Principality Stadium, Cardiff Liam is on his best behaviour for a singalong show that serves as reminder of how fantastic band were during purple period * Brothers in arms: Noel and Liam reunite on the Oasis reunion tour – in pictures * ‘Liam hasn’t sounded that good since the 90s’: fans react to the first night of the Oasis reunion tour The noise from the audience when Oasis arrive onstage for their first reunion gig is deafening. You might have expected a voluble response. This is, after all, a crowd so partisan that, in between the support acts, cheer the promotional videos – the tour’s accompanying brand deals seem to involve not just the obviously Oasis-adjacent sportswear brand Adidas, but the more imponderable Land Rover Discovery. Even so, the noise they make as the reconsituted Oasis launch into Hello takes you slightly aback, and not just because Hello is a fairly ballsy choice of opener: this is, after all, a song that borrows heavily from Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again by Gary Glitter. But no one in Cardiff’s Principality Stadium seems to care about the song’s genesis – the noise is such that you struggle to think of another artist that has received such a vociferous reception. So, the success of the show seems more-or-less like a foregone conclusion. Anyone who saw them in the 00s will tell you the latter-day Oasis were a hugely variable proposition live: you never knew what mood Liam Gallagher would show up in, or how the current state of filial relations might affect their performance. But evidently as little as possible has been left to chance at these reunion gigs. No one – including, to their immense credit, Liam and Noel Gallagher – seems interested in pretending this tour is anything other than a hugely lucrative cash-grab, and clearly you only grab the maximum possible cash if the tour does not descend into the kind of bedlam to which Oasis tours were once prone. So Liam is on his best behaviour – “thanks for putting up with us”, he offers at one juncture, “I know we’re hard work”, a noticeable shift from the days when he was wont to rain abuse on the audience. Continue reading...