I grew up in Fayetteville, Georgia, a small town outside of Atlanta. My American father, a Vietnam War veteran, spent much of his time railing against immigrants—including my Vietnamese mother, who he’d met in Saigon. He was constantly telling me I was white. Mom, exhausted from taking care of my brother, who was left disabled after the war, would often disappear into a haze of despair; the thick fog of it made it hard for any of us to breathe. Once my friends could drive, I’d escape to Atlanta whenever I could. My friend Ashley would blast Oasis during our drive, which took 50 minutes—the exact length of the band’s second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. I’d stare at the Interstate, blurry as we whizzed past, and daydream about one day visiting England, the country that had gifted us Noel and Liam Gallagher.

In 1996, on the last night of summer camp in North Carolina, I stood on a concrete patio at sunset, slow-dancing with an older girl from Florida to “Champagne Supernova.” I was 14 and a portrait of awkwardness with my braces and thick glasses. Lindsay towered about a foot above me, her blonde locks and severe bangs defining that distance, and she pulled my head to her chest, barely covered by a skimpy pink dress. Her skinny legs made her look like a flamingo, a picture enhanced by the sound of ebbing water in the opening bars of the song and the fading sun, which shot tropical orange and purple hues over the mountains. “Never forget this,” she said. “I want you to think of us when you see the sun and whenever you hear this song.” It was not romance. She’d seen me in too many dresses to harbor that illusion. Her intention, implicit but screaming, called for me to bottle up those positive feelings, of safety and freedom that we’d found in each other, knowing we could be ourselves and show our teary faces since we’d never see each other again. Oasis, whether unleashing a wall of guitar noise or lacing songs with cello and violin, still leaves me swimming in that nostalgia.

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I’m 41 now and have lived in London for 16 years. I entered the U.K. on a student visa to study Vietnamese in grad school, desperately trying to understand the country and the conflict that had brought my parents together. Oasis songs sat on my playlist all the while. Last year, when finishing my memoir Wild Dances: My Queer and Curious Journey to Eurovision, I remembered how on my very first day in the country, I’d served as an extra in an Oasis music video for “Acquiesce”—a B-side track that dropped on U.S. radio stations 25 years ago this October.

It’s September 2006 and I’m walking to The Electric Ballroom in London’s Camden Town. Last week, Ashley forwarded me a casting call from producers, sent to the official Oasis fan club of which she is a part. It spelled out their simple criteria in capital letters. They wanted an e-mail with your NAME, AGE, PHOTOGRAPH and MOBILE NUMBER—the very British way of referring to a cell phone—for a video shoot happening soon in London. I told Ashley I didn’t have any good photos. Schooled in the inner workings of the gay mind, which she’d mastered during her college years, spent partly at a gay bar called Boneshakers in Athens, Georgia, she stroked my ego like it was a cat and leaned into hyperbole. “You’re skinny and gorgeous, and they’ll totally pick you,” she said. “Just send them that pic you use on your MySpace profile.”

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The all-Asian audience featured in the "Acquiesce" music video.

A few days later, a producer e-mailed me and about thirty others, saying we’d been selected. She didn’t reveal the song. She did, however, include this request: “If you have an Oriental friend that you would like to bring along please email me their name, age and photo and they will be on the list of people appearing in the video.” Oriental, of course, refers to objects—rugs, pearls, gardens—not people (even if my American father still rages against “Oriental drivers,” including my Vietnamese mother). But maybe the producer is just young and doesn’t know better. Clumsy wording aside, I applauded them in my head for boosting East Asian representation. They’d probably cast too many white people already, since pretty much everyone in every rock video I’ve seen is white (sometimes literally in the case of KISS and the sun-deprived Green Day). I scanned the e-mail addresses of the other extras. Names like Maimai, Mihara, Shuji and Yukako sat alongside Cathy, James, Lance and Mike.

The video, I learn in another e-mail a few days later, is for “Acquiesce,” which came out in 1995. I’d never heard it. A quick dip onto message boards reveals it as a fan favorite. The title, about accepting or agreeing to something, even if you don’t really want to, led many to assume it explored the brothers’ combustible relationship, which had given newspapers plenty of inches over the years. Like when Noel reportedly smashed a chair against Liam’s head. Or when Liam sat out of their 12-song MTV Unplugged recording at London’s Royal Festival Hall, forcing his brother to take over lead vocals. Liam proceeded to chug beer and smoke, heckling Noel from the balcony.

When I get to The Electric Ballroom about a dozen people dawdle outside. Per the producers’ instructions, they wear baggy jeans, tank tops, and t-shirts; they’d banned us from wearing skinny jeans, saying we needed to look like we’re at an Oasis concert in 1995. I’m wearing a turquoise polo and jeans. Some of the other extras, just teenagers, have taken trains from Manchester, but most hail from London and the surrounding counties. Everyone has dark hair. They say their parents come from China, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and South Korea.

“Why is everyone Asian?” a half-Thai guy asks.

Oasis, unleashing a wall of guitar noise, still leaves me swimming in that nostalgia.

No one has an answer. Producers eventually herd us to an upstairs balcony that overlooks the stage. Four or five musicians—again, all of them Asian—pose for photos with their equipment, while a series of spotlights change from white to red, blue, yellow and then orange. A Japanese model, hired for the shoot, scoots up to me and asks if that is the real Oasis on stage. “Honey, the real Oasis are white guys,” I tell her. She laughs and I follow her back to a group of models, who, unlike the rest of us, are being paid for their appearance. A casting agent explains that the video depicts a Japanese cover band performing “Acquiesce” at a concert in Tokyo. The video will also include exterior shots of the cover band walking through Ginza and Shibuya to capture that sense of place. The on-stage actors will mime along to Liam and Noel’s recorded vocals.

I ask if Oasis is being lazy by outsourcing their music video to Japanese actors and the agent has a credible response. Apparently, the Japanese hold Oasis up as the standard bearers of contemporary British rock; the group are by far the most popular British musical act of recent years in Japan, ahead of even The Spice Girls, Blur and Radiohead. That’s spawned a series of successful Oasis cover bands in Tokyo, who inspired the video. In that way the video pays homage to some of the band’s biggest fans.

Producers tell us it’s going to be a long shoot, but say that we should definitely stick around. A female producer stresses that Noel frequents The Good Mixer and The Hawley Arms, two Camden pubs, so he may pop by later. One of her tasks, I suspect, is to keep enough bodies around so the room looks full until the bitter end.

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Meet the alternate-universe, Japanese cover band versions of Liam and Noel Gallagher.

Three hours after arriving, we’re finally released to the floor. I manage to make it to the front row, pressing my body against the metal railing. After thirty minutes or so, a group of white people, who had been sequestered in another space, fill up the rows at the back. We chant “O-A-SIS”, adding a “clap, clap” in between, for several minutes. Then the music drops. The amps blast dirty guitar strums while an ethereal wail that sounds like “welllll” floats just behind. The reverb paves the way for the Japanese cover band to take the stage. One of them wears a green parka with fur trim—signature Liam —and he swigs from a plastic cup of beer, acting like he’s already downed a gallon of hooch. He mimes the verses into the mic, and face mugs during the chorus, when the stand-in Noel drops his lip-sync. The set-up is fake, but it all feels like a real concert—we hop and bob as one, as cameramen run back and forth across the front of the stage and camera cranes swoop overhead. The energy really boils over in the build-up to the chorus. The descending bass line gets sucked into some sort of electronic wind tunnel and fake Noel takes center stage. The fake Liam, standing to the side, spreads his arms out like he’s Jesus welcoming us to Tokyo.

By the third run-through, producers start policing the crowd. They shout down a tall blonde guy who’d made his way to the front and he begrudgingly moves to the edge of the swarm before disappearing altogether. A little later, as I enter the trance of that falling bassline, a man with a clipboard looks at me, points while mouthing the word “you” and then gestures for me to skedaddle. I ignore him. He gets in my face and shouts for me to move.

“What did I do?” I yell at the girl next to me as I slowly back away.

“You look too white,” she shouts back. “We’re meant to be in Japan.”

Suddenly it all makes sense. In the Myspace pic I’d submitted I’m laughing—so hard that my eyes push back into a squint. In their narrow understanding of what Asians look like, and perhaps having misinterpreted my middle name, Lee, they’d approved my application. But in the concert hall, where I display a broader range of emotion, and set against full-blooded Asians, I’m deemed a half-breed and relegated to the back. I skulk out of the crowd, the producer’s eyes locked on me, and I feel bad, like a groupie who has crossed some sort of line. I haven’t. The man with the clipboard simply drew the line in the wrong place. I’m raging at the thought that my almond eyes should disqualify me. I spend the next run-through at the back, cursing under my breath. Maybe I can secure my place at the front if I pop out to Camden High Street and come back dressed as a spring roll.

Liam’s double throws his red tambourine into the audience, which swells like a wave, and I see my new acquaintances in the front row reaching for it. I feel a kinship with those extras thrusting near the stage. I know I need to get back to the front.

I sharpen my elbows and crab-crawl my way through the center of the crowd, avoiding the censors lined up along the sides, and make it to the second row, deliberately squinting to offer myself a degree of cover. It’s time to angry dance. I jump higher and throw my hands harder as I point at the stage, the band, the ceiling. I deliver a lip-sync so tight and precise you’d think Liam and Noel had set aside their differences and slipped into my motherboard.

In the final minute of the song we all repeat “we belieeeeve” and “we neeeeed” with Japanese Noel. My mouth, open wide, briefly inhales some of the long black hair of a model bouncing in front of me. She’s too wrapped up in the guitar distortion to notice. A camera pops up from behind the band and aims at the crowd. Shameless, I stare into its lens, saying I believe, and dance like everyone is watching.

Wild Dances: My Queer and Curious Journey to Eurovision

Credit: Astra Publishing House

Adapted from an excerpt of WILD DANCES: My Queer and Curious Journey to Eurovision, by William Lee Adams. Copyright© 2023 by William Lee Adams. Published on May 9, 2023 by Astra Publishing House. Reprinted by permission.

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