Letter from Murrayfield

Molly Stubbs

As a teenager, amid ‘the desperate search for self’ most of us go through during our youth, I built my personality around British indie-rock bands.

Morning drives to school featured The Fratellis, The Charlatans, Blur. At lunchtime it was The La’s, Pulp, Supergrass, The Kooks, Coldplay. Sunset accompaniments included the Happy Mondays, The Smiths, Joy Division, and The Strokes for a bit of transatlantic flair. At any time, eternally, it was and is The Stone Roses. All were an inheritance bequeathed to me by my father.

Oasis, however, were a discovery all my own.

In 2012, the record player renaissance in its opening chapters, I wandered around Kelly’s Records in Cardiff Market picking out my aforementioned favourites. Upon seeing the vinyl collection clutched against my chest, and the wad of birthday money produced from my purse, the old fella behind the till pulled down from the rafters a limited edition double-disc titled ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’

Not wanting to appear as if I didn’t like ‘the classics’, let alone that I had little idea who Oasis were or what they sounded like (don’t forget, my entire existence was based on knowing these things), I shelled out £80 for the record and went home.

Add thirteen years to my age and another zero to that price tag, and you’ve got tickets to night one of Oasis’ Live ’25 reunion tour at Edinburgh’s Scottish Gas Murrayfield.

Prologue: Bridgend, 31 August 2024

I am awoken at 8.50 am by my husband shaking my arm and telling me I should’ve set an alarm since “Simon’s been on Ticketmaster since 6.30 and he’s 33,000th in the queue!”

Well, here we go.

Four days previously, two days before their album ‘Definitely Maybe’ turned 30, Manchester-bred rock band Oasis announced their reunion tour. Presumably dying for a bit of cash, the Gallagher brothers put aside their era defining and destroying disputes to come together for another round of shows up and down the British Isles. 

Telling myself I’m not that bothered if I don’t end up fighting through tens of millions of people clawing their way toward the Ticketmaster home page, I rub the sleep out of my eyes, pull my laptop out from its bedside drawer, crack my knuckles, and dive in.

Cardiff, the tour’s opening night, is a no-go. I’m already 180,000th in a queue with the website gently reminding me via pop-up that there’s not many tickets left and I should probably give up now since I’m fighting a losing battle.

I don’t really even care if I don’t get to go. I’m shaking because I’m dehydrated and my stomach’s doing flips because I haven’t had breakfast yet and I’m frantically checking Oasis’ twitter to see if it’s a sellout because I want the best for the boys and I’m cycling through a thousand social medias cursing everyone who’s already secured their seats because … Oh, what’s the point in lying. I need these tickets!

Speeding around the internet like something straight out of a William Gibson novel, I notice that the Edinburgh dates are being marketed through an entirely different website to those for the rest of the UK. Switching tactics, I head onto SeeTickets, which redirects me to Ticketmaster, to find that I’m 15,000th in the queue! I say a quick prayer of thanks to the Rock Gods, and wait.

The bones in my fingers grinding together with the force that I am using to cross them, I watch the number get smaller and smaller and smaller. That evil pop-up appears again reminding me that there’s basically no tickets left, oh well, who even cares about Oasis? And now Ticketmaster, the malevolent dictator, is disappearing entire swathes of tabs and kicking people out of its domain without prejudice.

After six painful hours, I’m redirected to Scottish Gas Murrayfield’s stadium seating plan. It’s not over yet.

Lighting up like a switchboard, 60,000 seats randomly appearing and disappearing, thousands of others like me watch their luck run out, trapped in the churn as the final hurdle grows bigger and bigger.

And now the prices are getting bigger too. £172 per seat, ‘sorry these seats are no longer available’. £245 per seat, ‘you cannot leave an empty seat at the end of a row’. £357 per seat, ‘sorry these seats do not exist’.

A few hours ago, I jokingly told my husband that £800 was my upper limit. Now, as I somehow make it through to the checkout page with two tickets priced at £375 very, very firmly in my basket, I rip my already-sobbing debit card from its case and type in the necessary numbers.

‘You’re in! Thanks for purchasing Oasis tickets’.

Calm and composed, casual like, I walk out to the garden to tell my husband that we’re going to Scotland. And, since he gave up on getting tickets at 9.08 this morning, he’ll be buying the hotel room and doing the seven-hour drive. Fair’s fare.

The Main Event: Edinburgh, 8 August 2025 

“All the English booked up the Cardiff tickets so we had to come up here.” I smile guiltily at the hotel receptionist. It’s a line I’ll use a few times over the coming day. I don’t regret depriving two Scottish fans of Oasis tickets, but I do feel a little bit like a colonial invader.

“Yeah, Cardiff was the opening night after all,” the acne-pocked teenager replies. “I’m going on Tuesday, so let me know if they end up breaking up at your show.”

We giggle, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Thank God for Celtic solidarity.

Dressed to the eights in brown chords and a t-shirt reading ‘I’m #1 so why try harder’, I positively leap off the Big Green Coach, almost forgetting my ‘Ta, drive’, and run across the road toward the purple turnstiles at Murrayfield’s western stands.

In a sea of Man-City-blue branded with stripes and the monochromatic Oasis logo, my United-supporting husband (who two hours earlier I’d had to rip out of his vintage Beckham shirt for fear of offending Liam and Noel) and I begin to feel slightly out of place. But it’s all good, I’ve already taken out a second mortgage to buy some merchandise.

Only the first two merch stands don’t have the shirt that I want, and the queues around the stadium are starting to resemble something out of Gorbachev’s Russia. As the Spaniard behind me dutifully translates and practices the line ‘Number seven in a size of large, please’, I accost the poor woman behind the desk.

“Please tell me you have the gold Adidas shirt?!”

“Umm…yeah, I think so. What size?”

“Any size! Any size, I don’t care!”

Success. I stroll away with plastic-wrapped shirt clutched to my heart and my bank account £75 lighter. Although I am now so tightly wound that I barely make it up the banking to sit out the openers.

Not to worry. A very Scottish guardian angel is about to descend.

Oldschoolers 

In the car on the M6 and spinning through local radio stations, we landed on what I think was a BBC broadcast. The presenter and his guest were laughing, “Seeing people over 50 wearing bucket hats…you guys are so uncool! You need to take it off.”

I’d have to live my life over again to be over 50, but this still irked me. The over 50s are the originals. You let them wear their bucket hats and their army green Parka jackets and their Pretty Green shirts in peace, and you salute them for building the culture you get to imitate and enjoy. In return, you get some cracking stories.

“I’m gonna sit down here and I’m gonna have a joint,” a ropey older gentleman towers over us, “if you don’t mind?”

“Not at all.” I smile widely.

“Oldschool,” he begins, and I know we’re in for a treat. “I’m Jim fae Edinburgh.”

“I’m Molly from Pontypridd, and this is my husband Steve from Port Talbot.”

“Oh, Port Talbot! I worked on the Chimneys down there. Fucking Tata!”

“Fucking Tata,” we chorus. “We had to come up here because the English bought up all the tickets to Cardiff.”

“Fucking English.”

“Fucking English!”

“Nae bother. This’ll be a party.”

After telling us about his past stealing tickets from touts and affirming that, at 61 and lighting up potentially the largest spliff I have ever seen, his days of drug-taking are over, I ask if this is his first Oasis concert.

“Is it fuck! I’ve been taking my wee son to these concerts for years, but he’s married now and she’s straight as a pen which is why I’ve run off,” he guffaws. “We seen ’em at Balloch Park back twenty years ago. There was a Burger Van selling burger and chips for £7…so we flipped it over!”

“We’ve just had fish and chips for £13 down there.”

“Eh, let’s get on it. I’ll tell you, though, the best show I ever seen was in a pub. We was all there having a drink and then these two big security guards come in so we’re all like ‘what the hell is happening here?’ And then in walks Liam and Noel, and there was a couple of guitars about the place and they said ‘can we have a go?’ They played a couple of songs and we was all like…WOW! Liam was seeing the bird fae Girls Aloud at the time but you know what Liam’s like, he had some girl in Edinburgh was with ’em and she pours a drink on his head and then they left. WOW!”

I reluctantly tell Jim that we’re going to find our seats. He shakes my hand, then offers to help me down the deceptively-steep hill. But a 61-year-old isn’t the best counterweight to my 120 kilos, so I end up scooting down the entire thing on my grassy arse and Jim doubles over anyway, laughing as we leave him behind.

Completely unrelated to Jim’s drug use, this is the point at which I start to get existential.

Circling a packed-out Murrayfield, we move at a rate of a thousand faces per second. Each one with its own story, its own fictions made fact by the skill with which they’re regaled, each one soon to be unknown to me for the rest of my life and yet suspended for the next few hours together with all the others. Eternal. Scots and Welsh and English and Irish, Spanish and German and Japanese and Korean, students and staff, coppers and criminals, old-schoolers and infants, real fans and radio fans and all of humankind.

Noel Gallagher likes to talk about how the crowds he played to in the ’90s are dead and gone. I disagree.

As I pull the monobrowed security guard at the entrance to our section out of his trance, the smile on his face as he looks up at the thousands looking back down at Richard Ashcroft remains. It affirms: this is a thing of incontestable beauty.

Richard Ashcroft announces his closer with ‘I’m honoured to be supporting the best rock and roll band of all time, here’s the best rock song ever written,’ the crowd gets to its feet as one being for Bittersweet Symphony. I’m already crying, and Oasis aren’t even here.

It doesn’t take long though, as the closing beats of Born Slippy ring out, for the ripple to reach us. Two Land Rovers pull up next to the stage, and out gets a bucket-hatted Gallagher with his brother in tow. The scream I let out is entirely involuntary.

Epilogue: Tebay Northbound, 9 August 2025

I’ve been writing for the majority of my life. I like to think I have a pretty good vocabulary. But the task I undertake over my sausage and mash to describe to you the experience of watching Oasis perform requires more than language. As Noel Gallagher once sang over a video of Rhys Ifans as an undertaker, ‘Son, words fail me.’

I could rip out the piece of my memory, the handful of my soul that’s tied to Section 16, Row X, Seat 10 at Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium and offer it to you, and it still wouldn’t do the night justice.

Technically, sonically, it was near perfect. Better than the record but faithful ’til the end, the solos were everlasting and any lines wavering under reverb were clarified by the choir. No amount of cigarettes and alcohol could contend with those legendary vocal cords. Noel sang the harmonies so the crowd could have their moment, teared up in Talk Tonight, hugged his brother, smiled. Liam balanced his tambourine on his head, eyes disappearing under his hat, sunshiiine disappearing down the sides of the earth. There was no let up, no quiet part. Just choon after absolute choon.

But there was more to it than that.

‘Perhaps the best one I’ve ever been to,’ I text my dad as I scroll through TikTok comments on videos of the night before.

‘The best night of my life.’

‘How is it possible to be even better 16 years later?’

‘Biblical’

Maybe a comparison will help? Imagine that Shakespeare came back to life and took up a director’s seat for a showing of Romeo and Juliet. Or that Glyndŵr was resurrected for an S4C special.

Or if, all of a sudden, after years of anxiety and agoraphobia and bills and traffic jams and washing up, the songs that have soundtracked your life are being sung by tens of thousands of people whose hands you’re holding, and time stands still, and this is the reason you’re alive. This is why you kept going.

This is why.

God willing, one day I will be an oldschooler. By then the arthritis, cocaine and spite will have done the Gallaghers in, but I’ll still tell my children I was there, in 2025, for the fraternal reunion. When all of humankind gathered to watch the brothers sing.

£800? Oh well. Money is fleeting. Oasis are forever.