As if they never went away, Oasis are once again standing defiantly in front of us. “The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over.” Those were the words that heralded what millions of fans, myself included, had been dreaming of: Oasis were reuniting. Whether you love them or loathe them, that the Gallaghers are returning to the stage simply means so much to so many people. This is not merely an old band playing old songs, but a long-awaited shot of arrogant, swaggering, but unbridled, optimism.

It’s worth pausing on that arrogance though – the brothers’ not-so-secret laddishness and chauvinism that had many people concerned when the reunion was announced. Naturally, the question of what exactly returning to a ‘Cool Britannia’ can be when Britain is as fraught as it is right now emerges. I don’t really have an answer to that one. But I suppose, my excitement over the Oasis reunion lies in the Gallagher’s simple belief that life simply wasn’t as bad as you thought, and the hope that they might revitalise a discontented Britain once again.

“Wherever the brothers were going, whatever success lay in waiting, they wanted us alongside them”

Yearning for the nineties is nothing new, of course. The nostalgia is in the jeans we buy, it’s in the TV shows we watch, and it’s in the crisp white Sambas Rishi Sunak wore in a last-ditch attempt to look cool before the last election. When Definitely Maybe was released in 1994, Thatcher was gone and Tony Blair looked set to catapult Britain firmly into the new millennium with his glamourous New Labour project. That a Labour Government-in-waiting could provoke a swell of public hope and optimism, let alone promise literally anything to young people, seems fanciful to us now. That’s precisely why we long for those years; home ownership, an actual job out of school or university – they all seemed at last to be within reach. Simply the illusion that things could only get better sustained us, now it seems we don’t even have that.

Oasis fit into this perfectly. Definitely Maybe is one of the most bombastic and assured debut albums ever released. Noel Gallagher took aim at the mundane, directionless Thatcherite Britain in which he was stuck, at last, in ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, having “finally found something worth living for”. What perhaps encapsulates the spirit of the Gallagher brothers best is ‘Live Forever’ – written as an antidote to Nirvana’s ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’. In a 2013 interview, Noel said “That’s f*cking rubbish. Kids don’t need to be hearing that nonsense […] we had f*ck-all, and I still thought getting up in the morning was the greatest f*cking thing ever.”

When (What’s the Story) Morning Glory came out in 1995, the same drive remained. It’s present in the soaring chorus of ‘Champagne Supernova’, the rugged determination of ‘Some Might Say’ that “we will find a brighter day,” and in the repeated refrain of B-side ‘Aquiesce’, sung by both Liam and Noel, that “we need each other”. It seemed that wherever the brothers were going, whatever success lay in waiting, they wanted us alongside them.

“An arrogantly unfounded, gloriously improbable belief that life is going to get better”

Oasis didn’t change the world, but they made people all think, for the first time, that it could be changed. Despite all the riffs they ripped off, all the Beatles-esque haircuts they copied, with Oasis there exists one foremost influence: class. Whatever followed in their career, that fact seems unarguable, even for the Gallaghers. Five proudly working-class lads, who had been on the dole most of their adult life, sang about their experience with no filter. Liam and Noel believed that they could take on the world, and then they won. They seemed convinced that culture could be rebuilt on the foundations of collectivity and unbridled confidence, that the discord and division of the previous years might be overturned. Maybe, I hoped, having them return could conjure another decade that feels as good as the nineties – from cheaper records all the way to cheaper houses.

If all this seems grandiose, even unrealistic, it’s because it is. Culture alone cannot fix inequality in Britain, it cannot lift millions of children out of poverty, and certainly can’t make a Samba-wearing Prime Minister cool. The Oasis reunion therefore, only does one thing. It rekindles the fire that the Gallaghers started; an arrogantly unfounded, gloriously improbable belief that life is going to get better. It’s a belief that I, and seemingly 10 million opportunistic ticket buyers, are willing to buy into.