'I booked Oasis at the start of their first tour'

Neil Primett still has the invoice from when Oasis played at The Angel in Bedford

A promoter who booked Oasis to play a venue in 1994 has revealed he paid the band £100.

Neil Primett, then 25, had initially booked the band to play The Angel in Bedford for the January of that year, but the gig was rescheduled as the opening date of their first album tour in March.

The show was part of a co-headline tour with Whiteout. Tickets cost £3.50, and an invoice showed the Manchester outfit received £100 for the performance.

Mr Primett, now 55, joked: "I could've had them in my front room, doing a show just for me, for the same price somebody will pay for a ticket to see them in Wembley now."

Neil Primett has kept memorabilia from the show, including the invoice and a demo cassette sent to him by Oasis's agent

He said the 250-capacity venue attracted only about 130 people, and the show had a large guestlist made up of people in the music industry, including their label Creation Records.

"They had mostly played up north, so for all these people down south it's easy to come to Bedford to see how the band were shaping up," Mr Primett said.

Backstage, the band were given the usual rider for the venue: 24 lagers and some bottles of water.

As the venue had a kitchen, the promoter liked to cook for bands that visited the town.

"My view back then was, 'I'm going to befriend this band', because then you hope you'd get another show out of them.

"I knew they were on track so I was making more effort with the food that night. I got them a hotpot and a jacket potato. Quite rudely they went off and got a McDonald's.

"Whiteout sat there and ate theirs up. The Gallaghers snubbed me."

Oasis were due to play Bedford in January 1994 but rescheduled to play The Water Rats, London, instead – and Neil Primett was there

Mr Primett had been sent a demo tape by the band's agent which he got a friend to play to a local sixth form to generate interest.

"I remember the band found it a bit odd that the audience knew the words to the songs," he said.

"I was quite shocked to see the singer wasn't performing like other bands I put on. He was hanging on the microphone, which is now his trademark swagger, but at the time I thought it was a guy not performing.

"I remember chatting to him about other upcoming bands I had booked. He didn't seem interested [but] he said, 'There's two bands – us and the Stone Roses'."

Oasis did a short co-headline tour with Whiteout in 1994

The tour was the first the band did in support of an album, with Definitely Maybe set to be released later in the year.

According to the Music Venue Trust, only 11 of the 34 venues on that tour remain open today. The Angel is not one of them.

Mr Primett, who is still involved in the town's music scene, is hoping to get tickets to see next year's Oasis reunion with his family.

"Some might say they're doing it for the money," he said.

"I believe if you've got enough fans that want you to do something then you do succumb eventually. You want to make your customers happy.

"It's a legacy thing. What they do with this comeback will be another thing they achieved."