How Oasis Live '25 became a cultural moment with help from Disguise
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When Oasis reunited for their Live ‘25 tour, it marked one of the most anticipated comebacks in music history. For the first time in over 15 years, Liam and Noel Gallagher returned to the stage together – a cultural moment watched by millions around the world.
For 41 shows, the band performed a set of hits that would take them across 13 countries over five months. It was a historic tour. But for the band, staying true to their nonchalantly cool swagger was essential, even during such a highly anticipated event. Fittingly, the show was devised as a straightforward rock concert, with a focus on the brothers and their music - and iconic visuals would provide the perfect backdrop.
Universal Pixels chose Disguise GX 3 servers to power Oasis’s return to the stage, along with Absen LED and Brompton processors. Together, show programmer, Anthony Condon, and Video Director, Jon Shrimpton, handled everything from pixel-perfect playback through to IMAG content and synchronising visuals across different venues night after night, all controlled intuitively through Disguise’s Designer software.
The challenge
One of the biggest challenges for the team on the Oasis tour was to create the epic event fans would expect, while delivering the stripped-back rock concert that the band requested.
Oasis wanted a clean stage. That meant the backline, including drum kit and amplifiers, needed to be kept low while the side-of-stage tech was hidden below stage height. This new, purpose-built stage design prioritised wide, clean lines with minimal sight line issues, so that the onstage action reached fans at every corner of every venue on the tour. All video content needed to complement this approach.
With the tour making sold-out stops in the UK, North America, Australia, South America, and Asia, Shrimpton, Condon and the team also needed to ensure the visuals would work effectively across the whole tour, even with the size of the LED wall changing between venues.
The solution
To ensure that even those in the furthest seats could see the show, Universal Pixels delivered a huge Absen LED wall — which was 1,100 sqm, or the width of 17 double-decker buses, at the outdoor Heaton Park shows - which could be positioned 10 degrees back on either side of the stage. This meant it could be adjusted slightly to fit the size and shape of each venue’s stage throughout the tour.
Neil Harris of Bristol-based company, Shop, and Chris Curtis of I’m Your Boss were brought on board to create bespoke content for the tour. Shrimpton and Condon used a combination of this pre-rendered content and live camera footage to add some extra energy and place the crowd and band at the heart of action.
To bring these camera feeds in line with the rest of the visuals, treatments were applied to ensure everything fitted in with Oasis’s 90s rock aesthetic. The two content sources were successfully merged by using Gradient Modules with a mask blend mode in Designer, and piping Video Modules into ColourAdjust Layers.
During the opening track Hello, seven graded black and white visuals are shown in digital Oasis-branded white boxes, with an independent line cut in each. Condon used RGB layers in Designer to make the black and white frames, with seven video inputs composited in the foreground. Using the arrowing system in Designer, he also created expressions that transformed, cropped, and adjusted the opacity of layers from one master video layer and one master RGB layer. This approach provided the flexibility to tweak the visuals for the canvas size of each venue, with changes to one parameter automatically adjusting the others.
The same approach was applied to fan favourite, Don’t Look Back in Anger, while for Supersonic, Condon used a Channel Router and a PreComp to make prerendered moving cut outs for IMAG. Whatever used Soft Texture Edges as a mask to position the IMAG on the uneven horizon line.
Instead of a full Sockpuppet workflow, I opted for the traditional method of keyframing on timelines along with the Quantiser, using the band rehearsal audio files. It’s a hybrid approach which works well for a completely non-timecoded show. Working in beats and bars as opposed to time, I find, is a faster way to program specific track sections.
Programmer and Operator
In keeping with the show’s traditional rock ’n’ roll theme, Notch content was used sparingly but effectively, with playback handled by the Disguise GX 3 servers. One standout use was in Bring It On Down, which involved a video input layer being piped into the Notch block and then composited into multiple portrait feeds with exposed sides to achieve a wave effect. Notch designer, Matt Cromwell, was able to collaborate with Condon, Shrimpton and the team in previz and rehearsals to finesse these effects and ensure the creative direction of the show was consistent.
Some of the show’s other key visual moments came from pre-treated camera inputs - such as in Slide Away, where two Sony PVM-6041 CRT monitors were filmed by a pair of deliberately poorly set up minicams, giving the footage on the screens a scrappy, analogue feel that perfectly aligned with Oasis as a band.
The results
Oasis’s Live ‘25 tour has proven to be so much more than a sold-out reunion. It’s a cultural moment, influencing everything from fashion to the British economy. Older fans have been able to relive the heady days of the mid-'90s, while Gen Z has found its latest obsession. The show itself, with its restrained use of pre-made content and treated camera footage, is a testament to the enduring cool of Oasis’s aesthetic. The result? Pop culture history.
