Arenas are notoriously tricky places to play. The high ceilings and cavernous spaces can suck the atmosphere from the stage almost before a performer has had a chance to hit their stride – and for a little while at Wembley’s OVO Arena on December 14, the same threatened to happen with Noel Gallagher. Would he play any of the songs that first made him a rock ‘n’ roll star? Or would the thousands of (mostly) men in fading Oasis t-shirts have to make do instead with a set devoted solely to the band he’s been fronting since 2011?
The backdrop was uncompromising at least. “Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds” it read. Just in case there was any doubt.
A full four minutes (I timed it) of droning feedback preceded the band’s appearance on stage – but if that extended build up promised an explosion of noise and energy, the eventual muted drum machine and keyboard opening of “Pretty Boy” couldn’t help but fall a little bit flat. Not that the sell-out crowd packed into the arena seemed to care – even as the former Oasis songwriter launched into a series of songs from latest album Council Skies, the cheers that greeted each of them, if not wildly ecstatic (that came later) were nevertheless enough to inject some real warmth into the venue.
This was, after all, a High Flying Birds gig. The night began with no fewer than five tracks from Council Skies: perhaps because Gallagher’s canny enough to circumvent the whole “nipping to the bar during the new ones” thing by getting them all in early, or more likely because he genuinely believes them to be a set of songs worthy of standing among anything else he’s written.
There’s another possibility of course. Noel being Noel, there’s a real chance that he’s taking a more combative stance: if you want the big singalongs, you’re gonna have to hear the new stuff first. When one fan shouted for “Don’t Look Back in Anger” near the beginning of the night, Noel heard him out, before replying, with customary Mancunian swagger: “I can’t hear you mate, your mouth’s full of s**t.”
Noel Gallagher was in uncompromising mood on the first night of his 2023 Arena tour.
And the truth is, there are some real gems on Council Skies, dazzlingly showcased tonight. The trippy, Beatles-esque strings and soaring chorus of “Open the Door, See What You Find” stands comparison with the best of Oasis, and by the time the band launched into “We’re Gonna Get There in the End” and “Easy Now”, any lingering doubts had disappeared and the mood was of typical Gallagher arms-in-the-air jubilance.
And then, as the man himself said, it was time “to play some old ones”. That didn’t mean anything by his former band just yet, but instead a slew of songs that served to remind he’s been doing the High Flying Birds thing for over 12 years now… and in that time has amassed a body of work worthy of an Arena tour on its own merits.
Whatever else you think of Noel Gallagher, he is an extraordinary songwriter. The delicate “We’re on Our Way Now” held its own even in this huge space, and throughout “If I Had a Gun” and a barnstorming “AKA… What a Life!” from 2011’s debut Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, all of Wembley was jumping.
Which was fitting, as Noel was about to give the heckler with the mouth full of s**t what he had been hoping for. After recently rerecording the Oasis tracks “Going Nowhere” and “The Masterplan” at Abbey Road, he served them both up tonight as the opening numbers of a breathless series of Oasis songs that at times threatened to take the roof off the venue.
Noel Gallagher's work with the High Flying Birds holds its own with his Oasis songs.
“The Masterplan” especially – never released as a single in its own right, instead appearing as the B-side to “Wonderwall”, a decision Gallagher shrugged off at the time with “I don’t write s**t songs” – had the entire arena on its feet, and by the time he’d worked through “Half the World Away” and “Little by Little”, arms were in the air and the whole night had become a mass singalong.
There’s always an encore, of course, and after a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Quinn the Eskimo” (if you know, you know), there was a stripped back, affecting version of “Live Forever”, and then the song which, whether he likes it or not, is always going to be the climax of any Noel Gallagher gig. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” has overtaken “Wonderwall” as the archetypal Oasis anthem, and judging by the 13,000 or so people bellowing out every word tonight, it’s easy to see why. Whatever else it does, fully 28 years after he wrote it, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” still touches a nerve like nothing else he’s composed – and there’s little Noel, or anyone else, can do about it.
In some ways Noel Gallagher is a victim of his own brilliance. Caught between past glories and an apparent hunger to keep writing new songs worthy of standing alongside his previous work, his live shows have necessarily become about finding a balance between the two. He knows he’s always going to have to play Oasis songs. But then why not? He wrote them, after all.
On this opening night of a six-date arena tour, Gallagher got it just right. Don’t look back in anger, indeed.
Noel Gallagher brought swagger and poise to the Wembley Arena crowd on December 14.
