Something's just come to mind. It's not necessarily the loudest moment but it was still incredibly loud and incredibly emotional.
I'm not really much of an Oasis fan. Definitely Maybe is a great rock & roll record but everything after that I can give or take. I'm not really a fan of Noel as a person either. But when it comes to 'Don't Look Back in Anger', things started to change for me just after the Arena bomb when it became the de facto anthem of the grieving period Manchester went through in the weeks and months afterwards. I felt like I understood it and appreciated it more around then.
I lived basically next door to the Arena at the time and I was outside the snooker place at the bottom of Cheetham Hill in a cab when it went off. I didn't know what had happened until I got home and put the news on but I remember seeing all the faces of kids in Ariana Grande t-shirts who'd been separated from their parents, and vice versa. Lots of distressed people with phones in both hands, trying to make contact with their loved ones.
I couldn't sleep that night. My parents were in New York and I had to phone them and tell them. It was about 3am our time, 10pm US time. I woke up the next morning and the entire postcode was deserted, except for police and journalists and stuff. Walked across the city centre to the Waldorf and it was dead silent. Eerie and sad. It was like someone had finally managed to shut Manchester up and it really, really got under my skin.
When the dust had settled I found out one of my best mates from school had lost a friend in the attack. There's a text saying "Just heard about the Arena. You okay?" that remains undelivered on my mate's phone. And then I found out that a work colleague of mine had lost a family member as well - the little girl, Saffie. I don't normally get affected by things to the extent that the Arena attack affected me. I went to all the memorials, the vigils, etc.
Years passed and I realised on the morning of the 3-2 win against Villa that it was exactly five years since the day of the bomb. The game panned out as it did, with Gundogan's heroics, and obviously everyone was already emotional. Then Noel Gallagher emerged from his box just where the Colin Bell Stand meets the North Stand and the PA guys must have spotted it because they immediately played 'Don't Look Back in Anger'.
The whole North Stand turned to sing it at him. The library in full voice. And even Noel, who normally likes to soak in praise - he raised his arms a bit initially but after a few seconds he just stood there quietly, taking the moment in. We all knew what day it was, we all knew what that song meant to Manchester after the Arena bomb, and just for a moment what had happened on the pitch seemed incredibly small in comparison.
When I hear that song now, the moment that a few thousand of us shared with Noel jumps right back into my mind. That and the quiet, tense summer of 2017 in Manchester are all I can really associate it with now. A really sobering moment on a hectic today.
