Oasis – Live at Cardiff International Arena, Cardiff – March 19, 1996 –
Oasis in concert in honor of Humpday in COVID, recorded at Cardiff International Arena in Cardiff on March 19, 1996.
Oasis’ second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, was a worldwide commercial success, selling over four million copies and becoming the fifth-best-selling album in UK chart history. The album spawned two further hit singles, “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, which reached numbers two and one respectively. It also contained the non-UK single “Champagne Supernova”, which featured guitar and backing vocals by Paul Weller and received widespread critical acclaim. The song reached number one on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart. In November 1995, Oasis played on back-to-back nights at Earls Court in London, the biggest ever indoor gigs in Europe at the time.
“What Oasis has done in Britain, unifying an entire country under the banner of a single pop act, a band could no longer achieve in a country like the US. In Britain the band reigns unchallenged as the most popular act since the Beatles, there is an Oasis CD in roughly one of every three homes there. Last month, the band drew 250,000 people to Knebworth for the biggest outdoor concerts in the country’s history. The group’s battling brothers, Liam and Noel Gallagher, appear as regularly as royalty on tabloid covers.”
— Neil Strauss, September 1996, writing in The New York Times on the group’s escalating popularity.
On 27 and 28 April 1996, the group played their first headline outdoor concerts, at Maine Road football stadium, home of Manchester City F.C., of whom the Gallagher brothers have been fans since childhood. Highlights from the second night featured on the video …There and Then, released later the same year (along with footage from their Earls Court gigs). As their career reached its zenith, Oasis performed to 80,000 people over two nights at Balloch Country Park at Loch Lomond in Scotland on 3 and 4 August, before back-to-back concerts at Knebworth House on 10 and 11 August. The band sold out both shows within minutes. The audience of 125,000 people each night (2.5 million people applied for tickets, and 250,000 were actually sold, meaning the possibility of 20 sold out nights) was a record-breaking number for an outdoor concert held in the UK and remains the largest demand for a show in British history.
As a reminder that 1996 was an amazing year – crank it up.
