“LEE-UMMMMM!” screamed a scrawny twelve-year-old girl in a navy Adidas bucket hat and baby-blue Oasis jersey. “LEE-UMMMMM!”
Beside her stood a rotund man with a red nose and a thick Welsh accent—something out of a Shakespeare play. He wore a bucket hat too, along with a red and green Wales flag draped over his shoulders. In one hand, he nursed a neon blue cocktail from a foot-long plastic martini glass that looked like a souvenir from Margaritaville.
When the first growling strums of Cigarettes and Alcohol tore through the stadium, the man turned away from the stage–a Polish football ritual adopted by Liam Gallagher’s cult-followers–and tucked the girl beneath one arm and me beneath the other, the three of us bundled under his flag.
“This is our third time seeing them on this tour,” the girl told me from under the flag swaddle, eyes wide with pride. “We’ve seen them in Cardiff and Manchest-tuh. It’s my Christmas present from my Grandad.”
I told her that this show was my Christmas present too from my boyfriend Parker, though I felt a little embarrassed that neither of us knew every word to Whatever, as she and her grandad clearly did.
We were Oasis fans, but in a looser, American way—fans enough to fly cross-country to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, but not enough to come back again tomorrow, as she and her grandad planned to do.
Halfway through the show and several Coors Lites later, I looked over to find the girl crying during Cast No Shadow.
“They’re just so good,” she whispered, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her jersey. The song did feel heavier live—more elegiac than I’d ever noticed on Spotify. “As they took his soul, they stole his pride,” she sang over and over again.
Her grandad was off fetching another blue drink, and in our cramped row in Section 550, I felt an unexpected communion with her, or maybe a strange responsibility, as if we’d come to the concert together.
“LEE-UMMM!” she screamed again, and I swore the Gallagher brothers must have heard her from down there. It was funny, considering the Liam she deified had spent the evening mocking his audience.
“You Californians,” he scoffed. “You just wanna sun all day and smoke all night. You’re not punk—you’d rather be swaying to Grateful Dead or some shit.”
The jokes landed, probably because there weren’t actually many Californians there. The closest Liam came to sentimental was when he muttered, “I know we’ve been a fuckin’ nightmare to support. So thanks.” It didn’t sound heartfelt, but somehow it felt it.
When Noel began the opening chords of The Masterplan, the grandfather reappeared, drink in hand.
“We’re nearly there, darling,” he whispered, wrapping her in the flag. “Just four more songs to go.” They’d memorized the setlist.
The show’s final stretch—Don’t Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova—was unexpectedly spiritual. The Pasadena palms swayed in the SoCal breeze while the Manchester faithful harmonized like a gospel choir. Strangers linked arms. For a few minutes, the stadium reached a state of flow. Maybe we were Californians after all.
But most memorable from the evening was not Liam’s showmanship or Noel’s guitar mastery, but the scene beside me: the grandfather and granddaughter swaying beneath the flag, their silhouettes like Sancho Panza and a miniature Don Quixote in bucket hats. Generations united by Britpop.
“Someday you will find me, caught beneath the landslide, in a champagne supernova, a champagne supernova…” they sang, both tearing up. I nearly joined them. I was moved by how deeply they were moved.
The show ended with fireworks bursting over the stadium. Liam balanced a tambourine on his head and stared out at the crowd, expressionless.
The masses began to pour out of the Rose Bowl—where, as I later learned, we’d be stranded in traffic for three hours—but the girl stayed close to her grandfather, guiding him through the crowds.
“Come on, Grandad,” she said, clutching his arm and helping him step by step, row by row, down the bleachers. I’m not sure he’d care, but I wish Liam could have seen it.