Breaking Baz: Oasis’ Bitter ’90s Britpop Clash With Blur Retold In West End-Bound Show ‘The Battle’

EXCLUSIVE :  Back in the summer of 1995, you were either team Oasis or team Blur. There was no sitting on the fence as the rival Brit bands clashed over which group’s single would top the charts — Blur’s Country House or the Oasis number Roll With It.

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A new play heading to London’s West End in 2025 will chart the harshness of the animosity between the two enormously popular so-called Britpop bands, a rivalry so bitter that it burst into the headlines, even the TV news covered it.

News of the show, appropriately titled The Battle by humorist and writer John Niven, a former indie rocker and one-time A&R man, comes as Gallagher brothers Liam and Noel have buried their own feud to launch a huge Oasis tour in 2025 after 15 years apart.

Producer Simon Friend, of Simon Friend Entertainment, tells us that he commissioned Niven nine months ago to write a comedy about the cultural conflict that erupted when Blur’s Damon Albarn threw down the gauntlet by shifting the release of single Country House to the same day as Roll With It .

Battle commenced on Monday August 14, 1995.

“At the time in ‘95 the amazing thing was: you were either Blur or Oasis,” says Friend who won awards for his collaboration with Sheffield Theatres on the production of The Life of Pi that played both London and Broadway. He was also a producer of The Father , for which Anthony Hopkins won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

“Crazy stuff happened,” says Friend.  “You had couples breaking up over it, there was a lot of family strife and other crazy stuff. It was quite extraordinary just how deep into the zeitgeist it managed to reach that you had to be one or the other, you couldn’t be both, which to me, it feels like the subject of brilliant drama.”

The hostility between the bands was underpinned by class and location.

The Gallagher siblings were working-class lads from Manchester in the north of England while Blur were condemned as art students from Chelsea. “They were from different ends of the country, and they’d arrived on the scene at the same time,” Friend observed speaking from his office in London today.

“I think also, there’s probably some degree of insecurity of who’s bigger,” says Friend.  “And you can have no clearer cut way to show that than the top 10 charts: who’s going to get  to number one?”

I’m not gonna reveal which track made the top spot. Fans will know but there are zillions out there who weren’t even born, so I’m not going to spoilt it.

The irony of it all, Friend observes, is that “here are two iconic songs that I think both bands would identify as not necessarily being their greatest work, but by the measure of any other band  would be something to define one’s career by.”

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Friend says that The Battle won’t be produced in partnership with Blur of Oasis.

“It can’t be in conjunction with them,”  Friend declares, “because we want to tell an honest story, we don’t want to sanitize it.”

However, there are likely to be discussions about  the “complex area” of music rights, although at the moment The Battle is not “a sung show.”

The Blur versus Oasis hostility had been brewing for some time. In the Blur documentary film No Distance Left to Run , Albarn complains that Noel Gallagher used to constantly “take the piss” and that Oasis “were like the bullies I had to put up with at school.”

In April of ‘95 Oasis had a hit with Some Might Say and Albarn remembers, according to an interview he gave to NME, going to their celebration party and being accosted by Liam Gallagher who bragged about their song “being “Number f**kin’ One!”, right in my face. So I thought, OK, we’ll see…”

Friend says that John Niven, who played for 80s indie band The Wishing Stones and penned rock and roll novel Kill Your Friends , which was made into a film, “was in the thick of this world, so it’s an authentic voice. His novel writing to date has shown a brilliant ear for the folks in the industry, and he also is a fantastic humorist and comic writer.”

The producer says  that The Battle is “a comedy with teeth.”

Negotiations are taking place with a prominent director, and actors have been approached about portraying Noel and Liam Gallagher and Blur’s Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree, as they were in 1995. Although the full makeup of characters hasn’t been fully settled.

Timetable for The Battle says friend “is that we’re aiming for 2025 because that would be 30 years after the event.” With a chuckle, he adds: “There seems to be a great nostalgia for the mid-90s right now.”

And, of course, 2025 would also be the 30th anniversary of Blur’s album The Great Escape and the Oasis album ( What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

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