James Proclaims!

As I sit here writing this, my children are watching Pokemon. I think there are quite a lot of Pokemon cartoons available and I’m not sure which iteration it is they are watching. My six-year-old, aka Little Proclaims, is the driving force in the viewing choice. Her two-year-old sibling, Mini Proclaims, is fairly indifferent most of the time, as long as there are moving images of some description on the communal viewing screen. I have mitigated some of the parental guilt I might feel in letting them watch TV, by insisting that they watch it in French. We’re all happy with this arrangement and it has allowed me a small window of time to write this.

Little Proclaims occasionally breaks off from her viewing to tell me a fact about some Pokemon or other. I try to feign interest, but while I know with absolute certainty that I would have been a Pokemon superfan had it been a thing when I was her age, it wasn’t and so I’m not. My attempts to convince her of the brilliance of Masters of the Universe or Transformers have fallen on deaf ears. Not that Pokemon is anything new, it’s been around since the 90s, a decade in which I was definitely still quite young, but in 1996 I was more interested in bad action movies and Britpop than I was cartoons. Although I’d probably still have happily sat through a few episodes of Masters of the Universe without too much complaint.

Lots from the 90s appears to have endured, as evidenced by the mass hysteria that greeted the recently announced reunion of Britpop royalty, Oasis. I was not successful in obtaining tickets, but I was fairly half-hearted in my efforts – choosing to take Little Proclaims to her Saturday morning swimming lesson at the time anyone serious about the acquisition of tickets would have been logging on to their computers. Post swimming, I then spent several hours driving my daughters down the M4 to visit my parents, so, although my phone was notionally in the virtual queue for tickets, I was unable to give it any serious consideration until it was obviously far too late for me to have any reasonable hope of securing even one of the ‘dynamically’ high-priced tickets.

I am quite a big Oasis fan. Objectively I can see that they are somewhat overrated, but I was smitten with the music of the brothers Gallagher at a young age and, unfortunately, objectivity has no place when assessing who your favourite band is. Nostalgia is far more potent than logic in that arena. I can’t quite understand why so many young people were clamouring for tickets though. I suppose had the Beatles somehow been able to have put on some reunion shows in the 90s (which would have required a supernatural effort from John), I’d have been inclined to try my luck at securing a place in the crowd, but, in spite of recurring lazy journalistic comparisons, Oasis are hardly the Beatles.

Good luck to the kids who did get tickets, I just wish, for their sake, they had musicians from now to get as excited about as bands from the past. I can’t imagine that there aren’t any good new bands out there. Indeed as a regular attendee of the Reading Festival (which is a music festival that takes place in the town of Reading, rather than a literary festival as the name might suggest in print) I’ve seen a few good young bands in recent years. But I’ve also noticed increasingly that the headliners are acts who’ve been around for twenty years plus, which was not the case when I went to the festival as a younger person.

Indeed, I saw Oasis perform there in 2000. I didn’t live in Reading at the time and I camped at the festival, which is what most of the kids still do. I didn’t return to the festival until 2017, when as a resident of Reading, I was able to sleep in my own bed, which is far more sensible. Indeed, I’ve been back most years since (missing a couple due to Covid and one due to the birth of my eldest child). This year, I didn’t even pay for a ticket, as I was able to secure free entry to the festival by volunteering. Apparently my career as a person who works in a school makes me a responsible adult. A lot of the ticket-holders to the festival are very young so having a few responsible adults stationed around the campsite is a way of offering a bit of support to those that weren’t quite expecting the chaos of festival camping. Sometimes the kids find themselves overwhelmed and in need of a consoling chat with someone that has not consumed excessive amounts of alcohol and/or narcotics that day (and who, on the days they do consume alcohol, is far more interested in quality over quantity). I quite enjoyed volunteering. I’d have done it even if I didn’t want to see any of the music. But I did see quite a lot of the music. Including Liam Gallagher. Who was performing songs from Definitely Maybe, which is arguably Oasis’s best album.

I’d still like to have bought tickets to the Oasis reunion shows, but I can console myself in the knowledge that the crowds at those gigs will have paid a lot of money and that the band will not only be playing songs from their best album, but also songs from some of their later albums. Which even the most passionate Oasis fan would have to admit, are not really that good. As well as seeing the younger Gallagher brother for free recently, I’ve also saw him perform at the 2017 iteration of the Reading festival, where I eschewed watching his whole set in favour of leaving halfway through to watch another Britpop alumnus in the form of Ash. In 2017 I also saw Noel and his High Flying Birds play Wembley Arena, which is not quite as big as Wembley Stadium where Oasis will be headlining multiple dates. I have seen Oasis at Wembley stadium though, but it was the old Wembley Stadium that was knocked down in 2003. I saw them there in 2000, a few months before I saw them in Reading. I also saw them in 2009 in the national stadium in Cardiff, another of their 2025 reunion tour venues, on the tour that resulted in them splitting up for 15 years. I have seen a lot of bands over the years. It was a thing I liked to do a lot in my teens and something Mrs Proclaims and I did a lot together in 2017/18 in the year before we became parents. We often refer to that as our last year of fun. It was the last time we did anything socially together that didn’t involve our children. Of course we do occasionally have fun together as a family but it’s not the same. I’d rather be the father of my daughters and not be going to lots of gigs, but occasionally I do miss the days of being able to do that sort of thing regularly and often on a whim. Of the many bands I have seen over the years Oasis are definitely not the worst band I have seen. But, as much as I love them, I can’t honestly say that they are even close to being the best.

At the moment the kids are too young to take to rock concerts. Little Proclaims and I have been to some live shows together, but they have been largely centred around Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and a Tiger Who Came to Tea. One day my daughters might express an interest in going to see some live music, and there may be a window in that era when they’ll tolerate my company in exchange for me being the person who pays for the tickets. I really hope, when that time comes, that my daughters have something better than the the reunion of a 90s band that their dad liked, to get excited about.

Their current devotion to a 90s cartoon doesn’t bode well though.