Blur or Oasis? I have the answer, definitely maybe

Blur or Oasis? I always thought it was just a great marketing stroke, but now I realise I was wrong. It is the quintessential question of my entire generation. It is our “to be or not to be” — only bigger.
Initially the answer was easy. It was Oasis. Blur were great, but Oasis were next level. You’d go “out” to see Blur, but you’d go “out out” to see Oasis, and in the Nineties, it was “out out” or stay home.
Liam and Noel Gallagher were like two mad cousins who showed up uninvited at Christmas, drank everything, hijacked the stereo, caused a fight and snogged your sister’s friend. The next day, trying to find the cat, your mother was unimpressed. But, deep down, everyone knew that had been the best Christmas ever.
A devotion to Oasis, like an indiscretion at the office party or an impulsive tattoo, rarely looked as wonderful in the cold light of day. This was when Blur entered the picture. “I’m better than that normally,” you’d tell people as you reached for Parklife.
Blur were cerebral. They had depth. Oasis could never have sung in French. Françoise Hardy wouldn’t have entered a studio with Oasis without armed guards. If Blur were Proust, Oasis were Tit-Bits.
As time passed, Blur got the upper hand. Oasis split. Noel was rumoured to be in the same gym as his neighbour Paul Weller. His albums became better produced but in the age of the parental guidance sticker they were as threatening as a gummy dog. Liam still had an edge, but Beady Eye were awful.
Cigarettes and Alcohol gave way to green juice and a good skincare routine. It was dispiriting. What happened to the age of jeans cut so low you couldn’t wear knickers, you thought, as you fastened your belt under your boobs.
Blur, meanwhile, ever bookish, ever diligent, never afraid of application and hard work, thrived. The albums, the tours, the hits just kept coming. Even when Damon Albarn took up a side project, like you or I taking up pottery, it took off. Gorillaz, not even a real band, became bigger than Blur.
And then there were his side side-projects. Meandering solo albums, something about the Queen, a man and his piano. Here Albarn could sit majestically and bring to the table the kind of craic that normally only a sean-nós singer can bring to a wake. And not just any sean-nós singer, but one you suspect hasn’t really got a word of Irish and is just making that demented, Malojian sound to annoy people. Something, you have to admit, he is remarkably good at.
Blur’s ascendancy cannot have gone unnoticed in the home of Mrs Gallagher. Peggy — née Sweeney — is a good Irish mother who like all Irish mothers would never be one to let a rival’s success escape the attention of her own brood. An Irish mum doesn’t need to knit to use needles.
“Blur are doing great, aren’t they?” I can imagine her saying. “They’re playing Wembley now, I see, and is one of them in politics? No sitting on their laurels in that house.” Yes, it must have been, “Blur this” and “Blur that” 24/7 in the Gallagher family home.
Not that it was a picnic for us either. Oasis’s visit to see Tony Blair in No 10 was once held up as the nadir of the Britpop era. Pop heroes cosying up to politicians was seen as the embodiment of all that was wrong in the Nineties. We bowed our heads in shame.
Oh, to be easily offended now. Oh, for something as trivial as a band visiting Downing Street to offend me now, for something as small as that to distract me from war in Europe, climate change or ethnic cleansing. Not to mention the possible two-drink rule at airports, canned carbonara, or the plastic bottle recycling levy.
Against that backdrop the return of Oasis is the best news since the Covid vaccine. Just scrap the plastic bottle levy now and we’d have a gig to look forward to and the use of our car boot and spare room again.
Of course, Oasis return to a much-changed world. In the Nineties you could only be attacked by people standing next to you. Now, every keyboard warrior from Burnage to Bermuda can have a go. They have already been described as “the band of choice of for flag-shaggers and Reform voters”. Someone else dismissed them as more of “the same unexamined prelapsarianism”.
But honestly, I don’t think the lads will be offended by that. I mean how could they if, like most of us, they haven’t a clue what it is?
So, it’s game on. The Blur or Oasis question is back in play. But this time we know it’s much bigger than that. It’s what kind of life do you really want? Will you play it safe, read books and stuff, plan things? Or next year, are you going “out out”? Are you going to ’ave it large?