Back in August 2024, the UK was rocked by the news that Britpop icons Noel and Liam Gallagher had set aside their long-term feud and were reuniting their band Oasis for an August 2025 tour. The event brought back memories of peak Oasis-mania around 1994, at the centre of which was Nottingham ticketing shop Way Ahead. Editorial Assistant Caradoc Gayer takes us back to that time...
After weeks of rumour and speculation, Liam and Noel Gallagher announced on August 27 2024 that their legendary band Oasis was back in action for the first time since 2009, and set for a reunion tour in Summer 2025. The UK went into a total frenzy in response, and for good reason. For many, Oasis represent a tipping point, a time when rave and party culture, an incoming Blairite government, and two working class lads clawing their way to the tip-top of the UK music industry, encompassed an optimistic time when it felt like nearly anything was possible.
Things of course didn’t turn out as well as hoped. Ticketmaster’s use of dynamic pricing, upping ticket prices by as much as 250% in response to high demand, compounded with hours-long waitlists and glitching websites, has soured the good feelings of many who, at first, couldn’t have been happier about the reunion.
The internet has of course provided new, underhand ways for corporations to exploit music fans, but ticket-demand exceeding supply is nothing new, especially when it comes to Oasis. According to a certain local legend, the original ‘Oasis-ticketing-disaster’ happened right here in Nottingham, back in 1996.
The setting for this tale is Way Ahead Tickets, the now-closed independent record store and ticketing shop, which today operates as See Tickets. Back in ‘96, Way Ahead sold tickets out of a small store on St James’ Street, while overseeing just about the whole of Oasis’ What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? UK tour.
In the pre-internet days of physical tickets, it was a big job to distribute tickets for these shows, but Way Ahead managed it. The Oasis concert at Knebworth Park however, for which a staggering 250,000 tickets were on sale, was a whole other kettle of fish.
Nowadays, of course, it seems that Noel and Liam are still upending the systems that govern the UK music industry and entertainment, whether that be via their ever-controversial personas or their phone-exchange-and-internet-breaking popularity
Way Ahead tackled this enormous job by making additional sales over the phone. Unfortunately this meant that people would redial and redial Way Ahead’s number until they were lucky enough to be put through.
Moreover, two and half million people, according to the BBC, applied to attend the Knebworth show, and according to a source close to LeftLion, the resultant technical meltdown brought down Nottingham’s whole phone exchange for as long as an hour. With the addition of some enormous queues outside the shop, it’s safe to say that you wouldn’t have wanted to be in the shoes of a Way Ahead employee that day.
Nottingham’s phone exchange eventually got back up and running, and the show went ahead as planned (it later became the subject of the 2021 documentary Knebworth 1996). Nowadays, of course, it seems that Noel and Liam are still upending the systems that govern the UK music industry and entertainment, whether that be via their ever-controversial personas or their phone-exchange-and-internet-breaking popularity.
Maybe all of the resulting chaos is for the better? Perhaps, from now on we’ll all be looking at big corporations like Ticketmaster with much more of a side-glance. We’ll have to wait and see.
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