You're in an Oasis cover band. What happens now?
Some thought they were screwed — they couldn't have been more wrong
By Jack Dulhanty
When Pete Martin, 34, first saw the announcement that Oasis would be reuniting for their first live performances in 15 years, the possible risk posed to his tribute act did not occur to him. Instead, “I just went back to being a ten-year-old,” he tells me, sitting in Rigby Music, in Stockport, where he spray paints guitars part-time. “All I could think was: holy shit, how can I get tickets?” When his initial euphoria subsided, he remembered that he leads an Oasis cover band. “Ah,” he thought. “We might be screwed.”
But it doesn’t seem that way when I arrive at the band’s practice studio — a sweltering loft at the top of Hallam Mill in Stockport — for their Friday afternoon rehearsal. BBC World was just leaving as I was coming down the hallway. The walls are studded with Manchester City shirts and wooden beams cross the vaulted ceiling like gallows. Beneath the beams, the band plays Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, sweating in green parkas and outdoor jackets in the heat.
The band’s Liam, a 42-year-old called Chris Jackson who grew up in Moss Side and went to Burnage High School, cranes his neck and sings in that inflamed way. Pete rocks the neck of his guitar with every vibrato, and the rhythm and bass guitarists — Andy, 40, and Adam, 34 — huddle together and play inconspicuously. The drummer’s name is Tommy; he’s from Norfolk. The band, Whatever Oasis, have been performing since 2019, and over those five years have managed to do more than just play the chords in order — they’ve recreated the sound and energy of the original band too. As well as one can while also working full-time.
Tribute bands can serve many purposes. They might be merchants of nostalgia, allowing people to enjoy the simulacrum of a band they can no longer experience live due to the cruel passage of time. I’m thinking here about, say, the Bootleg Beatles or Zed Leppelin. Other tributes can give people the chance to get a taste of acts that are still touring, but they’d never be able to access because of price or demand. Think: Antarctic Monkeys and Slimboy Fat.
But for the last decade and a half, Oasis tribute bands have been able to offer fans something much more potent: a dream. The looming yet distant possibility of the band’s reformation has been central to the allure of its tributes, who could play on the fantasy of the Gallagher brother’s reconciliation. “With the real Oasis not looking like getting back together anytime soon,” one band’s about page still, ironically, reads, “this is definitely the next best thing.”
So what now? Well, perhaps counterintuitively, there has never been a better time to form an Oasis tribute band. In an attempt to capitalise on the excitement, venues have rushed to book them. As of yesterday, August 30, the website for Definitely Mightbe, one of the UK’s most prominent Oasis tribute bands, was still down because its bandwidth limit had been exceeded. One tribute band member told me they had already been flooded with requests over last weekend, when the reunion was still rumoured, and this past Wednesday, they had a dozen requests by 10am.
It’s been no different for Whatever Oasis. While Pete was worrying that his band may be about to become redundant, Andy Bollington, the group’s Bonehead, was watching their email inbox near enough burst into flames. “We’ve had to turn down probably 20 shows since yesterday,” he said earlier this week.
Whatever Oasis are unique in that they are the only tribute act on the circuit whose members are almost all from Manchester. Pete, Andy and Adam are from Stockport, and grew up not far from Burnage, where the Gallagher’s also grew up. They believe this speaks to their authenticity. The band’s regular Liam, Darryl, is from Denton. He couldn’t make it to rehearsal yesterday, or to the BBC interview (“his boss is a twat”), so Chris was drafted in. They work various jobs when they aren’t onstage: Pete and Andy in IT (though Peter has recently quit to become a session musician), while Darryl works at a factory making car polish and bassist Adam Grainger is a children’s entertainer who also hosts after school science clubs. “And I do some karaoke too,” he says, without elaborating. “Between all that, I can just about make a living.”
All of them were formerly in original bands, trying to make it themselves. But life got in the way. They bought houses, got jobs, became fathers (not in that order) and, to quote Pete, “got tired of playing to empty rooms”. This is the flipside of the coin when it comes to tribute bands. While the audience gets a taste of what it might be like to watch a legendary band live, the tribute act in turn gets a sense of what it’d be like to write music people know and adore.
“There’s times where you stop singing and everyone’s just singing back to you,” Andy reminisces. “It’s just a great feeling. Even though they aren’t your songs, they feel like yours, if that makes sense.”
Tribute bands supply steady gigs to musicians who are struggling to make it under their own steam. And seeing Oasis songs are “a piece of piss, to be honest”, says Pete, it’s no wonder there’s a competitive market, with bands cropping up all over the country. But the sheer amount of them also has its advantages. Bands will call each other up to sub in a Liam or a Bonehead if their bandmate is ill or can’t make it to a gig. At the end of the day, all these guys are doing the same thing.
But that leaves tight margins for differentiation, so some of the heavyweight bands will go the extra mile to give audiences as authentic an experience as possible. For example, Oasish — founded in 2004 and based in Reading — use all the same amps and gear the real band used in its heyday; they wear the exact same clothes the brothers used to wear; and their Noel even plays a guitar once used by the actual Noel Gallagher. “We have the paperwork to prove it,” says Paul Higginson, the band’s founder and frontman. In these cases, it isn’t just about covering songs; it’s historical reenactment.
The market being so saturated can lead to tensions, with bands accusing each other of taking gigs for free to undercut more major players. Few bands make a living off their work. Whatever Oasis wouldn’t charge much more than £1,500 a gig — “it works out less than minimum wage sometimes,” says Pete. Paul, however, runs Oasish as a full time job, alongside a Stereophonics tribute act.
Paul appears to relish the competition. A few years ago Oasish won two National Tribute Music Awards (the ceremony didn’t survive the pandemic), and the way Paul defended his band’s honour — without my asking — perhaps gives an impression of the bitterness that exists within the Oasis tribute band sector, so to speak:
“All of them will be saying: ‘oh, you know, that was given to you’. Well, they weren’t saying that when they were applying for it. They were all after the same award that we got, and we were the ones that got it, twice,” he says. “And it was nothing to do with the people running it — people keep saying that — we won that on merit and that’s that. That’s the end of it.” A pause, and then: “But no, I mean, I don’t mind the other Oasis tributes.”
Paul, too, has seen a rise in gig requests. But seeing he is booked for most of the year already, he’s turning pretty much all of them down. This will mean the work trickling out to other bands, which he ultimately seems to support: “it’s a celebration, mate, of the music of Liam and Noel and of them getting back together as well.” That’s felt elsewhere too: my barber told me the other day that his whole shop is being sent for refresher lessons on Mod haircuts, because their boss is expecting such a surge in demand.
But for the tributes, it's kind of like everyone else has finally caught up with them. They’ve been Oasis obsessives for years. Paul has been working on a theatre production called As we were which will tell the history of the band. He called Clint Boon, a friend and former member of the Inspiral Carpets — a band Noel was a roadie for — to record the narration for the show.
Last September, Clint called Paul and asked him what the show was about. “It’s going to start with them at Knebworth Park”, Paul explained, meaning the show the band played at the park in 1996, when they were at the peak of their powers. Then, the band would split and the show would follow Noel and Liam through two separate storylines.
“Then at the end,” Paul told Clint, “we’ll give everybody the big thing that we know we’re not going to get — but everyone is screaming for it — and that’s the reunion.”
Clint had just had Noel on his XS Manchester radio show the week before, and heard the news off-air. He needed to keep it under his hat, and yet, he paused.
“Erm, I’m not so sure about that mate.”
(Paul is now reworking his ending.)
Nice story.