From Oasis to Pink Floyd: The bizarre history of the ‘final gig’

On 28 August 2009, Oasis were about to take the stage at the Rock en Seine Festival in Paris when everything went pear shaped for the final time. “In some ways it’s befallen me to expose those songs to the public, and it’s a responsibility I take seriously.” If you know a show is going to be the last one, though, you can plan for it as something special, as Crowded House did when they bade farewell outside Sydney Opera House on 24 November 1996, to a crowd estimated at up to 150,000 people. “I was not determined to make it a big show,” says Neil Finn, the band’s leader. You can get lost in thoughts that are not very useful in that sort of situation.” You become very, very focused – it’s almost like a higher consciousness Crowded House’s Neil Finn Only afterwards did Finn come to appreciate the dangers of putting on such a huge show in an impromptu venue – the risks of crushing and dehydration among them: “I only realised later that there was a marathon effort of endurance to be down the front as a hardcore Crowded House fan and get through that day and then still have energy to make the show fantastic.” And he recalls looking up during the set and seeing that a fan was scaling one of the “sails” of the opera house. open image in gallery Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Neil Peart of Rush on stage during the R40 LIVE tour at KeyArena on 19 July 2015 in Seattle, Washington “I didn’t 100 per cent know it was our final show,” he told me in 2018.