Oasis reunion tour: follow the first gig in Cardiff – live!

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The Drugs Don’t Work prompts the first proper singalong of the evening. Phone torches are out. Men are embracing. A pink flare has been set off in rear standing.

Ashcroft’s face, shown in moody black and white on the screens, is eerily impassive – but the room feels almost full now and he energy is definitely crackling a lot more than it was for Cast. By Lucky Man, everyone’s properly singing along and starting to stand in their seats – it feels like a taste of what’s going to happen when Oasis come on.

Alexis is sinking further into his chair with every Ashcroft track. “The thing about this stuff is that it actually makes you realise how good Oasis are,” he says. It’s better than Cast, though. A Song for the Lovers next, then Break the Night With Colour.

Richard Ashcroft's support set begins

Richard Ashcroft’s new single is being played as his own walk on music. Who needs a brother for a war of ego and id? He says he’s “so proud to be here on this historic night with the greatest rock’n’roll band”. He opens with the Verve’s Sonnet.

The crowd is much bigger than for Cast, and while the stadium is still not full, Sonnet gets a massive singalong. It’s loud but you get the sense Oasis is gonna be Eras-level loud. Speaking of which, I forgot to note the main difference between cities being overrun by Swifties and Oasis fans: a large contingent of the Swifties were not old enough to drink.

Ashcroft is a big fan of himself. Some chest beating “come onnnnn” body language after that one. Next up it’s another Verve number, Space and Time, from Urban Hymns. Let’s not forget quite how big that album was: it’s in the Top 20 biggest selling albums in the UK ever: 11 times platinum and it sold more than U2’s The Joshua Tree, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and the Spice Girls’ debut.

That leaked setlist from stadium rehearsals suggests that Hello will feature, but some unnamed sources told the Sun that it wouldn’t, because it features a snippet of Gary Glitter’s Hello, Hello I’m Back Again – Glitter has been convicted and jailed for various child sexual abuse crimes in recent years. Hello features Glitter and Hello, Hello I’m Back Again’s co-writer Mike Leander in the songwriting credits, meaning that were it to be performed, Glitter would technically be in line for royalties. Though after another Glitter song was used in the film Joker, the UK and US rights holders said he wouldn’t receive royalties from that.

Hello, which opens What’s the Story (Morning Glory), is a really, really good song – the way the chorus shifts through various shades of melancholy and nostalgia is top-tier songwriting from Noel – and the “it’s good to be back” makes it an obvious candidate here in some ways. But is it good enough to warrant a bit of potential bad press? Will the words of a convicted sex offender be sung in front of thousands each night? Probably not, given how many other songs they’ll want to fit in.

We’ve deduced why the roof is closed: to stop drones filming it as there’s a documentary coming out next year.

Bono recently talked up the likely quality of the incoming Oasis set. “I’m still very close with Noel, and he sent a message to me saying he’s kind of shocked by how great the band is [sounding at rehearsals]. I think we’re going to have a good summer,” he said to Zane Lowe. I mean, you wouldn’t really expect Noel Gallagher to tell Bono that the band were sounding not very great, actually. But still.

The U2 frontman continued with some decent enough musicological analysis: “I remember what they did. Those big guitars, big Neil Young [inspired], generous sounds – they were against the law in the UK. But they were like: ‘No, I’ll do what I want.’ They had this rhythmic, beautiful quality to them … and Manchester was very influenced by dance music, so they were groovier than anybody, they were rawer than anybody.”

Alexis Petridis reviews Cast

It’s the binding agent of rock. It’s fine? They played the hits? How do you analyse a support set by Cast? It’s not as if Oasis had Two Shell supporting – Cast do the job a support act does. You don’t want to be overshadowed, you don’t want the crowd to burn out too soon, and Cast are definitely not at risk of doing either. It is slightly workmanlike. The other thing it demonstrates is that the sound is really booming around the venue, especially with the roof shut, which works for Oasis and their giant wall of guitars, but crushes everyone else. Maybe that’s why the tuneless space-prog song cut through, even though it didn’t work.

Far be it from me to cast (no pun intended) aspersions on the support acts, but instead of watching this bunch and Richard Ashcroft warming the stage for Oasis on Saturday, night two, you could be watching Wales make their debut in the Women’s European Championship. They may be the lowest-ranked team at the tournament, but the Guardian’s Louise Taylor reckons their performance might be surprising thanks to coach Rhian Wilkinson turning the team into tricksy opponents, with the “incomparable” Jess Fishlock and Sophie Ingle in midfield. I wish them luck – so that unlike the men’s Euro 96 team, they don’t have their defeat soundtracked by Walkaway.

First pic of Cast has dropped in. They look as if a doom metaller, a Madchester refugee and a white reggae artist have collaborated. That would go some way towards explaining the strange genre-mash Laura mentioned.

Cast have just played Flying. Even for a something of a landfill indie band, they’re a bit incoherent – tuneful whimsy; tuneless space-prog; this is a bit Americana lite.

But wait, now it’s Guiding Star – I actually do know this one! It provokes what I would call the first sign of life among the crowd. “So good to be here on a momentous occasion”, says frontman John Power.

In an example of opportunistic branding so brazen that we simply must applaud it and post it on the live blog, we turn briefly to Graham Conway, managing director of Select Car Leasing. “How can we crowbar our motoring company into the Oasis conversation, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with Oasis?” Graham beseeches his marketing corps in a break-out huddle-pod. “Erm, paint our EV fleet pink and dub it She’s Electric?”, someone suggests, but Graham senses the wokerati won’t like it.

Instead, he does some truly cerulean sky thinking and comes up with this, reported entirely straight by the Manchester Evening News.

“While it’s not illegal to wear a hat while you’re driving, there are rules around fashion items obstructing you while behind the wheel. Rule 97 of the Highway Code states you must have ‘footwear and clothing which does not prevent you using the controls in the correct manner’, while the Road Traffic Act says that anything obstructing a driver’s view is considered a hazard – including hats. And because bucket hats are generally pulled down low over the eyes to complete the look, that could be a serious problem when it comes to getting a full view of the road.”

Perhaps it was Graham’s influence that has so dented the aforementioned bucket hat sales trajectory. Your move, Adidas.

Thank you to X user Miss S, who posted this clip of sound emanating from the Principality Stadium on Monday. We must presume from this that Oasis are going in a bold industrial/musique concrete direction for a live album to be released on Black Truffle or the resurrected Table of the Elements.

Oasis Mania had this rather better quality recording:

Though Liam scotched the idea that he was actually doing the singing:

Just now there was some fretboard tapping going on, creating absolutely horrible, squelchy spacey zapping sounds. Awful. From Alexis: “That response to that song indicates a crowd determined to enjoy themselves.”

But then there’s a really touching moment when they dedicate Walkaway to Diogo Jota, the Portuguese footballer who died in a car crash yesterday, aged 28. Jota had a storied career at Liverpool, in Cast’s home city, winning the Premier League and FA Cup with them.

I love watching Top of the Pops reruns on iPlayer, and especially discovering the megahits of the time that have no lasting cultural footprint – such as 80s megastar Howard Jones: who he? Etc.

Cast seem like a classic example of this. I was born in 1989 and grew up familiar with Oasis, Pulp etc, and have been a music journalist my entire adult life, but until I listened to them as homework for seeing Oasis, I’d never knowingly heard a note of Cast. And as Alexis reminds me, they had two platinum albums! The 90s: a hell of a drug.