I had a front row seat at Blur v Oasis – here’s what a new play and a baffling mistake brought about | stage

And so, amid much ill-advised bravado, the battle began. I was 25 years old at the time. I spent three years at New Musical Express, interviewing both bands. (A single, “Wibbling Rivalry,” a recording of the verbal spat between Liam and Noel that marked my encounter with them, reached No. 52 on the singles chart in 1996.) I had just taken a job as features editor at Q magazine, which was busy turning away from the aristocracy of pre-’90s pop and rock — like Chris Rea, Dire Straits, and Simply Red — and embracing British pop.

Our offices were located in the same building as the HMV store near Oxford Circus. I remember two things about the week that Roll With It and Country House came out: daily visits to the basement to try to spot whoever might be fronting it; And meeting Alan McGee, head of Oasis’ Label Creation, after purchasing Country House. I showed him what I had bought and excitedly told him I felt like I was voting. “The whole thing is crazy,” he shrugged. I could tell he was really confused.

And so were a lot of other people. In the run-up to the supposed big week, there was a feeling that the two bands were twisting and turning in unseemly ways. In Blur’s case, the competitive drive that first pitted Albarn against grunge, then his arch-enemies Suede, then Oasis, not only got the better of him, but temporarily alienated him from Graham Coxon, the guitarist and artistic partner he had known since school. Meanwhile, in an interview with The Observer’s Miranda Sawyer, Noel decided to explain his hatred of Albarn and Alex James of Blur in the most horrific way imaginable: “Bass player and singer, I hope they both get AIDS and die, because I hate them.”

Such was the unstoppable momentum of Oasis that this incident — which Niven’s script combines with Liam’s homophobic rant that oddly fits the feel of the play — was quickly forgotten. This is partly because Blur released a second CD of Country House, where their song sold 274,000 copies, while Roll With It managed to sell 216,000 copies. But as anyone over 40 knows, after losing the battle, Oasis then comprehensively won the war.

By the end of 1995, Wonderwall had taken them into an orbit of their own, and their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? It sells huge quantities, not just in the UK, but in the US, a market Blur has never been able to break into. “The end of that year was a wonderful Christmas, wasn’t it?” James thought later. “I remember Damon came to my flat one evening, with real fear in his eyes. I think he was told he was a masturbator and that he had been beaten six times on his way through. He was the rudest man in Britain at that stage.”

To its credit, “Battle” is true to the breathless feel of the cartoon strip of the time, full of knowledge of the lines and a deep appreciation for the characters speaking them. To anyone familiar with the real-life story, some of the cast might seem a little miscast: Matthew “Gavin and Stacey” Horne plays Andy Ross as a brave, calculated man rather than a cunning, self-deprecating one; Why the famous Freshman speaks with an estuary glandular dialect remains a mystery. But the portrayal of Noel and Liam Gallagher by two unknowns – respectively, Paddy Stafford and George Asher, who had never acted professionally in theater before – was perfect. Stafford is characterized by his goals and control, while Asher occupies a role defined by the lack of any brake or filter.

Maybe Liam could have acted like this because the world of the British pop generation was, by modern standards, very small. There was no social media. The posts were created by the weekly music press and Radio One. If 1995 was a year of “civil war” and “thinking of blood,” it was largely a pantomime. When the audience walked out of the production I saw, you could sense what was going through their minds: the feeling that such a fight, in every way imaginable, would never happen again.