tell us, several split seconds too soon, that yes, it is indeed all over.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra at the KKL concert hall in Lucerne last weekend, managed something exceptional. In a transparent, flowing but never hurried performance, he made Bruckner’s finale more than the usual exuberant close of a big romantic work. The momentum was so urgent, so intense, it became a glimpse into the abyss. Bruckner, typified as the lonely eccentric (the word simpleton has been used), was here seen as radical, daring, pushing all to the limit. Silence was the only retort. Nézet-Séguin, arms aloft, defied anyone, orchestra or audience, to move. We remained stock still, as we might at the end of a Bach Passion but not a Bruckner symphony. At last he dropped his arms, and the standing ovation erupted.
That might seem a long description for a mere 20 or so bars of music. Nézet-Séguin and his players deserve the attention. The Canadian, who is music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, New York, is now among the tiny handful of top-rated conductors in the world. He was at the month-long Lucerne festival, one of Europe’s older such events, as an enthusiastically received guest of the orchestra. This ensemble of first-class musicians – orchestral principals, chamber players, a few soloists – abandon their usual commitments and gather in the summer to perform at the highest level. In the same concert the Italian pianist Beatrice Rana, who has recorded with Nézet-Séguin, was the nuanced and perceptive soloist in Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
‘A free exchange’: Plínio Fernandes and Sheku Kanneh-Mason at the Lucerne theatre. Photograph: Manuela Jans/Lucerne festival
Later the same night – events, many free, occur throughout the day, in different venues, by the lake, out in the street – the British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, one of this year’s featured artists, gave a duo recital with the Brazilian guitarist Plínio Fernandes. The intimate Lucerne theatre, lights low, proved ideal for a late-night programme with a South American emphasis. Opening with Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Aria (Cantilena) from Bachianas Brasileiras No 5, they ended with two numbers from Astor Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, performing specially arranged repertoire in between. The free exchange of instruments, equal-voiced, proved novel and rewarding. Elegie à une mémoire oubliée, written for them by the Brazilian composer Rafael Marino Arcaro (b.1990), was delicate and affecting. All three studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music.
The visible part of this Swiss festival is the glamorous roster of orchestras and soloists. The bedrock of its activities, however, central to its purpose and vision, is largely out of view. The Lucerne Festival Academy (together with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra), founded by Pierre Boulez and the festival’s director, Michael Haefliger, is 20 years old this year. It attracts young composers, conductors and musicians from all over the world – around 100 each year – supporting them financially and enabling them to experiment. The focus is music of today (today being a loose term extending back to the mid 20th century, bearing in mind Stravinsky, born in 1882, is still considered “today” in some circles).
Composers Unsuk Chin and Dieter Ammann at the Lucerne festival’s composer seminar. Photograph: Manuela Jans/ Lucerne festival
Concerts are given, workshop-style, and discussions held. Listen, don’t try to analyse, was the main message of the Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, running the composing seminar showcase in the absence of the influential German composer Wolfgang Rihm, artistic director from 2016 until his death in July. Ammann’s advice was vital. Hearing, as I did, four new orchestral works, with four different conductors, and three chamber performances by different players in the space of two days had the feel of a (highly enjoyable) Mensa test. The British conductor Joséphine Korda and British-German composer Eden Lonsdale, both with growing reputations, were among the lineup.
The last concert I attended was a recital by another of the festival’s star artists, the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili. She was joined by two grant holders from the foundation she set up in 2021 to help musicians from her homeland. The 23-year-old Giorgi Gigashvili, a BBC New Generation artist and recipient of many international prizes – he also plays in an electronic band – is already a formidable performer. He was a sensitive partner to Batiashvili in César Franck’s Violin Sonata.
The other was Tsotne Zedginidze, who has just turned 15. I have come to him late in the day: his CV is already longer than most four times his age, and includes association with names such as Brendel, Rattle, Pappano, Barenboim. This prodigious young composer-pianist played a sparky, virtuosic, toccata-like work of his own, as well as preludes by Debussy and, with Batiashvili, the same composer’s Violin Sonata. Musically bursting with confidence but modest too, Zedginidze still studies with his grandmother. We will watch his progress, agog.
The ‘prodigious’ 15-year-old Georgian Tsotne Zedginidze at the piano, with violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in Lucerne. Photograph: Peter Fischli/Lucerne festival
At Zedginidze’s age, Alexander Goehr, who had the brilliance of wit and intellect to choose almost any profession, decided to become a composer. His conductor father, Walter, who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg, cautioned him against, in vain. Goehr died last week, aged 92, the oldest and longest surviving of a trio of composers who met in Manchester as students, the others being Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. Together, though their paths separated, they changed the landscape of British music.
As well as leaving a body of fine compositions of his own, as professor of music at Cambridge Goehr taught a generation of composers, including Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson and George Benjamin. Benjamin will be working with the young composers in Lucerne this week. He may be poignantly alert to his new seniority in a lineage that, with only a couple of twists and turns, goes straight back to Bruckner.
As Oasis fans wait on tenterhooks for tickets for the long-awaited reunion tour to go on sale on Saturday morning, brands are hitching their wagons to what will be a pivotal and lucrative pop culture moment, hoping to cash in on the excitement.
The tour next summer is likely to trigger a wave of merchandise endorsed by the band, experts say, although people wanting to match the Gallagher brothers’ style can probably look beyond official collaborations, given the resurgence of 90s fashion.
New Oasis merchandise is already out. Levi’s has launched a collection of band tees to celebrate 30 years of Definitely Maybe. Luxury streetwear brand Represent Clothing, founded in 2011 by the Mancunian brothers George and Mike Heaton, posted a picture of a collaboration T-shirt with the band.
And there would be plenty more where that came from, said Andrew Groves, a professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. He said he imagined they had “been ironing out product tie-ins longer than they’ve been sorting out brotherly differences”. He expected “a tidal wave of collaborations”, name-checking brands such as Adidas Spezial, Berghaus and Umbro, as well as two that he wears so regularly that his students have started calling him professor coat: Stone Island, CP Company.
Oasis fans at Knebworth in 1996. Photograph: Hayley Madden/Shutterstock
But their look went beyond labels. Often lumped in with mod style, according to Graeme Campbell, a style writer and fan, it was “a little less mapped out than that”. Groves sees Oasis style as “the epitome of anti-art school. While rock stars like David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Freddie Mercury, and Brian Eno treated their stage outfits like theatrical costumes, Oasis made no such distinction. What they wore on the street, they wore on stage. It’s just as calculated, but it struck a chord with other men who saw themselves being reflected back from the stage.”
The good news for those planning to cosplay as Liam, is that his style, by and large, is easily replicable. Kangol bucket hats, baggy Levi’s and parkas, all are readily available thanks to the resurgence of 90s fashions . Many already seem to be seeking inspiration online. Pinterest has seen increases for searches including “Britpop aesthetic”, “Noel Gallagher 90s” (+20%) and “Liam Gallagher 90s” (who wins this particular battle at +45%).
Parka life: Noel (left) and Liam Gallagher in 1996. Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
The secondhand market makes it possible to buy into original pieces – and people are already looking. On Depop, searches for Oasis and Gallagher style items have increased by +863% since the tour was announced. According to a spokesperson for the resale site: “Oasis are set to inspire a return to a 60s-meets-90s casual aesthetic.”
But Campbell, who has written before about Britpop style, adds a note of caution: “Anyone can pick up a surplus parka or military coat, but they can’t wear it with the same ‘no-fucks-given’ attitude as Liam Gallagher does. This is a guy who thought nothing of walking out in front of a quarter of a million people at Knebworth in his girlfriend’s cable knit sweater.”
There will be practical considerations as well. According to Campbell, Oasis gigs are not for the faint of heart. “There are pints of all sorts being thrown about, it’s hot, you stand for hours, and then bounce when the band come on.” Heaton Park, where the band will play in Manchester, “is notorious for becoming a mud bath”, said Groves, a Manchester City season ticket holder. “It’ll be a brave person that wears their latest Adidas Spezials. I expect it will be a sea of bucket hats, Man City shirts, and rose-tinted glasses – literally and metaphorically.” Campbell plans to wear an old pair of trainers that he doesn’t mind getting dirty.
Can we expect to see Britpop-era looks studiously replicated? “The older fans are going to tread carefully – they’re hyper-aware of veering into ‘Dadsual’ or ‘Wellend’ territory,” said Groves, referring to the portmanteau of Paul Weller and bellend. “They’ll keep it subtle.”
Liam Gallagher saluting the crowd at Knebworth. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy
Younger fans, who weren’t around to see Britpop unfold first time around, are more likely to double down, according to Groves. “[They] will probably go all-in on the classic looks that made the band iconic: Umbro Cortez drill tops, Berghaus jackets and bucket hats.”
Some high-fashion influences may also be at play. The 24-year-old son of Liam, Lennon Gallagher, who recently starred in a campaign for Burberry, is likely to be in the crowd. Chanel is another luxury label with some claims on the band: when it chose to hold a show in Manchester last year, Noel Gallagher’s daughter, Anaïs, and Lennon were both in attendance. Campbell cites the influence of Britpop on contemporary brands, from Grace Wales Bonner’s collaboration with Adidas to streetwear labels such as Palace. “It will be interesting to see if those nostalgic 90s sensibilities feed into more upcoming collections following the news of the reunion,” he said.
Realistically, the crowd is likely to look quite different to the last time Oasis looked out from a stage, at V festival in 2009. The world had not yet fully succumbed to Swiftism, a cultural phenomenon that has changed what concertgoing looks like. With these gigs being called the “Eras tour for middle-aged men”, will the older crowd find their equivalent of swapping friendship bracelets? It will be interesting to see, but Campbell says he is not sure that would be in keeping with Oasis fans’ style.
The following guest post from audio preservation expert George Blood is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
On 78s
Thomas Edison produces the first machine that can record and playback sound in 1877. The flat disc is first patented in 1888. The concept is very simple: a sound wave is captured on the record as a physical wave in the disc, most often shellac (the shell of the lac beetle). Most discs spin at approximately 78 rpm, hence the name 78s. Other speeds, such as 80, 90 and 100 rpm are not uncommon. In addition to speed, the equalization and stylus size varies – either to improve the sound or to dodge someone else’s patent. In the 1950s they slowly give way to the LP or microgroove record, though in some parts of the world they remain common well into the 1960s.
Why is it important to preserve 78rpm discs?
The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.
The period of 78s doesn’t just parallel other historical developments. The sounds on 78s document cultural norms, performance practices, tastes, and the interests of people who, after centuries of drudgery and lives spent in the fields and hard labor, finally had free time. My mother liked to remind me that nothing tells you more about a person than what makes them laugh. The comedy routines and lyrics give us a window into a time when groups of people were preyed upon, disparaged, and disrespected in stereotypes and bigotry, which shines a mirror on how we can still do better to our fellow beings. We hear the buoyant sounds of the roaring ‘20s, a happy, hopeful time, of liberation and greed. Music borne of the heavy hand of oppression and poverty that conveys gospel, blues, and gives us jazz—all quintessentially American. On 78s, we can hear and learn of the other peoples of the world: of ragas and gamalans, performers who do not traverse great oceans, the cultures of foreign lands we could only read about. We can feel the despondency of the Great Depression in the songs that empathize with the struggles of a nation. Through 78s we can hear firsthand accounts of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the angry, vile speeches of dictators, the songs that inspired a once divided nation to pull together in a common cause against evil, to fight for peace for our time, for days that will live in infamy. Bursting out of the war to end all wars, big bands, swing, then rock n’ roll. It makes one long to hear Bach play the organ, Mozart play the piano, Paganini play the violin, or Orpheus beg for the turn of Euridice, and know, that if we preserved these 78rpm recordings, future generations will understand our joys and pains, to have a window, through sound, into the arc of history, the slow advance of progress of the human condition.
To remember half of recorded history, it is important to preserve 78rpm discs.
About the author George Blood is an expert in the audio and video preservation industry.
This is the Year of Czech Music, with major anniversaries for Smetana and Suk and round numbers for many other Czech composers falling in 2024. Not that the Czech Philharmonic should ever need an excuse for bringing its heritage on tour. The first of the orchestra’s pair of Proms – conducted by Jakub Hrůša, who takes over next year at the Royal Opera – balanced Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with something far less familiar: Suk’s Symphony No 2, named for Asrael, the angel of death. Suk began the work in mourning for Dvořák, his father-in-law and mentor; only months later his wife, Otilie, also died, and the devastated Suk completed the symphony as a double memorial.
It is an uncompromising work, shot through with grief in all its guises, yet Hrůša and his orchestra made it seem life-affirming. Suk’s music, richly textured, is almost cinematic in its evocative scope and in the way it creates a feeling of motion – or the opposite: in the second movement, it was the sense of constraint that was striking, the melodic line fidgety yet tethered above a relentless tick-tock on plucked strings. The second part of the symphony – the part written after Otilie’s death – brought passages that were wistful and heady with nostalgia, then a blistering dance topped by nightmarish E-flat clarinet. It was all movingly, powerfully played, and the hour-long work flew by.
Asrael was a better showcase for the orchestra than their slightly reticent performance of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, in which even the wind soloists seemed happy to take a back seat rather than try to compete or duet with Anastasia Kobekina’s solo cello. Kobekina took to the spotlight with open, impassioned playing, her broad full sound complemented by an interior-sounding tone that projected equally well, yet the performance as a whole was rather episodic, and while the moment of hush before the final huge crescendo was magical, it didn’t seem to join up with the rest. Her encore was fun: a gallardo by her father, Vladimir Kobekin, based on a Renaissance tune – a whirling, foot-stomping dance for cello and tambourine.
The concerts will take place in July and August, at stadiums in Cardiff, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Tickets go on sale at 9am on 31 August, with prices to be revealed on the day.
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Episode Notes
This week, host Isaac Butler talks to composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue, who fronts the 18-piece big band jazz group Secret Society. In the interview, Darcy talks about the thought processes that go into his compositions, like how his interest in mathematician Alan Turning inspired a track on the group’s most recent album Dynamic Maximum Tension. He also discusses the many hats he needs to wear, how he balances complexity and accessibility in his music, and how he makes the most of rehearsal time with such a big group.
After the interview, Isaac and co-host Ronald Young Jr. talk about the challenges and discomforts of self-promotion.
In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, Darcy explains how he decides how to assign solos in his big band music.
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The centrepiece of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra’s Prom with their chief conductor Lahav Shani was a performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto quite unlike any other. Shani, like his mentor Daniel Barenboim, is a wonderful pianist as well as a conductor, and in this instance played the concerto himself, directing his orchestra from the keyboard. It’s a familiar enough practice of course, in Mozart and Beethoven, though some might consider it foolhardy applied to Prokofiev, whose piano writing is nothing if not exactingly athletic, and who also demands orchestral playing and conducting of almost clockwork precision.
It proved, however, to be a tour de force that bordered on staggering. The devil-may-care brilliance and impertinent charm of Shani’s pianism suit Prokofiev down to the ground for starters, and you couldn’t help but be struck by the disarming dexterity of his way with those driven, helter-skelter allegros, or the airy grace with which he launched the slow movement’s almost balletic variations. Sweeping arm gestures in passages when the piano is silent controlled tempo and expression, but most of the time we were acutely aware of the orchestra’s intense focus on watching and listening to each other as well as to him. The whole thing was real edge-of-your-seat stuff as ensemble and balance risked coming apart at any moment. But they never did, and the end result was thrilling beyond belief.
The rest of the programme consisted of 20th-century French music, where the finesse of Shani’s conducting (he is extraordinarily elegant on the podium) and the detailed beauty of the Rotterdam orchestra’s playing spoke volumes. Lili Boulanger’s D’Un Soir Triste, unsettling in its awareness of encroaching mortality, was all sombre, brooding intensity. Shani took Debussy’s La Mer more slowly than some interpreters, lingering over the score’s sensuous beauty, without losing sight of tension or momentum, and the effect was simply ravishing. Ravel’s La Valse brought the concert to a close with its dark yet alluring intimations of decline and eventual destruction. The string tone sounded at times so sensual as to be decadent. Woodwind and brass alternately seduced and glared. And the ending, as rhythm and music itself finally seem to implode, was terrifying.
Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1979, musician and producer Jon Hopkins studied piano at the junior department of the Royal College of Music. He played keyboards for Imogen Heap before releasing his solo debut album Opalescent in 2001. His subsequent albums include the Mercury-nominated Immunity, the Grammy-nominated Singularity and 2021’s Music for Psychedelic Therapy. His soundtrack for the 2010 film Monsters was nominated for an Ivor Novello award and he has collaborated on various projects with Brian Eno and Coldplay. Hopkins lives in London. His seventh album, Ritual, is out on 30 August via Domino.
Neuroscience researcher Felix Scholkmann in Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
This series, based on a book by Michael Pollan, is a guide to the new science behind psychedelics that has emerged after decades of bans. These medicines have been a very important tool in my life – I made an album inspired by them – and I feel Pollan is a perfect bridge builder, approaching the subject in a rational and meticulous way. The series covers a lot of the same ground as the book, but you actually get to see and hear people whose lives have been transformed by medicines such as psilocybin, which can help with treatment-resistant depression and end-of-life care. It’s very moving.
This is a very special place. I became familiar with Verdant brewery a few years ago – they make a hazy IPA that I feel they do better than any other brewery. Now they’ve opened a taproom overlooking an extraordinary beach in Cornwall, in a wild location that’s quite hard to get to. They’ve got all the fresh, unpasteurised Verdant beers on tap, which is a dream, and there’s an amazing pizza chef. Sitting there as the sun goes down, it feels like one of the greatest spots on Earth to have a beer.
‘Purifying’: the Esalen Institute in California. Photograph: Cannon Photography LLC/Alamy
I’d heard about this place for many years and was aware that people like Ram Dass and Terence McKenna once taught there. Then, during a month-long trip in California, I got to spend two days there – a friend who grew up at Esalen took me. The institute has hot-spring baths where you just sit and soak for hours in water that’s extremely rich in minerals. You can get massages on the deck with waves crashing beneath you and condors flying overhead. And you end up having lots of interesting conversations. I left feeling purified and completely present.
A friend showed me this book when I was 18 or 19. It might look like a childish comic but it comes, I think, from the same place as a lot of David Lynch’s films – it has a dreamworld logic that cannot be put into words. The central character is a cat-like figure called Frank who goes about his adventures, which are often terrifying and freakish, but there are beautiful moments as well. There’s an antagonist called Whim, who has a head like a crescent moon. I once showed it to someone who said: “Oh my God, I’ve seen that in my nightmares.”
The Old Airport Road Food Centre in Singapore. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Whenever I’d go to Australia on tour, I’d always stop in Singapore on the way home to go and eat. This was the first hawker centre I was taken to by friends who live there, and it’s just incredible. In Singapore these places are much more appealing than the fancy restaurants. All the stalls are run by people who have made just one dish for decades – Hainanese chicken rice, or omelette with deep-fried oysters – and it’s just a completely perfect version. I would eat this food over a fancy meal any day.
‘With breath you can control your state to an amazing degree.’ Photograph: Delmaine Donson/Getty Images
This has been one of the biggest forces of change in my life and it’s great to see it becoming more widespread – James Nestor’s book Breath blew it open for a lot of people. I was introduced to breathwork through Kundalini meditation back in 2001 and later got into the Wim Hof method. These days I mainly practice Patrick McKeown’s techniques for downregulating the nervous system through long, slow nasal breathing. With breath you can control your state to quite an amazing degree. It’s a simple, calming tool to cope with the madness of the modern era.
This is an album that changed how I listened to music. It takes the form of a ceremonial experience, perhaps involving ayahuasca, and it uses a lot of field recordings. My friend Dan played it to me during some of our own medicinal experiences and I couldn’t believe that someone had managed to translate such a complex thing into music. When you lie there and listen to the whole thing, particularly if you’re in an altered state of consciousness, you start to realise that this guy is sort of a genius, a shamanic master, a one-off. It deserves to be heard.
