I remember the first time I heard the Manchester brothers more clearly than I recall my first kiss: I was at a house party, jumping up and down on my friend's parent's bed in Southampton, England; I was messily drunk off Diamond White cider, and "Cigarettes and Alcohol" was the all too fitting soundtrack.
I was As is de rigueur with filmmakers looking to break away from trad doc formats, Supersonic dispenses with talking heads and instead splices together illustrative animations and extensive archival. It's a mixture of unseen VHS clips of rehearsals and behind the scenes shenanigans, plus plenty of previously televised performances, with voiceover narration from the band, their mother Peggy, Alan McGee who signed the band to Creation Records , and other characters from their inner circle.
In fact there was enough demand that Oasis could've sold out ten nights, ultimately playing to a staggering 2. That was 20 years ago. There's nothing in Supersonic about the battle for the Britpop crown, the tabloid tattle, or Cool Britannia and its collapse.
The effect of this focus is two prong: it allows for some revealing, humanizing stories regarding the Gallagher's upbringing, their abusive father, and their resultant brotherly dynamics, but it also means the viewer feels the euphoria of every quip, every near disaster, and every triumph Oasis experienced in those years with none of the come down. This film sails out on a high, before the he said this and he did that, and crucially, before the onslaught of patchy albums.
It makes you wish you were there if you weren't, and long for the old days if you were. In the years that stretch between now and Knebworth it's been easy to forget what made Oasis such a thrill in the first place—the swaggering tunes, the unpredictability, the sparring that veered from downright dumb to clever-clever.
Either way Liam and Noel delivered the entertainment, the drama, and the soundtrack to a window of shared moments and many more moments besides.
A reminder of the band's bungles and gaffs both private and public—snorting a bunch of crystal meth thinking it was blow before a critical show in LA being one of them; being denied entry to Holland after causing utter drunken chaos on the ferry ride over being another. Previous to Supersonic exec produced by Asif Kapadia—the powerhouse behind Amy and Senna , director Mat Whitecross' most notable projects include an Ian Dury biopic and a comedy about a bunch of kids heading out to see The Stone Roses at their now-storied Spike Island show.
In fact the filmmaker thought he'd initially continue down the path of more political work like The Shock Doctrine based on a book by Naomi Klein and 's doc Road to Guantanamo, co-directed with 24 Hour Party People's Michael Winterbottom.
Music was very much a part of his childhood, but world politics were a near constant topic of conversation at the dinner table due to the fact that his Argentinian mother and his English father spent six months in an Argentine jail when the military came to power in '76 because they'd harbored Chilean refugees. Luckily, thanks to Amnesty International, they were exiled back to England before Whitecross was born.
We called up the year-old director to talk sibling rivalry, the Oasis legacy, what ended up on the cutting room floor, and more below. Noisey: What are some of the scenes or anecdotes that you wished had made it into the film? Matt Whitecross: There are so many. In this eight hour cut which I loved personally, we used to start with 20 minutes of Peggy and her childhood. She used to sleep with her seven sisters in one bed, and they had one pair of wellies that all the children shared and they'd walk to school in the morning.
They came from extreme poverty. Her courage coming to Manchester on her own… she was actually supposed to go to London but she missed the first ferry. Oasis could easily have been a London band, if things had worked out slightly differently! And then obviously meeting this guy who turned out to be a real piece of work. For me her story is fascinating and explains so much about the brothers. But there wasn't space for all of that.
She's a real survivor and has a great sense of humor which is part of their DNA as well. It was slightly heartbreaking cutting that down. There were things like the big fight in Newcastle where someone attacked Noel on stage. Jo Wiley [Radio 1 DJ] was there and happened to be recording for the [radio show the ] Evening Session and so we had some great audio for it.
We tried to animate it and it looked brilliant. And I was like, even if we cut the rest of the film that's going to stay. And then it was the only bit you could take out and you didn't miss it because it kind of repeated some of the other incidents, like in Amsterdam.
We had a little coda about the disastrous US tour, where Liam got on the plane then decided he wasn't going because he wanted to go house hunting, and Noel went and did a solo gig, and then Noel quite because of Liam.
It was a total pile up and it was great, but there's something poetic about doing something about the biggest gig of all time, and somehow acknowledging it was the beginning of the end. It you get into the tit for tat aftermath it seemed much less interesting in a way, because it felt like, I know all of this and I've seen all of this before. The guys have production credits, don't they? How involved were they with the edit ultimately?
It's that classic exec credit, it means nothing and everything in the sense that without them, we couldn't have made the film. They opened up their address books, their schedule. They allowed us to interview them as many times as we wanted. We did it for about 20 hours each, over two and bit months. Interestingly, it also marks a break in the band's extremely complicated fraternal dynamic, as it was the point at which Noel starting singing, too.
The song was released in on Oasis' monumental " What's the Story Morning Glory" album, and over the course of several decades, it's jousted with "Wonderwall" and "Champagne Supernova" both of which appeared on the same LP for dominance in the group's catalog. With a few exceptions, the idea of being in a gigantic rock band isn't an ambition that the majority of young musicians angle for these days. That's understandable, given that the last thing most labels want to do is send five youths and all their gear on tour for a year or more.
Oasis remains the Last Big Band, and there might not ever be another one. As I learned at a recent Fender guitar panel on the future of music, we now live in the era of the streamed playlist.
Oasis certainly wound up on plenty of pre- streaming playlists, but the band's impact would have been impossible without the album format and widespread radio play. Zep's legend was bases on their gigantic records, bootlegs of their live shows, and the fact that they were the first true mega-group. Oasis upped that by being the big band of the late television age, before the internet changed everything. The sheer scale of what they hoped to achieve — and actually did achieve — makes them a source of endless fascination.
And they actually look cooler as f--k now that they've aged and taken on some chic elderly edge. To both Noel and Liam's credit, they're also stuck with their style over the decades. It wasn't just the Gallagher Bros. Bonehead and Guigsy also looked cool, in their way, and the band's late-career art direction was typically superb.
And yes, you could argue that the lineup changes and intra-band feuds mean that Oasis can't match Zep and its unchanging decade-long lineup. But then again, Zep also tended to look pretty cool — Who can forget Jimmy Page's black dragon suit? Even now at age 45, Liam is never spotted out of character. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.
Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Matthew DeBord. Led Zeppelin was the biggest rock band of the s. The only band to come along after with such swagger and ambition was Manchester's Oasis.
The group was controversial, but in retrospect, undeniably great. Oasis was an absolutely electrifying live band. Oasis really knew how to organize an album for maximum impact.
Noel and Liam haven't mellowed. But the flip side is that they have too little depth, too little import to truly excite. One sneeze from John Lydon has more significance than Liam's pointless rudeness.
Compare them, for example, to those other phenomena to emerge from the Mancunian indie world, The Smiths and The Stone Roses. Neither played stadiums, but both had an importance beyond their sales. And both in their own way had an inexplicable effect upon their fans.
Everyone knows odd Smiths fans demented by Morrissey's morose ways, and Stone Roses fans who waited with six years of bated breath for a second coming. Both bands had an aura that Oasis sadly lack. For all the massed crowds at Cork and Knebworth, it seems that Morrissey at Wolverhampton or The Stone Roses at Spike Island will last longer in the memory than any of Oasis's big concerts. Be cause Oasis's triumph is important only in the same way as the world's longest conga an importance of numbers rather than content.
Like the prog rockers, once somebody does it bigger, Oasis won't mean very much. None of this is Oasis's fault, of course. They're not a bad outfit songs that sound as if they should be great, but aren't. Like Roll With It. Certainly they are not songs that should attract the adoration of quarter of a million people. EVEN now, despite the increased focus on guitar bands, the most talented ones remain well out of the public's view.
The unfortunates now stand to lose both ways when they get caught in the inevitable backlash when guitars once again seem passe and everyone grows tired of the s. In many senses it is better that a band like Oasis have made it big rather than another Queen or one of the more tedious bands like Menswear. Certainly it is hard to begrudge their success.
They all seem pleasant people even Liam's studied rudeness lacks real viciousness write pleasant tunes and if they took more care could be a fantastic group. Yet one senses if it were The Verve or Suede or A House up there we would have something of real quality.
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