CfP: (What’s the story) Reunion glory? Assessing Oasis’s legacy as Morning Glory turns 30 (27.11.2025, Université Rennes 2, France) Deadline: 7.4.2025
(What’s the story) Reunion glory? Assessing Oasis’s legacy as Morning Glory turns 30.
Université Rennes 2 (France), 27 November 2025
Organisation committee: Aurore Caignet, Guillaume Clément, David Haigron
It is estimated that nearly 14 million people tried to get tickets for this year’s Oasis’s UK tour following the announcement of their reunion in 2024. This staggering figure echoes the band’s one-off concert at Knebworth in 1996, when 4% of the British population had applied for tickets. Such statistics confirm Oasis’s special status within British popular culture and the band’s ability to allow people to come together.
Oasis’s music has met with considerable success since the 1990s, and while this success may be measured commercially through the band’s album sales (with all their albums and 8 singles reaching the top of the UK music charts) it appears even greater when considering the band’s permanent place within the national cultural zeitgeist. Following Oasis’s breakup in 2009, Liam (singer) and Noel Gallagher (guitarist and songwriter) led respectable solo careers and remained central figures in British media up until their reunion announcement in the summer of 2024. Despite this long hiatus, their second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory has charted almost continuously since its release in October 1995, thus confirming the album’s status as a major cultural commodity for many Britons.
As the national music industry has been, and still is, weakened by successive crises – from the digitisation of music consumption to post-Brexit restrictions on exports and touring – Oasis’s reunion raises questions about the evolution of practices and consumption patterns in popular music and culture in general. The band’s lasting success since the 1990s also leads one to wonder to what extent the band and their songs reflect British society in general, and its political and cultural developments in particular, over a long and tumultuous period. Moreover, Oasis has often been assigned several adjectives, such as Mancunian, Northern, or working-class, but what should one make of such labels when it comes to an artistic enterprise that is subject to the changing perceptions of a particular audience? In other words, does the musicians’ tangible sociological identity take precedence over the working-class credentials supposedly perceived by the public?
On the occasion of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory’s 30th anniversary, this one-day conference aims to examine Oasis’s place in British popular culture and invites multidisciplinary contributions within the fields of English / British studies, literature, history, musicology, linguistics, and political science.
Contributions on, but not limited to, the following topics will be particularly welcome:
Working-class identity / a working class voice?
Regional identities (Manchester, northernness) and national identities (Englishness, Britishness)
Gender identities and masculinity in the band’s work, especially in the context of lad culture but also in the post-#MeToo world
Commercial success and international perception (especially Morning Glory’s success in the United States)
Influence on post-Britpop pop and rock music
Political dimension of the band’s work, musicians’ political stances (from New Labour to Brexit)
The band’s adaptation to the music industry’s crises.
Proposals (200-word abstract along with a short biography) should be sent to the organisers:
aurore[dot]caignet[at]univ-rennes2[dot]fr, guillaume[dot]clement[at]univ-rennes[dot]fr, and david[dot]haigron[at]univ-rennes2[dot]fr
by 7 April 2025. A response will be provided before 30 April 2025