There's never been a better moment for Oasis to return

“Get back together, stop messing around,” The 1975 singer Matty Healy advised Oasis in a Canadian radio interview last year.

- MARK BEAUMONT

“Can you imagine being in potentially – right now, still – the coolest band in the world, and not doing it because you’re in a mard with your brother?” he argued. “Grow up, headline Glastonbury, have a good time.”

Indeed, at no point since their acrimonious 2009 split has the time been so perfect for an Oasis reunion. You see, Britpop has become a form of generational wonder warfare. The most highly evolved Gen-Zers have developed a reflex howl of “OK Boomer!”, triggered whenever the older generations – mistyeyed behind their Lennon shades, and testing the seams of their vintage Fred Perry shirts – start banging on about the Nineties as a golden age of British pop culture. Force the average 2020s teenager to yet again hear about Sunday’s NME stage lineup at Glastonbury 1994 – Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, and Echobelly! – and they might roll their eyes clean out of their heads.

If Britpop gets endlessly lauded as a champagne supernova of good times, it’s only because so many of us can say we were there. The sad truth is, Britain has a long and frustrating history of missing out on its own pop culture revolutions. The stadium excesses of Beatlemania mostly took place in America.

For Beatles fans in Britain – where, beyond their theatre tours, the band played only one 15-minute arena gig at Wembley Pool for the 1966 NME Poll Winners’ Party – they were a largely televised phenomenon. The various late-Sixties summers of love were American affairs too, taking over Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. In the UK, you had to have been a very early Pink Floyd fan, one of the 40 or so groovers in the studio for The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” satellite broadcast, or a Kensington trust funder letting Jimi Hendrix crash on your sofa to say you’d really “lived” the Age of Aquarius.