It's Labour Day. Eight days ago I was in Toronto, enjoying a concert. Time flies!
In the 90s, BritPop was my jam. I visited the UK in late 1994 and devoured the music press I found over there, and then devouring all the music I could find when I got back home to BC. Blur was my favourite, but I was deeply enamoured of Pulp and Suede and Manics and more. And then there was Oasis.
Look, in the whole Battle of BritPop thing, I wanted Blur to win. I can admit, however, that Oasis ultimately won out. I did like a lot of their first two albums as well, but didn't really stick with them after that. An occasional song, that's it. Their tumultuous break up brought me no join, just kind of a resignation that it was about time given all the shenanigans. I figured that I would never get to see them live, and appreciated that seeing Noel and his group were likely to be the closest I would get. I had seen Blur, Pulp, Supergrass, Suede, Manics, and a few others musical acts from that era. Oasis, though. An opportunity I never had.
And then they announced a reunion tour with stops in North America.
I couldn't even get into the queue for tickets for the two concerts here in Pasadena, but a friend of Allison's in Toronto pinned down tickets for four, and that included me. So, Toronto it was!
I'll comment on Toronto more in another post, so let me focus on the concert here. And let's get the not-so-great out of the way: that venue, the new Rogers Stadium way north in the city, was not good. From what I know, it's temporary - 5-10 years of planned lifespan - and built only for concerts, not sports. It isn't far from two subway stations, but it is a trek across an old airfield to and from those stations. There is next to no shelter, and all of the energy and noise from the crowd dissipated upward rather than bouncing back to the band and feeding on itself. And that lack of shelter means that we all got rained on for the last hour and a quarter of the show. It also meant that if there had been more than (I swear) those two flashes of lightning, then where would all 50,000 of us have gone?
Allison and I got the the venue minutes before the main act went on (we had barely heard of the opener and were fine missing them) and managed to scoot through a merchandise store, buying a t-shirt each (to go with the football jersey that I had bought earlier that day and wore to the venue)
and getting to our seats right as the introductory music blared forth.
From there, it was two hours (with a handful of minutes between the main set and four-song encore) of the hits and some select B-sides/album tracks with the crowd around us singing along.
The band was in fine form,
the rain came down,
and we had a great time.
The show ended a few minutes before 11, and we joined the thousands streaming to the subway stations. On the way south, between stops, there were Oasis fans singing their songs together. Fun! Allison headed home, and I made it back to my hotel just after midnight. I was due to head to the airport around about 6AM the next morning, and I needed to come down from the concert high and get to bed.
I do have Pulp again later this month, which is great, and who knows what BritPop there is left to see - I'd love to get to see Manics again and Sleeper if they ever reunited and came this way. But I've checked Oasis off the list, thanks to Allison, and I am thrilled that I got to do so.
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