You Ain't Ever Gonna Burn My Heart Out

Five lifetimes ago, while on a high school exchange program to a small town outside of Hamburg, Germany, I was at a house party where one of the Germans put on Oasis's second album, What's the Story, Morning Glory. Up until that moment, the music at the party had been forgettable German pop, other than the ubiquitous inescapable German earworm of the summer, Blümchen's "Piep piep, kleiner Satellit," an utterly catchy and absolutely maddening dance song.

Oasis had been a modestly large hit in the US—none of their songs or albums ever hit #1, but a couple came close—so I remember my surprise when not only did everyone sing along to "Wonderwall", which after all had been one of the biggest hits of that summer—but everyone sang even louder for the following track, a song I'd thought of as the real undiscovered gem of the album, "Don't Look Back in Anger." It's 30 years later and I still remember the joy of a room full of people belting out a song that—while in fact a decent sized radio hit even in America—felt like it was all a song we’d individually discovered and collectively decided we loved.

Another country, two lifetimes later, I was living in Edinburgh, working in the Royal Museum there and living in a hostel, the one long term American amongst a few Canadians, some Saffies, Swedes, and a lot of Aussies and Kiwis.

The last is relevant for this story, because one weekend in Edinburgh, a Kiwi friend invited us all out to see the All-Blacks play. I was at that time extraverted enough that I would hang out with anyone I liked even remotely, so I said yes, and then asked, "What are the All-Blacks?"

A group of two dozen of us walked the two miles to the Edinburgh rugby stadium, stopping in liquor stores along the way that had bouncers controlling the lines, on our way to Murrayfield to see the Edinburgh Rugby team (who had recently stopped calling themselves the Edinburgh Reivers) play the New Zealand All-Blacks. The streets were parties as the crowds took over and people walked down the middle of the street in the middle of the afternoon.

It was a wild and exciting day. While my college was a basketball college, it was also a dry campus at a small Christian college in the middle of Indiana; it was orders of magnitude more staid than going to a Scottish/Kiwi city tailgating party in Edinburgh.

I didn't1 understand rugby, but you didn't need to know the rules of the game to see that the game was a slaughter. To say that the All-Blacks are good at rugby is to drastically understate it. The All-Blacks are sometimes regarded as one of the most successful sports team in history, and Edinburgh Rugby are not. It was a curb stomp of a game.

But that was clear even before the game started; my one crystal clear memory of the match was that on that day I learned what the Haka is. If you've never seen one, you're in for a treat—a ritualized war dance of the team dancing, prancing, shouting, stomping, and contorting their faces to tell the opposing team that they will be destroyed—with my Kiwi friends in the stands next to me joining in. It's an astonishing experience.

Two weeks ago I returned to Murrayfield Stadium with 80,000 of my drunkest mates, louts, lads, and my wife. We were there for Oasis; they'd broken up years ago, and only reunited after a bad divorce left one brother painfully short on money. It was a cash-in tour, perfectly executed and aimed at our nostalgia, the love and joy that we had in the mid-90s, and it brought us all back there. There was no "We're going to play a couple songs from our newest album." They’ve been playing the same setlist every show, and why would they change it up? It is constructed perfectly to hit every single crowd-pleasing hit with no dead weight2 from start to finish.

Including of course "Don't Look Back in Anger." And once again, Americans and Europeans all got together to sing along together at the top of their lungs, like it was their own personal private discovery.

It was glorious.

As of this writing, Edinburgh Rugby has played against the All-Blacks 32 times over 117 years, and has never won.

While I recommend listening to Oasis, I would be remiss if I didn’t include “Piep Piep Kleiner Satellit.” Germany in the 90s was a wild place.