Oasis live 2025: illuminous collage

A Luminist Reading of Design, Memory, and the Art of Assembly

Marvel Stadium hosted thousands upon thousands at the Oasis LIVE 25 stage in Melbourne, lucky to be in the audience of adidas stripes. This post could be condensed to one sentence; the performance and staging were both first class.

Tom Hodgkinson and the team at SHOP DESIGN composed an accompaniment in fragments, a visual counterpoint to sound. The concert unfolded like a city of flickering posters, torn, remade, and illuminated. The palette oscillated from coal black and sodium orange to petrol blue and mercury white; industrial tones recalling Manchester’s mills, refracted through Melbourne’s crisp southern light. Where earlier Oasis tours drenched stages in static monochrome, Hodgkinson’s approach introduced fluidity: light that breathed, fractured, and sometimes broke entirely. The glitches were deliberate, ruptures that allowed audiences to see the medium’s fragility. It was a reminder that perfection is sterile, that vibrancy depends on flaw. The graphics made an impact through contrast and juxaposition, a conversation between grit and gloss, nostalgia and innovation. Often a frame of light carried the residue of another: a Bauhaus poster glimpsed beneath a Manchester billboard, the El Lissitsky-esque geometry colliding with the haze of 80’s photographs. It was collage as atmosphere and collage as memory.

Three main screens set above the stage were alive with collaged images. Reminiscent of Hannah Hoch’s cut forms, here the collage layering was digital: pixels were the paper, light was the glue. Each projection operated like a torn page, one texture revealing another beneath. The faces of Liam and Noel, re-scaled and multiplied, drifted through a cloud of shifting typographies, as if the band itself were being reconstructed from cultural memory. It was a visual archaeology: the stage as palimpsest, each layer honouring the one before it.

Collage as Philosophy

In the Luminist reading, collage represents the moral act of attention, the capacity to see fragments as meaningful. Where modern culture seeks the seamless, collage acknowledges history, labour, imperfection.

Collage, at its core, is about what we keep and what we discard. It is an act of selection mirroring the ethical choices of design itself. By curating fragments from musical, graphic, and architectural heritage, Tom transformed the concert into a deeper realm of cultural lineage. Every flashing poster, every echo of type, whispered the same truth: heritage is not a static relic but an active composition, a work forever in progress. The show was a dialogue between eras, cities, and identities.

In the catalogue of design history, Hodgkinson’s Oasis LIVE 25 sits across eras rather than a moment of contemporary arena graphics. It was a meditation on assembly, a humane, perfectly imperfect, luminous bricolage.

Bucket Hats off to you. What a show.