Knebworth, 1996: The Last Night of Britpop

On the 10th and 11th of August 1996, Oasis played to a quarter of a million people at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire. The shows sold out in a matter of hours — 2.5 million people applied for tickets. One in forty of the entire British population wanted to be there. Nothing like it had happened since Live Aid, and nothing like it has happened since.

The scale of it is still difficult to comprehend. Noel Gallagher has said that standing on that stage and looking out at the crowd was the moment he realised the band had become something beyond music — a cultural event, a national mood, a shared experience that transcended anything he'd imagined when he was writing songs in a bedsit in Manchester. 'Champagne Supernova' played to a quarter of a million people under a summer sky. It was, by any measure, the peak.

"One in forty of the entire British population wanted to be there. Nothing like it had happened since Live Aid."

But peaks are also turning points. The shows that felt like a triumph were also, in retrospect, the moment Britpop began to collapse under its own weight. The movement had started as something small and specific — a reaction against American grunge, a reclamation of British identity, a series of brilliant records made by bands who were genuinely competing with each other. By Knebworth it had become a spectacle. The intimacy was gone. What remained was enormity.

Oasis released 'Be Here Now' the following year. The reviews were ecstatic. The sales were enormous. And then, slowly, the consensus shifted. The album was too long, too loud, too much. The songs were bloated. The production was suffocating. It was the sound of a band who had run out of things to say but hadn't yet realised it. Knebworth, in hindsight, was the last night of something. The music that followed was never quite the same.