I went to see Oasis at Wembley Stadium on Saturday. It was all a bit last minute and nicely discounted, but was a fantastic spectacle. If you pointed the speaker stacks in the stadium up at the sky and played the instrumental bit from 'Live and Let Die', the sonic blasts could probably take down a Boeing 747. Al Qaeda Wings fans take note. The visual displays are so flabbergastingly awesome that they were able to make Noel Gallagher's haircut look not shit. You also have to pay £4.00 for a pint of flat Carlsberg. It's a remarkable place.
The only problem with Oasis, other than the unashamed volume of plagiarism and monkey genetics (the boys are so simian that I thought we'd ended up at a Gorillaz concert - oh, the irony) is, when massed together, their fans could well be confused with the 'International Cunts Convention' - which was actually taking place next-door at Wembley Arena. A larger collection of coked up scallies, wideboys and mini-cab drivers was rarely witnessed. We used to export these types to Australia, now instead we intern them in Wembley Stadium for a few hours a night to give the rest of the UK a bit of a breather. Most spent much of the gig commuting back and forth to the bar to make sure they had drank the 12 pints necessary to exclude them of accusations of homosexuality. Even then, they must have actually ordered 14...allowing them the obligatory 2 extra to hurl at other people in the crowd. It's not all bad though. When Oasis finally appeared (after Kasabian and 'Kasaboasis, it's got a lady'), the scallywags were so delighted that they threw plastic pints up into the air like a staggered fireworks display, thus already outdoing the opening ceremony planned for the 2012 London Olympics.
Being a bit of a social anthropologist (i.e. sniffy) I observed the easy back and forth of the stadium savage. For example, at one point I was having a wee at one of the many overflowing piss troughs around the stadium when some girls walked in. One of the men standing next to me said. "Aaa cam there's so many gels saddenley come in?". "Well" said the toilet attendant, taking his cue: "Gels only go into the toilit in gwoops of fawa, dan't they" causing a ripple of mirth and wheezing amongst the gentlemen. Delighted by his own comic genius, the attendant continued. "Oi, gels. Get aaat, yeah? If you is gonna stay in ere, least you cud do is suck my cock!" The queue of full bladders broke into yet greater bouts of lung collapsing chucking was met with one of the 'gels' saying "Oi! Cheeky!" in a flirtatious, mock-outraged manner. Enjoying the mastery of both wit and 'the ladies' the Wembley Stadium official continued. "Cos, if you don't get aat soon, I'm sure the lads ere wouldn't mind taking it turns wiv ya" causing the lads to nod in grinning agreement and one of them to say "Phwoar" in a sinister, piggy-eyed Robin Askwith fashion. The girls simply giggled at this thinly veiled threat of gang rape and said something along the lines of "saucy", in the same euphemistic cockney way that foamingly psychopathic career criminals are described as "a little bit naughty". Before threats of skull sex were misinterpreted as bawdy chat up lines, I decided to scarper. I couldn't go by that point, anyway.
It wasn’t all terrifying sexual assault at Wembley. They also did food. As well as being predictably exorbitant, the marketing bods had also cottoned on to the idea of selling more meal comobs with the simple use of alliteration. Thus the menus consisted of ‘burger and a beer’, ‘pizza and a pint’, with ‘lucozade and langoustine’ and ‘whisky and a wagon wheel’ presumably being phased in at a later date.
A similar novelty was the feature, on our row, of a black guy dressed in a shiny suit, star-shaped sunglasses and a plastic cowboy hat passionately playing an inflatable purple guitar. We couldn’t decide if the guy was employed by the venue or was a slightly deranged day-release patient who had the burdening delusion that his efforts were central to the enjoyment of the 150,000 strong crowd and the success of the entire enterprise. However, the fact that we found him asleep in a nearby phone box after the gig suggested the latter. Not to poke fun at the flamboyantly dressed minstrel. He was 'fookin boss'!
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