On 4 July last year, Oasis were all set to start the first gig of their hugely anticipated comeback, 16 years since the band imploded after Liam Gallagher swung a guitar in the direction of brother Noel’s head backstage in Paris. However, just 20 minutes before showtime, there was no sign of the singer. Some 74,500 fans in Cardiff’s Principality Stadium were going crazy, while Noel was left impatiently pacing around the venue’s loading bay, presumably wondering if everything was about to fall apart again.
Then they walked out to this eruption.” Later, Noel is filmed expressing incredulity that his long-estranged younger sibling could “skip the final rehearsal, then just rock up, grab my hand, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And off he goes, sounding like he’s 30 years younger. And I’m like, ‘You absolute mad cunt.’” The Cardiff entrance is one of the more dramatic scenes in Lovelace and co-director Dylan Southern’s film Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which briefly dwells on how the fractious working-class Manchester tearaways became the biggest rock band in the world in the 1990s before concentrating on how, 30 years later, they did it all again. The Oasis Live 25 tour consisted of 41 concerts across 14 countries and five continents, playing to more than two million people.
Don’t Look Back In Anger captures the supersized raw power of those gigs but also packs an unexpectedly emotional wallop, showing how a bitter, long-fractured relationship between two feuding brothers was healed by the power of their own music – not just over themselves but over those millions of fans. The cameras capture Noel’s stunned admission that he “wasn’t prepared for the intense outpouring, a sense of what it meant to people”. Lovelace insists it was the same for the directors.
It seemed bigger than Oasis, something a lot of people needed. I don’t think we understood the magnitude of it. I was overwhelmed.” Southern and Lovelace’s previous music films include the New York indie scene rockumentary Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) and LCD Soundsystem’s live farewell, Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012).
Southern says it “never came up” that the pair also made No Distance Left to Run, the 2010 documentary about Oasis’s avowed rivals, Blur. The directors have their own history with the Manchester band – as fans. Lovelace remembers, as a teenager growing up in the Fens, East Anglia, listening to Definitely Maybe on a Walkman and thinking: “This is the first music that feels like my own.” Southern saw them in 1994 at the 200-capacity Hull Adelphi, when the working-class northerners “felt like our band”.
When tickets went on sale for Oasis Live 25, Lovelace was “in a car on my phone failing to get a ticket” while Southern “eventually gave up”. They were later approached about “a big project”, but weren’t told what it was and were sworn to secrecy. Then they were put together with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, as scriptwriter, and the project got under way.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
