I briefly sat next to Liam Gallagher at a party once. It was after Oasis played Earls Court in 1995 – peak Oasis, before the bloat set in – and the band’s label Creation had organised an after-show soiree in a club beneath a Mexican restaurant in Soho.
“Who are you?” Liam asked, after taking the seat next to me. I mumbled an introduction, but his attention was already elsewhere. On one of the walls bordering the dance floor, he’d spotted a life-size cardboard cutout of his older brother, Noel, and he didn’t like it. He left his seat as quickly as he’d arrived and wandered over to cardboard Noel, studying him with equal amounts of curiosity and suspicion. He started shadow boxing, throwing jabs and hooks at his sibling. Then he pulled cardboard Noel down, tossed him onto the floor, and danced around him, arms aloft, like Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston. In a roomful of associates and hangers-on, Liam was alone on the dance floor, with his brother at his feet. Victorious.
The animosity between Gallagher Junior and Senior obviously wasn’t new. Eighteen months earlier, Creation had hired the Royal Albert Hall for Undrugged, an evening of acoustic music to celebrate their 10th anniversary, and Noel Gallagher – three months before the release of the debut Oasis album Definitely Maybe – played a short set while Liam heckled him from the audience, just as he would in 1996 when they appeared on MTV’s Unplugged. And two weeks after the Earls Court show, Wibbling Rivalry, a seven-inch single featuring nothing more than the brothers arguing during an NME interview, climbed to number 53 in the chart. Friction was part of their commercial appeal.
It still is. That sibling rivalry is front and centre in the new movie, Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger. It’s presumably why they hired a screenwriter, Steven Knight, whose credits include Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Peaky Blinders, to massage the narrative and tweak the drama, as if the brothers were lead characters in a carefully choreographed docu-soap.
While it’s not exactly Keeping Up With The Gallaghers, it’s not exactly revelatory either. No new details are provided about the infamous Paris fracas that led to the band’s disintegration in 2009, and there’s no real insight regarding the pair’s reconciliation. It’s as if it’s enough to know that something happened, but not how or why.
The truce isn’t the only part of the story that’s glossed over. Noel has happily come to recognise the importance of Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs to the band’s sound, but the guitarist isn’t interviewed and remains a peripheral character in the film, only marginally less prominent than the onstage cutout of then-Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. And while the band rightfully pay respect to Stone Roses/Primal Scream bassist Mani after his death, there’s no mention of Bonehead’s abandonment of the tour to seek treatment for prostate cancer.
A crowd singing an impromptu version of Don’t Look Back In Anger at the vigil held outside the Manchester Arena following the 2017 terrorist bombing is sold as a great unifying moment, but Liam’s public criticism of Noel for not performing at the subsequent One Love concert isn’t revisited, nor is his description of Noel’s set at the venue’s reopening as “a PR stunt” (Liam later claimed his Twitter account had been hacked). Of course, there’s no mention of the dynamic pricing fiasco which saw some fans pay more than double the advertised price for reunion tour tickets (although Liam does joke about the lack of “cheap seats”).
There’s also some severe clunkiness, including (thanks to Steven Knight, presumably) a scene where a vicar delivers an Oasis-themed sermon about forgiveness to a scant congregation of dozing pensioners.
In the end, none of this takes the gloss off what’s an extremely powerful movie. The brothers play their part, of course – the scene where Liam arrives at his first rehearsal and immediately demands the removal of acoustic panels on the drum kit is a clear claim for territory; he may as well have cocked a leg and urinated. Or, even more bizarrely, the times Liam balances his tambourine on his head like a crown. Filmed in silhouette, he looks like an alien god. “If I did that, I’d look like an utter cunt,” admits Noel. “But he does it, and it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
More than the Gallaghers, this is a movie about the impact of their songs. On the big screen, pumped through multiple cinema speakers, their great songs (Live Forever, Wonderwall, Acquiesce) sound utterly immense. Their decent songs (most of the rest) aren’t far behind. Even Roll With It, a three-chord boogie so rudimentary Francis Rossi might have baulked at releasing it, sounds like it was handed down from Mount Olympus. Never have a band sounded so much more than the sum of their parts.
The true star of the movie is the audience. They seem to be split fairly evenly between fans returning to the band they loved in the 90s, and those who’ve picked up Oasis via their parents rather than first-hand exposure. The cameras roam the crowd looking for fans overcome by the occasion, and they find plenty. Grown men weep. Strangers embrace. Couples kiss. Even the ticketless are part of the experience. The impact is clearly generational.
Best of all, at the end of the first show in Cardiff, the camera settles on the face of a young man who probably wasn’t born when Oasis played Knebworth. He looks as if he’s experienced some sort of religious encounter and isn’t quite sure whether it’s over. His face is a mixture of bewilderment and rapture, but instead of cutting quickly to the next disciple – as less brave filmmakers almost certainly would have – the camera lingers as his confusion and ecstasy slowly fade and he reengages with the real world. It’s a genuinely wonderful moment.
Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger might be the best film ever made about music’s ability to emotionally impact vast crowds. It’s also brilliant, Olympic-level marketing: Just days after the cinema release came news of another run of gargantuan outdoor shows. Eleven Etihads. Four Knebworths. And so on. Staggering numbers. You, too, can be part of this!
The press release accompanying news of the tour boasts that the band will “once again return to lift the spirits of the people”, and, in a business driven by bullshit and hyperbole, it actually sounds like the truth.