One question, at least at first, animated the tour: will it fall apart again? Film-makers Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern include a clip of Keir Starmer, then the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, saying, “Look, let’s see what happens with Oasis”, after the dates are announced.
Liam, 53, and Noel, 59, spent almost 20 years in Oasis together, many of which were marked by public spats. During an early tour of America in 1994, Liam often changed lyrics to insult Noel onstage.
Only a few months before their break-up, which took place after a fight at the Rock en Seine festival in France in 2009, Noel described his brother as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet” and “like a man with a fork in a world of soup”.
Have they let bygones be bygones? Don’t Look Back in Anger doesn’t get into detail about the break-up or what made the reunion happen, but the Gallagher brothers are somewhat willing to open up about where their relationship stands in the 2020s.
Here’s what we learned.
Rehearsals for the tour remained uneasy
If Don’t Look Back in Anger is any measure, an average rehearsal for the Oasis reunion tour looked a little like this: the band battered through the set list with simple professionalism; Noel made inscrutable, focused faces (“You’ve got to live up to the hype,” he notes); and Liam hit his marks.
The tension between the two is palpable, especially as Noel gives his brother a note about the end of Slide Away. At one point, Noel is heard saying that Liam “comes in a bad mood, leaves in a bad mood”.
During at least one rehearsal, Liam exits the practice space while the band is still playing through the instrumental conclusion of Champagne Supernova.
But his bandmates also praised Liam’s businesslike focus during the rehearsals. The vocalist later adds that he wasn’t drinking or smoking cigarettes throughout the tour because the songs needed to be “treated with respect”.
Despite the lack of tenderness between the brothers, Liam grabs Noel’s hand – once unthinkable – and raises it in the air as they head on to the stage at the tour kickoff in Cardiff, Wales, before launching into Hello, the opener from 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
“I was a mess playing that song,” Noel later recalls. “I genuinely don’t know how I played it.”
The break-up is (mostly) avoided
Don’t Look Back in Anger doesn’t offer a clear explanation for how and why Oasis reunited. The first conversation between the Gallagher brothers in 15 years remains offscreen, as do the business dealings behind the tour.
But the astronomical levels of hype around a potential reunion factored into the calculations. Plus, as the brothers describe in the film, it’s a way to rewrite the narrative of the band. “The way it finished – unacceptable,” Liam says. “It didn’t sit right with me, man.”
A new generation of Oasis fans
As a result of their 2009 break-up, there are thousands of young Oasis fans who haven’t had a chance to see them play. Before performing Don’t Look Back in Anger, Noel shouts out the first-timers in the audience who imagined what it would be like to sing along with that soaring chorus at an Oasis show.
It’s a theme the brothers return to in the film. “You want to be writing songs that people take and stick into their lives and go, ‘It’s mine now,’” Liam says.
For Noel, seeing those crowds get emotional often caused him to cry, so he’d turn around and face the guitar amps. “You see fathers and sons – that gets me all the same,” Noel says.
Their relationship is in a decent place
In Don’t Look Back in Anger, Noel is willing to compliment Liam, especially in how he operates as a frontman. One of Liam’s regular onstage antics – balancing a tambourine on his head – would only work if Liam did it, Noel says.
Meanwhile, Liam believes that age has helped the two of them mellow out. Eventually, he adds, you realise that you’re “full of s***”.
As a result of the reunion, the Gallagher brothers’ children are seeing each other for the first time, “and now they’re best friends”, Noel says.
The tour has, according to Noel, helped repair the relationship between the brothers.
“All the little things that used to annoy us about each other, they’ve gone away,” Noel says. It’s like “a weight’s been lifted”.
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