For most Australian musicians, opening for Oasis would be the kind of career-defining moment that exists only in their dreams. But for Brisbane five-piece Ball Park Music, it became a surreal reality.
In front of more than 320,000 fans during the legendary UK band’s ‘Oasis Live 25’ Australian tour, Ball Park Music found themselves stepping onto stadium stages multiple times the size of anything they’d experienced before, performing for crowds three, four times their usual.
Liam Gallagher claimed responsibility for bringing the Aussie indie-rockers on board, in a response to a fan on Twitter. Separating Gallagher’s bold assertions from reality is never quite straightforward, but he said it was his idea to have the beloved group open the highly anticipated tour.
Mine
— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) April 17, 2025
Ball Park Music have built a dedicated fanbase through platinum singles, eight acclaimed albums, and consistent triple j Hottest 100 appearances. Seven albums impacted the ARIA top ten, three of which reached the runner-up spot: Puddinghead in 2014, Ball Park Music in 2020 and Weirder & Weirder in 2022.
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Their latest album, Like Love, was the first to reach No. 1. It was also the first homemade album to lead the ARIA Charts this year. The last Australian artist to go to the top was Kylie Minogue, whose Tension II opened at the top in late October 2024, one of six Australian-made leaders that year.
They’re taking it on tour in 2026, with newly announced shows set for May and June.
The experience has now been immortalised in the third edition of Live Nation’s Sound Check series, which goes behind the scenes to capture the preparation, nerves, and gratitude that accompanied the monumental shows.
Following previous instalments featuring Anna Lunoe, Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers, and Dallas Frasca, among others, the series continues its mission to celebrate homegrown Australian talent and the transformative power of live performance.
We caught up with the band’s frontman Sam Cromack to talk about the surreal experience of touring with the Gallagher brothers, their setlist decisions, a 600-show milestone, and why this reminded him of the romantic rock and roll dreams that started it all.
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Rolling Stone AU/NZ: You’ve had some time to process how crazy the past two weeks have been, how surreal was it, opening for Oasis?
Sam Cromack: It was amazing! That really has to be said first up, we loved it. It was definitely an emotional roller coaster, especially to begin with. Day one, you know, arriving at the stadium and kind of getting a lay of the land with our crew, it was a lot.
Obviously, we’ve been looking forward to this for months and months and months, pretty large in our imagination, so it was almost too much to process on day one. We were just trying to sort of get used to it all and blend in and not tread on anyone’s toes and we’ve very much got our own set in mind, making sure to the best of our ability that we can sort of get things set up to our liking. And yeah, just coming to terms with playing to an audience that large, we’ve never done anything like it. The crowds are probably at least three to four times bigger than the biggest crowds we’ve played to previously.
It was confirmed that over 320,000 people attended ‘Oasis Live 25’ over the five nights, which is insane. Was the crowd atmosphere different to your own headline shows?
Definitely, yeah. The first and most obvious thing being that it’s a gigantic crowd of people who are primarily waiting to see Oasis, you know, we sort of almost stood as a barrier to what they wanted, but I thought the crowds were really kind and receptive overall. I never felt, you know, unwelcome or unwanted. I didn’t feel like people gave us any grief. Sure, there’s a little bit of indifference, there’s just so many people there and they’re waiting for the headliner and a lot of people kind of looking at you like a stunned mullet.
Like I said, that first day was so much to take in and it was a bit too hard to process it. But once we’d done that and ripped the bandaid off, I think we went into day two feeling really excited to get to do it yet again. And it’s often like that with performing, if you get to do two nights somewhere or beyond, like coming back to have a redo feels so good. We kind of knew what we had to do. We brought a lot more confidence that second night and the remaining four shows were easily some of the most memorable we’ve ever done. We started to even really like playing in a stadium. We sort of thought, oh, I could get used to this, you know!
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You’ve said that this tour reminded you of why you started playing music in the first place, can you tell me more about that?
I think when you’re a kid and you first get interested in music, you obviously have a very limited understanding of what that world is like. You have a very romantic view of what rock and roll might be, and you do get swept up in those kind of fantasies, you know, the big obvious things. You see big stacks of amps and stadiums and everyone cheering, and you can’t help but, as an aspiring young guitarist or musician or whatever, think, ‘wow, I’d like to do that one day’.
The journey between being young and thinking like that to where we are now has had lots of twists and turns, and a lot of it falls short or is different to what you expected, and obviously we have a very true and lasting passion for what we do, we’ve never given up. We love music and just keep returning to it over and over again. But to do something like this, so grand in scale and so close symbolically to sort of what drew you in in the first place was such a thrill to do.
You grew up listening to Oasis, is there a specific song or album that is significant to you personally?
For me personally, I kind of feel tempted to say their song “Roll With It” which is from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, like how can you not like those kinds of songs!
I remember when I was young, and I hope I’m remembering this correctly, either way it’s always stuck in my mind, I think I saw an interview with Noel, this is many, many moons ago, where he said his daughter, who would have been young at the time, her favourite was “Roll With It”. And I remember as a kid being like, ‘oh, that’s interesting that his daughter likes that one’. And then I remember always listening to it and still to this day thinking, it’s just about that dynamic, especially now that I have daughters, like, that she really went for that song.
And I’ve come to see that song as very much a great display of their more fun, up-tempo kind of rollicking side, with very obvious nods to classic rock and roll. I’ve always cherished the song, and when they played it at the shows, I felt like every time that was a real pivot in the energy, it just lifted so much and I was living for that song, it was so good.
What about your setlist, was that something you carefully curated to make sure it resonated with the Oasis crowd?
Definitely! I think our band explores quite a few different sounds, we have some pretty low-key, almost acoustic, folky sort of stuff. And that was really kind of one of the focuses of our last record in particular. But we have our rock piggy moments as well. We thought that was the best way forward in a stadium with a massive amount of people who mostly don’t know us. We just thought, ‘let’s be loud and rollicking and really confident and just kind of burn the house down if we can’. We thought that was the way to go, and I think we made the right choice.
Sydney night one marked Ball Park Music’s 600th show, congratulations, that’s an incredible milestone. What did it feel like celebrating that on such a mammoth night?
It was epic, I mean, the numbers are right there. We’ve done a lot of shows now, and while we give it our best and enjoy them all the best we can, not every show can be sort of supercharged by some kind of bigger meaning or catharsis, this simply can’t happen every night. But some shows are, and this was definitely one of them.
It couldn’t have been more perfect, right in the middle of the tour, had a lot of family and friends coming to that one, we were really starting to feel confident and a bit more at home on the stage, yeah, dream come true. It was so good. We definitely partied hard that night.
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Do you have any fun stories to share from interactions with the Gallagher brothers?
Unfortunately, no, we didn’t get to formally meet them. They were very much sort of like in their own galaxy, you know, like you literally didn’t see them really anywhere. We didn’t see Liam once, only saw him when he was on the stage. Even when he would enter the building, things were very much kind of getting locked down.
Of course, we hoped that at some point we might be able to say g’day and say thanks for the opportunity. At the same time, I totally respect the task that they’ve got in front of them. We also know what it’s like to be a headline band flung all around the place. I know for them personally, there wouldn’t have been too much excitement if someone’s like, ‘hey, you have to go and meet the support band’.
It’s such a massive tour. I don’t think we even fully understood how big of an operation the whole thing was. So yeah, that never happened. But some of us and our crew did once or twice pass Noel in the corridors. He was polite and said g’day, and we were sent some videos by people of him watching our set a couple of times. But certainly no crazy hotel room trashing stories to share or anything like that.
Ball Park Music are the stars of the third edition of Live Nation’s original content series Sound Check, following artists including Anna Lunoe, Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers, and Dallas Frasca. What does it mean to be part of this showcase of homegrown Australian talent?
We’re very grateful for it! You roll into so many things really with no expectations, you kind of just roll with it and see what happens. We were immediately receptive to their pitch is sort of capturing our journey towards doing these shows, and everyone we’ve worked with’s been lovely.
We’re not going to say no to very well-captured free content in 2025, if someone wants to capture something and make something really nice, well, you know, that suits me.
Yeah, why wouldn’t you!
Exactly! But on a serious note we were very thankful. And it is awesome when these big kind of milestone moments in our life and music get captured. We’ve been trying to invest a little bit more into that sort of thing, we know that it’s got a functional purpose right here, right now. But it’s also something that we’ve come to understand that we’ll be fond of in the years ahead.
The series is quite intimate, offering a behind-the-scenes look at your preparation for the Oasis tour, was it challenging to be that vulnerable and open with a cameras following you?
No, we’ve gotten a bit more used to it. We filmed the making of our last album, which came out earlier this year, and we recorded it June last year, and that was probably the first big thing we’d done where we’d had a camera in our face the whole time. It’s probably not like a speciality for our band, we love performing on stage, but I don’t know, we don’t have celebrity blood, you know.
I think the trick is having people behind it that you either know and feel comfortable with, or even if you don’t know, it’s important, and I say this respectfully, that they’re somewhat invisible. You need to really forget the fact that that’s happening, and then you can sort of let your hair down. All the stuff in the lead-up to these shows and anything captured at the shows was with people that we’ve come to know through the industry, or they, like I said, did a good job of me not even knowing they’re there.
And it must be nice for your fans to be able to see a different side of you, that they might not have seen otherwise, right?
Yeah, that’s it. We’ve started to be a little more receptive to sharing that. I think we realised you really do need to just be yourself and say whatever you would normally say.
So what’s next for Ball Park Music, you’re off in two weeks for shows in Europe and the UK, you’ve got a couple of festivals in Australia next year, is there anything else that you guys are working on at the moment?
We’re definitely looking into next year and working on more shows. Definitely feel on a roll with the show and keen to keep it going. Doing Oasis, we knew it would be exciting and a bit of a spectacle. But you’re always bracing for how it could really be and a part of me was keeping my expectations realistic, thinking it might be fascinating, but it might ultimately feel a bit strange. But it was really, genuinely great.
I was saying to our drummer Daniel last week, it kind of felt like it lit a bit of a spark under me again, like renewed some ambition that had not faded away, but had just plateaued a little bit. It felt awesome to be up there doing a show of that scale. And I felt like our band and our music was reasonably well suited to that environment.
And I’m not saying we’ll be in stadiums anytime soon, but just everything about their show, the size of it, the love of the fans and the production too with the screens and the sheer volume of everything in the stadium, I don’t know, it kind of did reawaken something. You’re like, ‘all right, I’ve got things I’d still love to do’. And suddenly I can see our band as being something that’s maybe bigger than little club shows or whatever.
Maybe we do need to strive to keep going and get on even bigger stages with an even better show all the time, which, I mean, that’s been our kind of goal since day one. But it was nice to have something that’s like a real refresher!
