Watching Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger, Stephen Knight (Peaky Blinders)’s exhilarating portrait of Oasis’ long-awaited return, the Gallagher brothers remain perfectly-calibrated opposites: Liam, instinctive and gloriously unpredictable; Noel, dry, watchful and incapable of resisting a good put-down.
But one of the great pleasures of the reunion documentary, opening in cinemas this week (Sept. 9), is seeing how much affection now exists beneath all the familiar friction. Throughout, Noel is genuinely enthralled by Liam’s presence — at one point declaring that Liam putting a tambourine on his head during last year’s Live ‘25 Tour as “the coolest f—ing thing in the world” and describing him simply as “delightful” to be around. Liam, meanwhile, is relentless in trying to make his elder sibling laugh at any given moment.
It’s surreal viewing, to put it lightly. After 16 years apart, the brothers returned to the stage last summer for 41 shows, taking Oasis across the world and into stadiums filled with both lifelong devotees and a striking new generation of fans. Knight’s film follows the journey from the tense first rehearsals — including one dramatic scene in which Liam disappears from the room before the last chord of “Champagne Supernova” rolls out — through to the gigs themselves, capturing the band as they lead enormous crowds in singing their hearts out. Along the way, the film shows how the reunion took on a different character in each city, shaped by the fans’ reactions and rituals, while making clear that Oasis no longer belongs to just the generation that grew up with them in the 1990s.
The joy of seeing the band back together is also inseparable from the knowledge of how spectacularly things fell apart the first time in 2009. As the documentary reminds us, Oasis’ final show ended before it began, with the band pulling out of Paris’ Rock en Seine festival after a backstage altercation between Liam and Noel, who walked away from the band that night. Knight, alongside filmmakers Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, who directed 2016’s Oasis: Supersonic, get unprecedented access to the brothers as they prepare to return to the stage, allowing their individual accounts of the split (“It was disgraceful,” Noel says at one point) — and their feelings about each other now — to gradually emerge.
What follows is a collection of moments that bring the reality of such a high-stakes reunion into focus: Liam explaining that he treated the songs with “respect” by giving up drinking and smoking before the shows; the striking evidence of just how good his voice sounds; and Noel, visibly overwhelmed on opening night in Cardiff, saying he nearly needed a “time out” to exhale and take in what is happening.
Here are five standout scenes from Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger.
