It's just that time of year: the town is full of strangers, foreigners: skiiers, students, just-visitors, tourists. If they're lucky, the sun shines and it's warm enough to sit outside at a pavement cafe, watching the world, breathing the spring air. It was like that on Saturday: clear skies, warmth, T-shirts and open collars. I'd been for an afternoon swim and was wandering slowly back through the centre of town, enjoying the crowds and the cheerful, bright atmosphere. Lots of people on the streets and sitting around, talking, laughing, passing the time.
Outside the Palais de la Biere - the most expensive bar in town, I think- a crowd of obviously-British lads surrounded a small table, on which balanced improbably-large-litre glass tankards of amber beer. I don't know what it is about British men of twenty to thirty years old, outside their native land, but they are unmistakable. There's an atmosphere about them, almost like the old seaside postcards, but without the knotted-handkerchief hats. I recognise them anywhere: but perhaps it's just blood recognising blood, despite the years in exile. But that's just what I saw: a group of young British men, sitting at a French pavement cafe in the sun on a peaceful, springtime Saturday afternoon.
But behind the beer-drinking Brits, and next to the cafe window, looking shockingly-pale and wide-eyed, sat my daughter and her friend, grasping tiny cups of black coffee and Very Obviously trying to look careless and carefree and Extremely Sophisticated. It wasn't working. At least, not in to my eyes - something was Very Wrong!
"Come here!!!!" she signalled, "Quick!" A panicked whisper. I squatted in the chairless space at the side of her table. "What's going on?" I whispered back.
"Behind you... it's OASIS!!!!! It is! It's THEM!" Giggle. And both girls tried to hide their blushing faces in the miniature coffee cups.
Ahhhhh.... so that explains why she and her friend were spending twice as much on a coffee than they would ever normally do. (Everyone falls for this place at least once: it's an enticing cafe, a nice spot, you can see a garden square and its fountain, some majestic buildings, the mountains towering behind... and the waiter serves you and you sit in the sun and the world is at ease.... and then he brings you the bill and you choke on the dregs of your beer. I remember paying about 70 francs - 14 dollars - for two coffees and three Pepsis, five years ago now...)
Anyway, it was Oasis, sitting relatively-quietly (for British lads out on the beer), relatively-undisturbed (apart from daughter-and-friend asking for autographs) in a relatively-peaceful (apart from Saturday-shopping) French town. A bodyguard each, apparently, but they just looked like mates out to enjoy themselves. And I guess they did enjoy themselves, because my daughter bumped into them all again that night at a local nightclub. Enjoying the beer, they were, all of them, and I don't suppose that they had any need to worry about the prices here.
But I wonder if they could have sat, relaxed, in the street, then danced the night away with all the locals back home without getting mobbed? Somehow I doubt it.
I can't give a first-hand review of the Sunday-evening concert. All I know is that for several hours beforehand, my home was full of youths of assorted shapes and sizes, talking about how they were going to get to the concert hall, whether-or-not Oasis was "their" music, would she introduce them to the band? what would it be like, would they get there on time? could they have a sandwich please?.. and how my daughters returned at midnight, enthralled, having loved the concert, the music... how they didn't know who had been more drunk, the band or the mostly-British audience, who'd bussed down here from all over the UK... their stories of the Scots lining up 16 French beers to get the equivalent of a British pint, and paying even more than at the Palais... of John Lennon and Paul McCartney lookalikes by the dozen in the audience... and one proudly-owned tour T-shirt that is still ceremoniously draped across the kitchen worksurface.
Oasis performed at The Summum, Grenoble, on 31st March 1996.
