‘Just sums up Britain,’ one person said

Liverpool forward was honoured by Liam and Noel Gallagher during ‘Live Forever’

Britpop legends who were once at loggerheads held hands and embraced onstage at their triumphant first show since 2009

‘I want to say that this country is nothing without the immigrants,’ the voice says

Musician said performing over the next few weeks could ‘risk lasting damage’ to his voice

Singer’s nod to the ticket pricing row didn’t go down well

Focusing heavily on their 1990s output with only one song from their last four albums, Liam and Noel Gallagher performed together for the first time since 2009

Swaggering, cocksure and incredibly loud, Oasis burst back on to the live music scene on Friday night with an accomplished – if ever so slightly distanced – debut gig on their reunion world tour.

Playing Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, the six-piece impressed at the start of what is arguably the most anticipated tour of the century, focusing overwhelmingly on songs from their 1990s heyday – only one song, Little By Little, was taken from their final four albums.

Noel and Liam Gallagher brought the house down at the Principality Stadium, kicking off their record-breaking reunion tour in tremendous fashion

Principality Stadium, Cardiff
This is playlist Oasis, with their later fallow years ignored almost completely – and that makes for a ferociously powerful set to an utterly adoring crowd

• 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 on stage for their first reunion gig is deafening. You might have expected a loud response. This is, after all, a crowd so partisan that, in between the support acts, they 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 Defender.

Even so, the noise the fans make as the reconstituted Oasis launch into Hello takes you aback slightly, and not just because Hello is a fairly bold 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’s received such a vociferous reception.

Liverpool forward was honoured by Liam and Noel Gallagher during ‘Live Forever’

Rock band tore hrough their biggest hits for first time in 15 years

As Liam and Noel Gallagher tear through two hours of uninterrupted hits, it’s tough to imagine another comeback on such a momentous scale

It’s the most anticipated tour date in recent memory, bringing Noel and Liam Gallagher back together on stage for the first time since 2009. See it unfold here – from setlist to stadium singalongs

While the Oasis subreddit is overspilling with speculation and excitement about the first gigs of the reunion tour, the Cardiff subreddit has been driven up the wall by banal questions from non-locals about travel logistics. It’s inspired increasingly deranged spoof posts about the so-called Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, that green Oasis® foam used for floral arrangements, the fruity soft drink Oasis and where you can weigh your sister in the city … geddit … oh-weigh-sis.

Fans have been soaking up the atmosphere – though I’m not sure that cardboard Liam is too happy about it.

The band have denied claims that their identity and music are fake

Exclusive: Band’s management tell agencies and publishers they can use shots of first gig in Cardiff for one year only

• Songwriters ‘missing millions in royalties from more than 100,000 UK gigs’

A row has broken out over restrictions imposed on how newspapers, magazines, TV broadcasters and digital publishers can use pictures taken at Oasis reunion gigs, as the band prepare to play the first night of what is expected to be the most profitable tour in UK history.

Photo agencies and publishers have been told they can use shots of the first concert, which takes place in Cardiff on Friday, for one year and then the rights revert back to the band and management.

Nearly 10,000 city workers are on strike to demand better pay

As Oasis prepare to share a stage again, we’re revisiting the barbs, bust-ups and backhanded compliments that defined one of rock’s most legendary sibling rivalries

With Pulp at Glastonbury and the Gallaghers reunited, it feels like there's something in the air again, writes Glenn Fosbraey

When the Leicester band were forced to drop their old name after a legal threats from a certain budget airline, it could have been curtains. But frontman Murray Matravers’s trip to Japan has prompted a bold new outlook – and an upbeat new album

When writing songs, “95% of the time” Murray Matravers starts with the title. It’s a tactic he picked up from Gary Barlow: a producer once told him the Take That man tends to arrive at sessions touting a load of prospective song titles “cut out on little pieces of paper, and he’d put them on the table and you could just choose one. I was like: that’s fucking brilliant. Ever since I’ve always had loads of titles in my Notes app. It actually changed the way I wrote music,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “Shout out to Gary Barlow!”

Names are clearly very important to the 29-year-old – but in recent years they have also caused him untold stress. By 2023, Matravers’ band Easy Life was thriving, having scored two No 2 albums on the trot by fusing upbeat, synthy bedroom pop with wry emo-rap. But that same year, his career came to a screeching halt when easyGroup – owners of the easyJet brand name with a long history of taking legal action against businesses with the word “easy” in their branding – decided to sue the Leicester band for trademark infringement.

Hallé Orchestra/Adès
(Hallé)
This brings together new works of his own and by composers he admires that Thomas Adès has conducted at Bridgewater Hall during his residency with the Hallé

Since 2023 Thomas Adès has been artist-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. He has featured as composer, conductor and pianist in his appearances with the orchestra, and all his concerts have included new or nearly new works, both his own and by composers he admires. As the residency comes to an end, this collection brings together pieces he has conducted in Manchester; there are four by Adès himself, alongside William Marsey’s Man With Limp Wrist and Oliver Leith’s Cartoon Sun.

Of the four pieces by Adès, only one is substantial. Aquifer, which he wrote last year for Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a densely packed 17-minute movement, which contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long, before being brought to a halt by the most common-or-garden of cadences. Tower – for Frank Gehry is a fanfare, and both Shanty and Dawn, composed during lockdown in 2020, are pieces that work wonders with repeated phrases. Marsey’s musical narrative, in eight “scenes”, is a strangely evocative succession of musical ghosts, inspired by paintings by Salman Toor, while Leith’s wacky processional, punctuated by enormous climaxes, leaves an exhilarating impression.

Blackweir Fields, Cardiff
The thrash legends’ first UK gig in six years is a lean and unforgivingly mean set – no breathers, no ballads, only teeth-rattling bangers

‘Forty years ago, dude. Duuuuude,” Tom Araya exhales, reflecting on Slayer’s maiden, gob-spackled UK show at London’s Marquee Club in 1985. They were just kids then, on the verge of becoming the most belligerent force in thrash metal’s “big four” with Reign in Blood, but time hasn’t dulled their blade. The bassist-vocalist’s mane might be streaked with grey as he addresses the heaving pit but he still has bile to spare, immediately calling up a take on War Ensemble fit to loosen teeth a dozen rows from the front.

Orbiting their contribution to Black Sabbath’s forthcoming final show in Birmingham, this is Slayer’s first UK date in six years after a final tour that, not unsurprisingly given metal’s spotty record in this regard, wasn’t so final after all. There’s little sense of a sheepish re-emergence, though, with a lengthy video package on the history of the band teeing up South of Heaven’s inimitable riff, which is immediately in the throats of the crowd before drummer Paul Bostaph’s double-kick sparks kinetic mayhem.

Devendra Banhart finds mysticism in Acquiesce, Snail Mail gets chills from Stand By Me and Johnny Marr chooses an absolute curveball as 17 musicians analyse the reunited band’s genius

• Simon Armitage on why Oasis still enthrall us

There are a lot of similarities between us and Oasis: two brothers in the band, Creation Records, working-class kids, guitar band, etc. In the mid-90s, we couldn’t get arrested and had to watch their meteoric rise, but I couldn’t dislike the great music. Rock ’n’ Roll Star was on a compilation tape on the ill-fated US tour when we broke up. We’d had a punch-up on stage at the House of Blues in Los Angeles and back in my hotel room we were hanging around with a bunch of druggies. I was thinking “Where did it all go wrong?” when this song came on. I knew I’d remember that moment for the rest of my life. To me, Rock ’n’ Roll Star is like Johnny Rotten singing with Slade. It’s punk rock, but in 1994. I love the self-belief: Noel [Gallagher] wrote it before he was a rock’n’roll star but knew it was gonna happen. The difference between the Mary Chain and Oasis is that when we reformed we’d buried the hatchet a good few years before we got back together. I’m not sure if they have, but it used to amaze people how William [Reid] and I could be screaming with hatred at each other in the studio, then 10 minutes later it would be: “Do you want a cup of tea?”

The singer’s smoky vocals and undeniable stage presence more than make up for a patchy set-list

The exhibition is set to open in September at the Victoria & Albert East Storehouse

As the Gallagher brothers finally prepare to reunite onstage for the first time since 2009, Mark Beaumont and Roisin O’Connor take a trip through their favourites from the Oasis back catalogue

Fans from all over the world have been camping outside the Principality Stadium overnight in the hopes of getting a spot right in front of the stage

The pop artist wished his former rivals well, commenting: ‘Good luck tonight lads’