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The real magic of Oasis? They made a better kind of Britain seem briefly possible | Alex Niven

Ignore for now what they became and recall the radical vision that fuelled their rise – and made the nation embrace them, writes academic and author Alex Niven

Beyond all the noise about chart battles, sibling rivalry and Cool Britannia, the Oasis narrative was such a powerful one because it pointed to how a valuable new form of “ oceanic feeling ” – Sigmund Freud’s term for an all-embracing mass consciousness – might emerge in Britain in the dying days of the 20th century. Living in south Manchester in the Thatcherite 80s, the teenage Gallagher brothers would build up a deep store of anger at the savagely anti-working-class policies of a Conservative government intent on dismantling the welfare state and restoring the power of British elites who had been disenfranchised in the postwar years. But it is surely not too much of a stretch to say that, as well as enjoying the power of the melodies themselves, one of the things the audience at these gigs will be feeling is a peculiar form of togetherness and collective hopefulness that is difficult to find in British culture outside rare, nation-transforming, once-in-a-generation examples like Oasis.

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