Brothers in arms
Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger, the Disney/Hulu documentary hitting screens here, opens with some context-setting clips from the past—the Britpop era— followed by the unlikely reunion of the Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam, for a series of 2025 concerts with the band. The first rehearsal doesn’t go smoothly. Liam’s casual indifference at the microphone kind of puzzles his bandmates. He waves and walks out the door as they wind down a lengthy guitar outro to Rock and Roll Star. Still, they rattle on. Asked about his no-effs-given attitude, Liam shrugs later: “It takes a lot of caring to not give a f**k.”
Shown on IMAX, what this documentary—written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight—does do is prove that Liam’s pouty moods are, at least in part, posturing. Noel is the songwriter, slaving over the copped and repurposed riffs to create a band with a catalogue that is cherished by fans, and a sound that was, according to one biographer, “so devoid of finesse and complexity that it came out sounding pretty much unstoppable.”
When the unlikely reunion occurs, some 15 years after the Gallagher brothers abruptly stopped speaking to each other following an on-tour meltdown and seemingly irrevocable split, it could have gone either way. If their tour stops in Cardiff, Dublin, then Seoul, Brazil, and the US had met with crickets and silence, well, then Liam could just give the two-finger toss-off to his mates again, and walk away.
But in the opening Cardiff concert, exploded gloriously in IMAX, they are, indeed, unstoppable. Noel is amazed at how it all clicks again. That’s rock and roll.
I confess, I’m not the biggest Oasis fan in the world. I know maybe five of their songs (the good ones), and I never really got the Britpop mania surrounding them back in the ‘90s. The council estate kids who spawned a million hooded parkas and branded boat hats never really got to me. The fans know better, as Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger demonstrates.
There’s a bit of arc-building here by Knight that feels intentional, if not manufactured: the band stops in Ireland, and we hear a local pastor at a pulpit mention the upcoming Oasis concert, weaving its estranged brothers into an almost biblical parable. We hear fans describe the reunion in practically religious terms. We see the earnest adoration on their faces. You can’t fake that in IMAX.
What’s absent is an explanation for why they got into a major scrap and split up the band in the first place. Leave it to history footnotes. Suffice to say, Noel, the engineer of the band’s sound, probably had had enough of Liam’s public posturing and bratty frontman takes on every aspect of British rock, probably up to and including his own band. Brothers in rock are known to slug it out occasionally (see: the Kinks long history). So we shrug and accept that this is not just a cash-grab reunion.
The doc suggests that, even if it initially was a calculated gamble, the power of rock transcended those calculations. The concert footage is truly gobsmacking: the seas of fans simultaneously bobbing and pumping fists, singing ever lyric, possibly rivaling BTS fans’ passion. (At least the selected bits we see here.) More importantly, these fans have private stories, which Knight focuses on between retro clips and huge crowds. The Brazilian fan working in the UK who discovered other Brazil Oasis fans, a kind of lifeline so far from home. One woman names her dog “Bonehead,” after the band’s plucky guitarist. Korean fans latch onto the band’s we’re-one-of-you message. “Other bands try to lift you up when you’re down,” says one Seoul woman fan. “Oasis come down to the ground with you, and then they help you up…”
A bit focusing on Manchester, where the band is from, suggests that a deadly explosion at an Arianna Grande concert in 2017 ripped the guts out of their economically desolate city… but Oasis’ triumphant return is a kind of resurrection. It’s a stretch.
But again, you have the concert footage to prove this band still has the power to reach their fans. There’s a nostalgia aspect, the urge to recapture youth. Even Noel acknowledges this: “What we meant to these people on this tour… it kind of knocked me back.” Is it just nostalgia? A jukebox experience? Liam ponders that fans look upon even their messy, chaotic return as an antidote to how shitty the world has become: a callback to Britpop optimism, or at least the feeling of being young and alive. “If you loved it or hated it (back then), it’s almost exactly the same. Which seems to be the glue for this band.” Even Noel has to confess, he didn’t know what they’d sound like—until Liam started singing the familiar opening lines to Champagne Supernova or something, his arms locked behind his back and his nose lifted to the sky behind sunglasses and a hoodie, and Noel realized: nothing has changed.
The brothers emerge holding hands, lifting them to the sky during their last concert. They may even have a future together. Stranger things have happened in rock and roll.
A feel-good, uplifting film about the famously fractious Oasis?
Who’d’ve thunk it?
***
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger now showing in SM Cinemas and IMAX.
