Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds at Sony Centre

Photographs by Lisa Mark.

As far as legacy acts go, Oasis is up there. If someone doesn’t know the words to “Wonderwall”, there’s a good chance they’re a monster (or, at the very least, they don’t listen to rock music.)

Noel Gallagher is responsible for a lot of Oasis’ popularity – and because of that, he’s allowed to have a rock star reputation that long precedes him. Known for being a prickly, outspoken asshole that swears like a sailor, he’s the man that wrote some of the most iconic songs of the 90’s Britrock scene. You can hate him for his persona, but you can’t deny the fact that he knows how to write a good song. Or, as his first of two Sony Centre shows would prove, at least a couple of really good songs, written a bunch of different times.

With plenty of new material to share from 2015’s Chasing Yesterday (his second record with the High Flying Birds outfit,) it fit easily with the rest of his back catalogue. Gallagher was good to lace his set with songs from both his solo records and a few key Oasis tracks, and it all blended pretty well. This is both a blessing and a curse. It all sounds great. It’s grandiose, soaring, and easy to like. It’s also so similar that you’d be forgiven for losing track of where one song ended and the next begun.

There’s not much subtlety to what Gallagher does (see: the pretty literal visual representations showing behind him for the duration of his show) and, because of it, an hour-and-45-minutes of his rah-rah rock meets slightly less rah-rah balladry is about as much of it as you really need. He and his High Flying Birds put on a fantastic sounding show, without question. But by his own admission: it’s not something you need to see again and again.

“If you’re coming tomorrow night, it’s going to be the same f*cking show,” Gallagher told the crowd near the end of his set to a close-but-not-quite-sold-out audience. “If you’re not coming, you’re not missing f*ck all. It’s pretty much the same as it was three years ago.”

The self-deprecation rightfully drew a laugh, but it was indicative that the English musician knows his own limits of tedium.

Thankfully, he was playing to a crowd that were very much there to see a rock icon succeed. The audience was quick to stand as soon as the pre-recorded bevy of horns finished blasting and the lights dimmed. They stood for the entire show, in fact, bobbing by their seats to the unfamiliar and screaming out lyrics to the classics.

Of the Oasis back catalogue, Gallagher offered up five of them. Forgoing “Wonderwall”, he instead showed off “Fade Away”, “Champagne Supernova”, “Digsy’s Dinner”, “The Masterplan”, and set-closer “Don’t Look Back in Anger”. It was the tracks from the iconic (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? that unsurprisingly faired the best – “Don’t Look Back in Anger” particularly anthemic and encouraging, sending the crowd off with cathartic fists in the air.

Between the Oasis songs he penned, however, were Gallagher’s solo efforts. These were particularly indicative of his worth to Oasis. While slightly less familiar to the crowd, the offerings were all just as easy to get into. It was the tried-and-tested formula of swelling choruses, bursting instrumentals from his four-piece backing band and three-piece horn section, and belted vocals. Gallagher hit it all, note for note.

Chasing Yesterday’s first single, “In the Heat of the Moment”, slithered and stomped, upping the energy. “If I Had a Gun”, from his 2011 self-titled, was equally as well received later in the set. While remarkably more in the ballad camp, it’s by no means a softly sung number. It sounds exactly as you’d expect a song of his to sound like, regardless of its content or subject matter.

And there’s the nut of it. He’s ticked all the right boxes when it comes to song writing. The same can be said for the live show checklist.

After so many years in the spotlight, it’s evident he knows what his crowd is there to see and he plays to this. He’s a conscientious musician with a can’t-care attitude. He keeps things moving. He plays to his crowd. He calls out idiotic audience behaviour (fair warning: if you’re in the first eight rows of a Noel Gallagher show, prepare to be mocked.) He flips off the crowd. He says “thank you very much” quite a bit. He banters.

Of the latter, he had a particular quote-unquote “nice” interaction with a young audience member in the first few rows.

“How old are you?” Gallagher asked, about midway through the show. “Six? Ten? What the f*ck are you doing here? … Has your dad bought you a t-shirt? Get him to buy you a f*cking t-shirt. It’ll fulfill the experience. It’s not complete without a f*cking t-shirt.”

Other interaction was split between incoherent mumbles and jabs at Toronto. Gallagher noted: “It’s the first time I’ve been to your city where the f*cking sun’s come out. It’s vastly different. Almost pleasant, innit?” It seems strange for an Englishman to complain about Canadian weather, but here we are.

Outside of running his mouth, the setlist itself ran like clockwork. Tracks from Gallagher’s two solo albums were broken up every so often by Oasis material, keeping the audience entertained and crossing their fingers that they might hear their favourite song. There was only one slight hitch in pacing that was of note, and that was the transition between Oasis hit “Champagne Supernova” and its follow-up: current single, “Ballad of the Mighty I”.

While the 1995 song is much more earnest and acoustic, its electric and amplified, piano-anchored follow-up was a bit too jarring of a transition. This is admittedly a strange thing to complain about, given how fairly monotone the set was otherwise, but it would have been a smarter move for him to switch up that and 2012 single “Dream On”. With “Dream On”, the track is as a natural bridge between “Champagne Supernova” and “Ballad of the Mighty I”. It represents the sing-along qualities of the former and the big band inflections of the latter. Outside of that though, it was as near a perfect set as you could hope for… just so long as you don’t equate perfect with boring.

That’s the thing about Noel Gallagher. What he does sells, and it sells well. It should sell well – it’s great pop music. There’s a lot beyond those walls though, and if you’ve ventured outside of whatever’s on the radio, it’s likely what Noel Gallagher’s pushing is good for a quick fix but by no means the rock cure.

He’s really good at making big sounding tunes. He’s one of the best, in fact. Because of that, his show is something worth experiencing at least once in your concert-going life. He’ll satisfy the Britrock craving, but he’ll also inevitably leave you wanting more of something a little less safe.

For all intents and purposes, Noel Gallagher’s live show will remind you that he’s but the gateway drug into rock music that takes a much bigger risk.