I believe everything I read in the papers. I make a point of it. From there on in, it's just a matter of finding ways to rationalize those beliefs, convert them into codes for living, construct a water-tight defense for something you kind of know isn't true. In an age without religion, it's things like this that hold us together.

But, sometimes, it's not that something isn't true, just that it hides its truth. i came to Irvine half in love; I considered Oasis some kind of indulgence, almost a guilty pleasure I had my reasons.

It all seemed dead -- old guitars, charity shop tunes, rock 'n' roll "attitude" worn down to a quarter-hearted snear, like washed to rags hospital sheets. All Oasis had ever seemed to generate was hallow, unfounded optimism; all those songs soaked in a kind of empty, non- specific triumphalism, and try finding a single press clipping from the last twelve months that doesn't bang on about some supposed "new dawn for British music", along with endless unexplained assurances, that somehow, thanks to Oasis, Everything's Going To Be Alright. How? Why?

Tonight, I leave with tears behind my eyes. Won over. Enlightened? Finally, beautifully fooled? Whatever. I stood in the crowd in a muggy marquee on a miserable Friday evening, pools of rain stored high in the canvas coming loose and plopping down the back of a borrowed sweater -- Oasis strode on, plugged in, piled into "Acquiesce", and I felt like The Mighty Thor.

So, this one goes out to the irritated futurists who have Oasis down as an irrelevance at best, or, at worst, everything that was ever wrong with everything ever. Just because a sabre-toothed, champagne-pink tiger is born in the coal shed, doesn't make it a lump of coal. Explain to me why blind refusal is in any way less stupid than blind acceptance if you THINK A LITTLE, you might find that Oasis aren't what you think.

Yes, I'll Explain.

At some point on Friday night, I flashed back to a half-remembered Maker live review from early last year. Something like this: "So we'll go on pretending we've created a scene our children will want to hear about... the hell they will. This has to end." I remember vaguely concurring at the time. And now I'm thinking who gives a f*** what our bloody children think?

That whale Rock N Roll Heritage schtick, lineage and posterity and caring about anything other than NOW, it's gone, it's over. It means nothing to post post-modernism, in fractured times. Which doesn't exclude Oasis' pilferings. (I'd love them more if they maybe drew on something that's happened in pop since 1977), but it sure as hell doesn't excuse criticism rooted in the same outmoded way of thinking. Pensions are not the point.

And maybe empty optimism is, in these times, a perfectly valid creation. Its blind immediacy, its poignancy, I think of riding home at dawn in black cabs, a headful of light and snow ("Live Forever"; Liam hurls a tambourine in the air, Noel throws back his head and sighs...). I think of the flash of the moment, lights so bright they hurt, music closing down the long, open perspectives that dog us with regret, or dread, or other, less concentrated moments in our lives ("Some Might Say"; explosions inside).

Also: I watched Oasis two night running. On Friday they placed a pretty amazing live rock n roll show, and I saw adoration (applause like planets colliding, people folded over the crash barriers like cheques). On Saturday, they played what I'm close to accepting was the most exciting live rock 'n' roll show I've ever seen in my life, (endless, unstoppable chants of "Oasis,Oasis", and I saw insanity face down the front like 15th century paintings of sinners burning in hell, the final feedback feast dissolving into the PA playing "Hey Jude", 8,000 people singing along and, backstage, Noel blinks away real tears).

Trying to maintain traditional reservations in the face of this intensity of feelings is like trying to argue with Judge Dredd. These emotions exist, for any opinion of Oasis to be remotely valid, you have to accept that, deal with it, or you've got your head up your arse. Which isn't to say that popularity means you're beyond criticism, just that popularity brings you extra considerations that after everything. So what if that hysteria adds and extra oomph, elevate Oasis to something a little more exciting than they are? That's pop, isn't it?

Also, much of the bile Oasis receives is in fact contempt for their audience. That's not unfair in itself (bands, Simon Price says, always get they audience they deserve), but its the easy option. OK, along with Weller, Oasis are the perfect example of the kind of band loved by those who gabble on about "real music", "real instruments", and "real people", the sort of constipated, visionless nomarks who prefer Fleetwood Mac circa "Rumours"/"Tusk" (peculiar, multi-layered, completely artificial sounding). And, oddly enough, Fleetwood Mac -- next band up for rediscovery, incidently -- are a nice comparison: both Oasis and the Mac are fairly trad rock 'n' roll band elevated to something special as un-rock 'n' roll as their properties. See, that's what hey authenticity gang can't grasp: if Lindsey Buckingham turned rock to gold dust by tampering with the mix until everything sounded not quite right, then Noel is Lindsey on even more cake (artistically, not literally -- that would be impossible), pumping everything up until the boundaries between instruments almost dissolve, creating a kind of hypersound, as intricate and as in-your-face as a TV screen full of static.

And it's also the sound -- that overdrivers, sneering wallop somehow elevated into the rushing in your ears as you enter heaven -- that makes Oasis so compelling: the tug between lumpenness (real life, the everyday) and longing (the blissful retreat of "Slide Away"), kicks and kisses, between their "Down-to-earth" laddishness and the hints of femininity (through riot effemmacy) you'd have to be a hammerhead to miss (the tender, yearning feeling of their best songs, the fact that Liam's not handsome, he's pretty.)

The hotel, afterwards, I collapse at the piano. Hardly anyone about, so I start to play the opening chords of "Live Forever". Instantly, as if by magic, Paul Mather appears with Liam, Liam puts his drink on the piano, motions at me to carry on, and starts to sing along. Three seconds later, a couple of 14-year-old girls walk into the bar with their parents, look over and feel their hearts stopping, impossible looks on their faces.

As they scramble for words and scraps of paper, I stop playing and sidle away smiling, actually feeling for the first time in recent memory as if anything actually mattered, as if life were worthwhile, as if anybody really loved anybody else. As if someone, if you were to look long enough and hard enough, there was something good in the world.

Sometimes, if you think a little, you understand more than if you think a lot.

Melody Maker: 22 July, 1995
author: Taylor Parkes