Oasis - Wembley Arena, London - Thursday 16th October 2008

After a sneak preview of the new Oasis material and show in Canada last month, here was the real thing - London dates, with the full Oasis experience back at home again. Of course, seeing Oasis in the UK is somewhat more authentic (the Canadians, much as they loved the band, couldn't beat the fanaticism of a UK crowd) - but it does also mean spending your evening with more than a few total idiots. And not just the ones on stage, there are usually rather a lot of them in the crowd too.

Tonight, however, the idiocy was confined mainly to the venue management and security. Given that Wembley Arena is one of the more soulless and expensive places to watch a band in any case in my experience, they really have to go some to make it much worse - but they managed to. Arriving outside just after 8pm, I eventually got inside just before 9pm, missing the first 3 songs of the Oasis set in the process. There were 2 people scanning tickets, which was taking a hopelessly long time, so the queues were backing up all around the venue. Add some inept and especially officious security, and it was obvious there were going to be problems. Totally unacceptable from a venue that claims to be "world class". When you charge £40+ for tickets, the venue really should be hiring enough staff to get people inside, and able to see what they paid for - otherwise they are just taking their money, and expecting paying punters to put up with it. Whatever the excuses were, they weren't good enough.

When I did eventually get into the arena to watch Oasis, the set was the same as the standard for this tour so far. My Big Mouth, which they had played a week or so ago, was sadly dropped again, and Live Forever was still missing. But, all the recent set staples were there, and having listened some more to some of the new album, tunes like I'm Outta Time sounded like they could be real growers. All in all, the band sounded on top form, really good and loud, and it was a very good set. Liam and Noel didn't seem especially up for it, and did look to be going through the motions a little bit - but they sounded very solidly great.

This show was filmed and shown live on MTV, so we had the strange situation that the main room lights were on throughout the show. This did mean that it didn't really seem like being at a gig in some respects. Just as TV companies can screw paying football fans around by changing kickoff times, it seems that they can screw paying music fans too, by leaving the lights on at gigs! Still, as long as the people watching from their sofas enjoyed the show, that's all that matters - they are the people that keep the live music industry afloat, after all...

So, a great set from Oasis, but lots of other things around the gig were far from great. Which is a real shame, because it must be a bummer for Oasis to play a really good show, but have idiots around them meaning that many people still have a bad overall experience. Apparently there were many hundreds of fake tickets that didn't get people into this show too, quite apart from those with valid tickets needing an hour to get in due to crap security Judging by the army of touts outside beforehand, plus another army of fake merchandise sellers outside afterwards, and those crap security guards and greedy venue management; there certainly were plenty of scumbags around to ruin people's days. This kind of thing happens to Oasis more than most other bands - a sign of how successful they were, and how big and important they still are as a band. Really good set from a great band - but a shame that so many parasites (outside the venues) and incompetents (managing the venues) manage to dampen the experience.