Oasis fans got a reality check yesterday (May 13) when the band’s co-manager, Alec McKinlay, told Music Week that not only is there no new album to accompany the band’s upcoming first tour in 16 years, but that the highly anticipated, sold-out jaunt itself would be “the last time around.”
Last year, Oasis singer Liam Gallagher teased fans that a new album was already finished, but that is apparently not the case in reality. “This is very much the last time around, as [group member] Noel [Gallager]’s made clear in the press,” McKinlay said. “It’s a chance for fans who haven’t seen the band to see them, or at least for some of them to. But no, there’s no plan for any new music.”
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McKinlay confirmed reports that the tour was planned in absolute secrecy to deter leaks. “We’d obviously been planning it for a while and the moment when it went live was a little bit of a step into the unknown in terms of how big the reaction would be,” he admitted. “When it all hit home, it was just phenomenal. The reaction was very much one of, ‘finally, some good news after all the nonsense that’s been going on in the world.’”
The tour begins July 4 in Cardiff, Wales, and includes more than 40 shows around the world, but will not be extended beyond that, per McKinlay. “Probably the biggest and most pleasing surprise of the reunion announcement is how huge it was internationally,” McKinlay said. “Honestly, we knew it would be big [in the U.K.], and that doesn’t take much intuition. But looking outside the U.K., we knew they had a strong fanbase. We were quite cautious about what that would mean when it came to people actually buying tickets, but we were just bowled over by how huge it was. We could have sold out half-a-dozen Rose Bowls in Pasadena and probably eight MetLife stadiums in New York in a day. We saw the ticket stats. We were watching what was happening and the demand was way beyond our expectations.”
As previously reported, the Gallaghers chose producer Steven Knight and directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace to helm a film about the reunion. Knight is a BAFTA- and Oscar-nominated multi-hyphenate who created Peaky Blinders and is also the co-creator of the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? franchise. Among his music-themed projects are the U.K. ska documentary This Town and the Angelina Jolie-starring Maria Callas biopic Maria.
Southern and Lovelace are best known for the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits and adapting former SPIN writer Lizzy Goodman’s 2000s-era New York music scene book Meet Me in the Bathroom into a film.
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