Will Oasis Have New Music Ahead of the Reunion Tour? Here's What the Band's Manager Says
While rumors about the upcoming Oasis reunion tour continue to swirl, one of the band's co-managers has put one to bed: There will be no new music from the Gallagher brothers.
Speaking to Music Week, Alec McKinlay, who heads the band's Ignition Management and Big Brother Recordings, Oasis' U.K. label, revealed that there were no plans for Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher to get back in the studio together for a new record. The band released their most recent album, Dig Out Your Soul, in 2008.
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'This is very much the last time around, as Noel's made clear in the press,' McKinlay said in the interview published Tuesday (May 13). 'It's a chance for fans who haven't seen the band to see them, or at least for some of them to. But no, there's no plan for any new music.'
The confirmation arrives after months of rumors, including some teasing by frontman Liam on his social platforms. In September, Liam responded to a fan to say that a new record was 'already finished,' and in November he said he was 'blown away' by the songs Noel had allegedly written for a new album.
The band's reunion tour kicks off in the U.K. at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on July 4. The run of dates will continue through Manchester, London, Edinburgh and Dublin before hitting North America, Latin America, Asia and Australia across the 41 planned shows.
Elsewhere in the interview, McKinsley discussed the response to the shows globally. 'We'd obviously been planning it for a while and the moment when it went live was a little bit of a step into the unknown in terms of how big the reaction would be,' McKinlay said. 'When it all hit home, it was just phenomenal. The reaction was very much one of, 'Finally, some good news after all the nonsense that's been going on in the world.'
'Probably the biggest and most pleasing surprise of the reunion announcement is how huge it was internationally,' he added. 'Honestly, we knew it would be big here, and that doesn't take much intuition. But looking outside the U.K., we knew they had a strong fanbase, we did all the stats. We were quite cautious about what that would mean when it came to people actually buying tickets, but we were just bowled over by how huge it was.
'We could have sold out half-a-dozen Rose Bowls in Pasadena and probably eight MetLife Stadiums in New York in a day,' McKinsley shared. 'We saw the ticket stats, we were watching what was happening and the demand was way beyond our expectations.'
The clamor for Oasis tickets in the U.K. sparked a debate about on-sale practices. In March, the Competition and Markets Authority said that Ticketmaster may have 'misled' fans about ticket prices for the events.
The band has yet to officially confirm who will be performing in the live group alongside Noel and Liam, but the latter has denied reports that 'Hello' will be dropped from the setlist due to its connection to convicted pedophile Gary Glitter.
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Noel Gallagher may not have appreciated how big a compliment he was paying Babyshambles when he described the chaotic early 2000s indie band as the 'opposite of Oasis'. 'We were trying to make it big, and they are trying to make it small,' he said of a group intimately associated with the 'landfill indie' scene, and who are today mourning the death of their guitarist Patrick Walden at age 46. Babyshambles were, as Gallagher intimated, best enjoyed in pokey clubs and dingy dive bars – where you could see the whites of their blood-shot eyes and lose yourself in their hedonistic energy. But while they were regarded as the sole creative property of Pete Doherty, the troubled pied-piper of that decade's indie scene, it was Walden's dexterous and vulnerable musicianship that propelled hits such as Killamangiro and F--- Forever. 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