I attended my first solo Noel Gallagher show in December 1997. It was actually an Oasis gig, but Gallagher’s brother Liam pulled out of frontman duties because of a throat infection. Scepticism about his illness was rife because only a few years into their stint as kings of the Britpop movement Liam was notorious for his diva strops and fights with his older brother. The last-minute promotion of Noel to lead singer was headline news, and made for a legendary show. Last Sunday I went to my second Noel Gallagher-headlining show. This time he was an old hat, 13 years into his solo career and still deep in a public acrimonious feud with Liam.
That night in 1997 was something special. Liam scowled in the wings while Noel belted through hit after hit, rather than the few trademark songs he usually performed acoustically in the middle of Oasis shows. He went straight from the Point to the RTÉ studios to catch the end of The Late Late Show with Uncle Gaybo, his mother Peggy Gallagher in the front row. We love nothing more than taking the ashes of a dead horse out of the urn and dancing on them at the crossroads when it comes to connecting celebrities to their Irish roots, but the Oasis boys are bona fide potato heads and Peggy is a native of Charlestown in Mayo. I got home from the concert just in time to see the interview, and no doubt frantically jabbed a video cassette into the VCR to tape it, ignoring the “DO NOT TAPE OVER” warnings. Those warnings were conditional on something more important coming along in need of preserving.
That video tape went into a precious archive, along with other recordings of My So-Called Life and ER. I was a memory hoarder of sorts, terrified of banishing fleeting moments forever in case I one day wanted to share them with the children I never really had any intention of having. My concert ticket from the gig went into a box with countless others. The Cranberries, Blur, Radiohead. There was never any doubt what I was spending my babysitting and waitressing money on.
When VCRs went the way of the dodo, so did the tapes. There didn’t seem much point in keeping items that could only be played on obsolete equipment. The concert tickets were different. I could never bear to part with them. I added to the collection over the years. Paper representations from Slane, Whelan’s, Vicar Street, The Pod joined beautifully illustrated tickets like the ones from REM’s intimate “rehearsal” shows in the Olympia theatre and Oasis’s big gig in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
Paper tickets have now largely followed VCRs into obsolescence. At Harry Styles’s Slane gig this summer they were completely redundant, and entry was only permitted via digital ticket. There’s rarely any tangible evidence for a memory box anymore, save for a wristband here and there. I certainly don’t have a Noel Gallagher in Dublin ticket or a Liam at Knebworth stub to add to their 90s counterparts in the shoebox in my childhood bedroom. What I do have is smartphone photos and videos. Social media posts. Email confirmations and QR codes. These 2023 memory box equivalents don’t really hold the same meaning, though. They seem more fleeting, more susceptible to loss.
Sometime in the last few years I stopped keeping tangible memories. I no longer save wristbands from gigs in lieu of paper tickets. I’m selective about the cards and letters I hold on to. My concert memorabilia boxes are frozen in time, and I’ve decluttered my life of reams of keepsakes. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have children to bore with my “I remember when all this was fields” tales. Maybe it’s an ageing thing and a realisation that I don’t really know what purpose these knickknacks serve beyond reminding me how rapidly we’re all hurtling towards the grave. Perhaps it’s a sobering decision to live more in the moment.
The digitalisation of absolutely everything makes tangible items feel as obsolete as those 90s VCRs. I can pull up that Noel Gallagher Late Late Show interview on YouTube whenever I want. It’s unlikely that an archaeologist in 3023 will need my crumbling Trip to Tipp ticket to piece together a vision of life in the 20th century. Still though, if Oasis ever do reform, I might be glad to have my box of memories to really lean into the nostalgia. Will I print off a paper version of my QR code for posterity? Definitely. Maybe.