I was asked to contribute some words to “Get On The Rollercoaster” – a book about Oasis’ haphazard New Zealand tour in March 1998.
Being involved on the promotions side of things, doing artwork for live shows - posters, press ads etc - the Oasis shows promoted by Lees & West and then Michael Coppel Presents in Australia & New Zealand (through local agent and our client The Sequel) came to us.
The tour was meant to have been in late 1996 but was indefinitely postponed. We had already worked on a lot of promo material for the tour when the plug was pulled (I still have copies of the giant double A0 posters somewhere in storage).
I had seen Oasis at their giant UK Knebworth show in 1996 (and wrote a RipItUp review about it) so I was looking forward to seeing them again. Fast forward to early 1998 and new shows had been booked so I got back to work on the new art.
The artwork for the shows was created in Australia and wasn’t that great (they didn’t even use the correct typeface for the Oasis logo on the 1996 posters!). I tried to subtly make it more “Oasis”-like but the key art had all been approved by management and they don’t appreciate people messing with it, even if it looks better lol (see slide 6).
The shows were mostly a disaster and the Gallagher brothers were fighting a lot. Hence this book documents that particular chapter in the Oasis story.
In the book I write about my experience doing the art and randomly meeting Noel Gallagher on the street the day of the Auckland concert. There are many other great contributions from fans and music people in the book along with photos and articles. Being the pre-social media and camera phone era, it was harder to get a lot of the info together.
I’m glad I got to see Oasis at their peak at Knebworth because the Auckland show was not great!
Well done to the author of the book Karamdeep (Kaz) Sahota who put in a lot of time and effort researching and collecting stories from those who were there.
