British rock band from Manchester, widely considered the greatest British band of their generation and a defining act of the 1990s Britpop movement.
Brothers Liam Gallagher (lead singer) and Noel Gallagher (main songwriter) grew up in a down-at-heel part of Manchester, brought up by a single mother who left her abusive husband. They were self-taught musicians. In May 1993 the band played to just a dozen people at King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut, a music venue in Glasgow. Alan McGee, owner of Creation Records, an independent label, was in the audience and signed them soon afterwards.
Their first album, "Definitely Maybe" (1994), sold 86,000 copies in its first week—more than any other British debut at the time. The follow-up, "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" (1995), has sold more than 22m copies. One of its singles, "Wonderwall", is the third-most-streamed song from the 1990s on Spotify, after "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". To date Oasis have sold more than 70m albums.
Oasis were part of a crop of young bands—including Blur, Pulp and The Verve—who reinvigorated British pop music in the 1990s. They had a long-running feud with Blur. Blur's frontman, Damon Albarn, is a drama-school dropout whose parents were bohemian artists in London; the Gallaghers, by contrast, "looked like the common man." Oasis outsold their rivals comfortably: 70m albums against Blur's 17m. Between 2019 and 2024, Oasis's songs accrued 10bn streams globally, compared with 2.9bn for Blur, 2.7bn for The Verve and 750m for Pulp.
Their debt to The Beatles is obvious. Liam once claimed to be a reincarnation of John Lennon. The piano in "Don't Look Back in Anger" sounds like a hard-rock reworking of the opening bars to "Let It Be". The lyric "I'm gonna start a revolution from my bed" pokes fun at the interviews given by Lennon and Yoko Ono from their hotel room in Amsterdam.
The brothers were constantly fighting: Noel once attacked Liam with a cricket bat during a recording session. In 2009, before a show in Paris, Liam lobbed a plum and swung a guitar around. Noel stormed out and announced the end of Oasis. Both had successful solo careers but attempts at rapprochement failed until 2025, when they announced a global stadium tour—their first performance together in 16 years. Ticket sales prompted controversy over "dynamic pricing", with Keir Starmer, the prime minister, promising to look into the practice.
Of what you see in books, believe 75%. Of newspapers, believe 50%. And of TV news, believe 25% -- make that 5% if the anchorman wears a blazer.