Still "Cool Britania" ? La politique d’événementialisation des villes en contexte musical : le cas des concerts de reformation d’Oasis à Manchester »

The announcement in August 2024 that Oasis was reforming was met with enthusiasm, then often incomprehension – even anger – from fans when they discovered that ticket prices for the announced concerts were subject to "dynamic pricing". While the reactions of fans, band members and even economists have been widely commented on, how is the city of Manchester, the band's "motherland", preparing to welcome a wave of 320,000 people over five concert dates spread across ten days? How is it positioning itself in terms of communication in the face of the return of its prodigal sons? Three types of data enabled me to assess the challenges of the event and its scale from both a spatial and temporal perspective: 1/ articles from the local press, supplemented by those from the national and international press, will provide an overview of the gradual set-up, implementation and impact of the event on the city 2/ my personal experience, including attending one of Oasis' performances at Heaton Park (20 July 2025) during a three-day stay in Manchester, gave me the opportunity to observe the urban dynamics on the ground 3/ scientific literature enabled me to place these concerts and the observations that will result from them in a broader perspective, particularly through the concepts of eventisation (Bonte, Guillard & Ruggeri, 2024), place-making and heritage preservation (Ballico & Watson, 2020; Guillard, Palis & Johansson, 2024).