‘The guns have fallen silent,” said the Gallagher brothers, on announcement that they had got over their differences enough to do the reunion everyone was waiting for.

The streets of Cardiff, however, had not fallen silent. With an atmosphere more like a World Cup game than a rock concert, pubs were full to bursting, buskers dusted off their bestWonderwall, hawkers flogged bucket hats, there were defibrillators at the ready for fifty-something men who thought they could consume lager and cocaine like they did back in the Nineties, and the whole city had gone, to use a phrase redolent of Oasis’s heyday, mad for it.

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The genius of Oasis is that, in time, even their bad songs become good. The secret lies in the immediacy. These are songs that arrived sounding like you had already heard them — probably because, to an extent, you had. Nobody knew how to steal just enough from the past like Noel Gallagher. Combined with his lyrical ability to capture normal life with such clarity, they bring a sense of familiarity that is both uplifting and moving.

The set took on extra resonance given everything that has happened since. Noel may have once called Liam a man with a fork in a world of soup, and Liam accused Noel of being a potato, but Acquiesce is a song about the fact that they “need each other” — and they do. Noel has a soul complex enough to write beautiful songs. Liam has a soul simple enough to deliver them with pure feeling. They are, ultimately, stuck with each other. Which explains a lot.

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