I’ve spent my entire adult life an Oasis apologist.

Anyone who has sparred with me on the subject knows that I will happily mount an impassioned defence of the Gallagher brothers’ bravado and indefatigable self-belief. I’ll explain why they were always better than Blur, and champion the post-Masterplan albums that everyone generally writes off (yes, even Standing on The Shoulder of Giants).

I might draw the line at defending the drunken oaf pissing into a cup and lobbing pints of urine out of the crowd in 2009, or the thug who headbutted my brother in the moshpit at Wembley Arena the previous year, but while the fanbase may be questionable, Liam and Noel never were. They had the songs. They always had the songs.

In seven days’ time I’ll be off to my 10^th Oasis show and at last the world agrees with me again. I ought to be mad for it – everyone else is – and yet, a week out, all I can think about is Alanis Morrisette, another highly lauded 90s artist now enjoying a well-deserved victory lap. And a victory lap I’ve inexplicably managed to miss out on.

Last weekend Rick and I were supposed to be seeing Alanis at the Lytham Festival by the sea.  We decided to skip her recent Glastonbury set on TV. It felt like it would be a spoiler and, having bought the tickets some 12 months earlier, it seemed far more sensible to restrain our curiosity and wait for the real thing.

Fast forward to the day of the event and, after a truly bizarre evening of high winds and torrential rain, we wound up in a Lytham hotel room watching Alanis on iPlayer. Our concert cancelled. Our plans, like so much else that night, blown out the proverbial window.

If only there were a song to describe the irony of the situation.

Unlike Oasis, I’d only even been a passive Alanis fan – one of the millions who bought Jagged Little Pill, loved it, and then, for no good reason, failed to listen to anything else she released.

Prior to the music streaming revolution, my dad held the theory that most ‘mainstream’ music fans only ever bought five or six albums a year. Land one of those spots and your career would instantly go stratospheric. Oasis made this leap, which is why (What’s The Story) Morning Glory is one of the biggest selling albums of all time. So too did Alanis – to this day, Jagged Little Pill is the third best-selling album by a solo female artist ever.

But it was always a problem retaining these fans. Unless you were already part of the musical aristocracy – Sting, Annie Lenox, Phil Collins etc. – there was no guarantee that the same giant audience would turn out for your next record. They were fickle, and the record industry was happy to move onto the next shiny thing.

The audience that wolfed down Morning Glory and Jagged Little Pill in 1995? By 1997 they were far happier listening to The Corrs than they were Be Here Now. And by the time Alanis’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie came out in November 1998, the world had simply stopped paying attention.

This isn’t a criticism of the masses. Quite the opposite. The public gave a brilliant record its due and made Alanis a multi-millionaire, freeing her from label demands and giving her full creative control. This isn’t a sob story. Alanis is, and always has been, absolutely fine. As for Oasis, they’re back on their pedestal and don’t appear to mind that most of the audience for their reunion hasn’t listened to any of their post-90s output – a fact reflected in their chosen setlist.

No – the criticism is aimed at people like me. People who don’t think they’re part of the masses. People who think of themselves as individuals. Curators. True music lovers. I have defended Oasis for decades after the backlash set in, but where was I with Alanis?

I loved Jagged Little Pill but I was young and lazy. I assumed that the Alanis lovers within my circle of friends would do the hard work for me and keep sharing her subsequent output – maybe as a quid pro quo for the work I was doing with subsequent Oasis releases.

It never occurred to me that most of these friends were my dad’s five-albums-a-year crowd – loyal to the zeitgeist, not to last year’s favourite sound.

It was my job to keep up with Alanis and I failed.

Since booking the tickets to Lytham Festival, I’ve listened to every record Alanis has released. I’ve familiarised myself with every song she might conceivably perform. I’ve condensed thirty years of homework into twelve months – and emerged with a renewed, and deeply felt, appreciation for a consistently compelling and fine artist.

The real irony isn’t that we watched her  Glastonbury set a week late, rather than enjoying it in real-time with millions of other lapsed Alanis fans. It’s that I finally put in the effort, caught up on three decades of music… and the concert was abandoned the moment I was ready.

I don’t imagine that Oasis will be cancelled. Heaton Park isn’t renowned for its high coastal winds. And when I’m there next week I’ve no doubt the crushing disappointment of the lost Alanis opportunity will instantly fade from memory as I’m presented with an epochal reminder of why I spent so many years defending Liam and Noel.

Needless to say, I will have the last laugh. But it’s a timely reminder that, if we value our artists, we need to stick by them through thick and thin. And to make me sound even more like an out of touch dinosaur still using analogies from a pre-streaming age, this is a lesson well worth passing on to young music fans everywhere. Stay the course, and don’t let the bright and shiny music marketing machine distract you from what you think is the best thing you’ve ever heard.