What’s the Story? The 1990s, Oasis and a Welsh upbringing

Rhys Llwyd, now a Baptist minister in Caernarfon, was active in several Welsh bands and served as a music columnist for Barn, the Welsh-language magazine, during the early 2000s.
As he awaits Oasis’ long-anticipated return, he reflects on how a Manchester band came to shape the soundtrack of his deeply Welsh upbringing

It was the 2nd of July 1996, the day of my 11th birthday, and I unwrapped what would become a portal into something bigger than I could have imagined. My parents had bought me a Matsui CD67 boombox—not only my first CD player, but the first in our household. The following day, I went down to Currys, which at the time had a section selling Top 40 albums, and spent my birthday money on what would become the defining soundtrack of my youth: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

By that point, the album had been out for nine months, and if memory serves, I already knew most of the tracks from hearing them on the radio— and taping them, of course. This was the pre-internet version of Napster, which in turn came before the industry invented Spotify. But my real initiation came from an unlikely place: our loft conversion.

For a few months during 1995 and 1996, we had two builders from Manchester — Paul and Simon — working in our home. They played Oasis, and specifically Morning Glory, back-to-back, all day, every day. Somehow, through ceiling joists and insulation boards, that sound embedded itself into my musical consciousness.

For a young person coming of age, the 18 months between Easter 1996 and October 1997 were culturally and politically formative. Just as I was waking up to the world, so was something bigger. That’s part of why Oasis still means so much to me—it wasn’t just a band; it was the soundtrack to everything else that was beginning to stir.

That season coincided with starting secondary school. A couple of months after getting the CD player, I got my first guitar—a battered budget Les Paul my mum bought off a sixth-former named Rhodri Darcy. He even gave me my first lessons. Many years later, I’d be reacquainted with Rhodri in a very different setting, as we now both work in different capacities for the Church – though I’m glad to report we’re both still guitar fanatics.

Despite Rhodri’s guidance, the real breakthrough came at Christmas 1996, when I was given the Oasis ‘There and Then’ VHS. It was a live concert video with highlights from their now legendary Maine Road shows. I learned to play guitar by pausing the video to study the position of Noel Gallagher’s fingers – this is how I discovered the pentatonic scale trick (the only thing you really need to play Oasis-style solos) and iconic techniques like the pick scrape.

A few months later, one of my best friends at school, who played double bass, got hold of a bass guitar, and a band was formed. That friend was Huw Thomas, now leader of Cardiff Council, where Oasis’s comeback tour is kicking off.

Another friend, Cynyr Rhys, was involved too. And, remarkably, we had a drummer for a time named Rhodri Shaw, who went on to become a successful visual and video engineer. One of the highlights of his career so far? Running visuals for Liam Gallagher’s 2022 Knebworth shows. It blows my mind to think back to those early rehearsals and see where life took us.

As I mentioned, Oasis meant so much to me not just because of the music, but because it was the soundtrack to a political awakening. By 1997, Morning Glory was already regarded as a classic, and we were waiting with growing anticipation for the third album, Be Here Now. And right in the heart of all this came the General Election on 1 May 1997.

Whatever we may now feel about New Labour or Tony Blair’s legacy, especially in the light of the Iraq War, there’s no denying that his victory carried with it a real sense of hope. The Conservatives had been in power for 18 long years, and as millennials, we had known nothing else.

Despite the cultural differences between my Welsh upbringing and Oasis’ Union Jack-draped Englishness (although they are actually Irish), there was a sense of solidarity. What families in Burnage endured under Thatcher wasn’t all that different to the struggles experienced in our Welsh communities.

I still remember the moment at the 1996 Brit Awards when Noel Gallagher declared from the stage: “There are seven people in this room giving a little bit of hope to young people in this country — me, our kid, Bonehead, Guigsy, Alan White, our manager, and Tony Blair.” Even as an 11-year-old, I felt the weight of it. It wasn’t just a rock star making a political statement, it was a moment that captured the cultural mood.

That same year also brought the death of Princess Diana, the YES vote in the Welsh Referendum to establish the Welsh Assembly, and the rise of Cool Cymru, Wales’s own answer to Britpop, with bands like Stereophonics and Catatonia at the forefront. Manic Street Preachers, of course, marched to their own drum. They never quite fit neatly into Britpop or Cool Cymru, they were too intellectual, and all the more brilliant for it.

In the space between that election and the referendum, Oasis released Be Here Now, on 21 August 1997. I was still only 12. Interestingly, it came out the same week that Super Furry Animals released their second album, Radiator. I remember going to Andy’s Records in Aberystwyth to buy Be Here Now with my pocket money, and Andy tried to talk me into buying Radiator instead. That moment has always stayed with me.

That summer, I also got my first proper guitar, a sunburst Epiphone Les Paul Studio. I played it until it physically broke. But the connection I’d made with the music, with the era—was unbreakable.

Being so young during the height of Oasis’s 1990s fame, I never got the chance to see them live at the time. That changed in July 2002, when I was 17. A big group of us travelled by train from Aberystwyth to London to see them at Finsbury Park, part of their Heathen Chemistry Tour and their fifth studio album.

Although I have fond memories of the trip, I can’t honestly say I enjoyed the gig. By 2002, the crowd had shifted—Oasis fans were now angrier, louder, more resentful. There were fights, people throwing pints of urine, and at times it felt like survival was more important than the music. But I’m still glad I went. I saw them, and I have that memory.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to see both Liam and Noel live. Liam in 2022 was a celebration, a nostalgic, euphoric evening. Noel in 2023 was something else entirely: a masterclass in musicality and craft. Both experiences meant a great deal to me, and both were light years away from the wildness of Finsbury Park.

Last summer, after returning from my annual break from the churches I serve, I was looking forward to getting stuck into work, but found myself entirely distracted by the build-up to Oasis’s comeback tour. Late one Thursday night, an email landed: I had been selected at random in the pre-sale ballot. On Friday, the code arrived. I logged in, waited nervously, held my breath as the system loaded, refreshed, searched—and then came the ping from my banking app. I had the tickets. We were in. And this time, I’m not going alone. I’m taking my son, who, uncannily, is now the same age I was when it all began.

I love Oasis’s music. It’s pop music, yes, but through an overdrive pedal — and what’s not to love about that? But more than the music, it’s about what the music carries with it. A return to those golden years of the 1990s, when the ghosts of the past seemed to be fading and a new dawn was breaking.

For us millennials, it was a time when we were just coming of age, still free from real responsibility. And, crucially, we didn’t yet have the internet to distract us. But time moved on. We discovered Tony Blair wasn’t the messiah, the economy tanked just as we were trying to find jobs and buy homes, and Oasis imploded one fateful night in Paris, 2009.

And yet, here we are, 15 years later, and I’m preparing to see them again. I’ll be two days past my 40th birthday, standing in a crowd once more. But this time, I’ll be standing beside my son, as the music plays. And with it, everything else returns.

Check out all the latest Oasis stories on Nation Cymru HERE