I saw Noel Gallagher at the Royal Oak Music Theatre yesterday and it was... bonkers. The meeting him bit certainly helped with that but... it was a damn fine show on it's own merits.
I've seen Oasis quite a few times. And the highlight for me way always the acoustic bits that Noel would do on his own (playing stuff like "The Masterplan") so I couldn't have been more geeked for this show.
I saw Oasis first with Travis in Detroit at the State Theatre I think? I remember an Ian Brown street team giving us free cassettes and bumper stickers after the show (after which I promptly almost killed Melissa and Lizzy and myself in a rain storm).
Second time I saw them it was pouring out (again) and Liam couldn't barely sing... they were opening for the (ugghhh) Black Crows so we weren't at that concert very long! But seriously it was so rainy I kept telling my friend "Cross your fingers and hope this is actually an exit" when driving on the highway.
The third time I saw them was when they toured for Don't Believe The Truth at UIC with my dad and my sister... despite having numerous panic attacks (god knows why) it was a great show and I kept remarking how much better Liam sounded compared to the last time I saw him. As is typical of my family when watching shows we skipped the end because we didn't want to get caught in traffic (and also because we figured we've seen Noel do the "acoustic" part of the show many times, we'd heard the singles enough times that hearing it again wasn't gonna make a difference, etc)... no rain for that show surprisingly.
So having seen them tour for Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (which actually may be one of my favourite Oasis albums, or fav albums in general... AND BEFORE YOU RIP INTO ME FOR THAT tell me that the b-side of that album isn't brilliant! I mean it's got "Gas Panic!", "Where Did It All Go Wrong", "Sunday Morning Call", and "Roll It Over" those songs are better than "She's Electric" lol), and having heard them play basically every single they'd ever written had me ready to hear the solo material last night. Had he only played one Oasis song I would have been cool with it. But once I knew that I was going to this show I had another agenda... I gotta meet this generation's equivalent of [insert the name of whoever you think is really important here].
I sort of had this feeling that "I'm gonna meet Noel tonight". I generally have a pretty good feeling for these things... I also tend to go out of my way to engineer a way to make it happen lol. Sometime that doesn't work (see the recent Arctic Monkeys show I went to for example). The other night it did!
I felt sort of bad for him because he obviously wasn't up for it. Even though there were like 6 of us waiting to talk to him? He had a cold (which I think I caught, yay!) and was obviously worn out. Thankfully he wasn't a prick like some people have been in the past because that would have ruined the music for me (and that's a lot of music to ruin.)
I'll write more about it but I wanted to get this post up before I forgot about it like so many posts before. SO WATCH THIS SPACE FOR AN UPDATE WITH MORE STORY!
Check out the setlist here.
