Cast

Bass player, then bandleader

Cast were put together in Liverpool in 1992 by John Power, until then the bass player in The La's, and Peter Wilkinson, who had come through Shack. The line-up that made the band's name settled the following year, when Liam 'Skin' Tyson joined on guitar and Keith O'Neill on drums. Power has described the early years as a matter of stepping out of The La's' shadow — no small thing in a city where that band's single album had already become the local measure of a good song.

What Cast brought to the mid-90s was narrower and more insistent than most of the field around them: short songs built on a strummed chord and a rising vocal line, carried by a high Scouse tenor that reached the back of a hall without much help from the desk. There was no irony in it and very little arrangement. That was the point, and it travelled a long way on those terms — Power's writing was praised by peers who were otherwise competing with him, Noel Gallagher calling him 'as cosmic as the day is long'.

The band's history with Oasis starts early. Both were on the bill at Knebworth in 1996, and the two camps have circled each other ever since, which matters a good deal to where Cast have ended up three decades later.

All Change, and the record that stopped it

All Change appeared in 1995 and became the fastest-selling debut album Polydor had put out, which set the terms for everything that followed. Mother Nature Calls came in 1997 and Magic Hour in 1999, and the singles kept landing: 'Flying' reached number four, still the band's highest UK chart placing, with 'Walkaway', 'Sandstorm', 'Finetime' and 'Alright' establishing the handful of songs any Cast audience now turns up for.

The fourth album broke the run. Beetroot, released in 2001, traded the guitars for loops and funk-leaning production, and neither the press nor the audience followed. Cast split shortly afterwards. Power has since put the collapse down to the band disagreeing about the direction of that record rather than to anything that went wrong live, and he spent the rest of the decade working under his own name.

The reunion came in 2010, for a tour marking fifteen years of All Change, and the pattern after it was modest and unhurried: Troubled Times in 2011, Kicking Up the Dust in 2017, Love Is the Call in 2024. Wilkinson left in 2015 and Jay Lewis took over on bass. Through most of that period Cast were a reliable draw in mid-sized British rooms and nothing more, playing to a crowd that had aged alongside them. Nobody was writing about a comeback.

The stadium summer

That changed with the Oasis reunion. Cast were the most-used opener on the Live '25 run, starting at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff on 4 July 2025 and going on to five nights at Wembley Stadium in July and August, MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford on 31 August, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on 6 September, and two more Wembley dates on 27 and 28 September. Liam Gallagher had already taken the band out on his Definitely Maybe anniversary shows, so the invitation was not a surprise, but the scale was a different order of exposure — several hundred thousand people, a large share of them too young to have bought All Change.

Cast worked the two things at once. The 30th anniversary of All Change fell in 2025 and was marked with its own run of shows, while the band were simultaneously making a new record. Power wrote most of it inside six months, finishing songs in the room during sessions in February and March 2025 with Youth producing at his Space Mountain studio in Spain. Power's account of it is about nerve rather than craft: he says he finally found confidence in the studio, and let strings, brass and gospel backing vocals arrive as the songs asked for them instead of planning any of it in advance. P.P. Arnold sang on several tracks.

By 2025 the band had also signed to Scruff of the Neck, a long way from Polydor and a reasonable indication of how they now operate.

Yeah Yeah Yeah

The eighth Cast album, Yeah Yeah Yeah, came out on 30 January 2026 — ten tracks, opening with 'Poison Vine', the P.P. Arnold collaboration that leads with brass rather than a guitar figure. 'The Way It's Gotta Be (Oh Yeah)' pushes into funk and psychedelia; 'Teardrops' has been singled out by reviewers as the strongest thing on it; 'Birds Heading South' closes the record quietly. It reached the UK Top 10, which is the band's best commercial result in a very long time.

The reviews were warmer than the band have been used to. Writing in February 2026, At The Barrier described a cleaner, fuller sound that keeps the jangling Merseyside roots while opening the windows to brass, strings and gospel-tinged vocals, and read the album as the work of a band re-energised by late-career momentum rather than one repeating itself. The consistent note across the coverage was that it does not trade on the 90s.

Power is direct about the distinction. He rejects the term legacy band, and points to the radio play 'Poison Vine' picked up as the first significant airtime Cast have had in 27 years. He is 58 and says the sense of communion on stage is stronger now than it was at the height of it, which he attributes to being more open on stage rather than hiding behind the songs. His summary of where the band sit: back, definitely back.

October, and what the year has looked like

The Yeah Yeah Yeah tour is six dates, on sale since 17 July 2026: Leeds University Stylus on 1 October, Edinburgh's Queen's Hall on 2 October, Manchester's New Century Hall on 3 October, then Newcastle University on 22 October, London's Electric Ballroom on 23 October and a homecoming at the Liverpool Dome on 24 October. Trampolene open the first three; Pastel open the last three. These are halls, not arenas — a deliberate step back down from the stadium slots, and the same scale of room Cast have played for fifteen years, only now with a Top 10 record behind them.

The run arrives at the end of a heavy year: setlist.fm logs around forty Cast performances in 2026, most of them festivals. The band played Roseshire Festival at Chester House Estate in Irchester on 29 August, Rock N Roll Circus at Sheffield's Don Valley Bowl on 30 August, Blackpool Winter Gardens on 12 September and BBC Radio 2 In The Park at Stirling on 13 September. Power's framing of the shows, given when the tour was announced, is that walking on stage is about the here and now, that nobody is getting nostalgic, and that the point is the myth of tomorrow rather than yesterday — which reads as posturing until the setlists are checked and the new songs are actually in them.