"Delightful." Not an adjective you expect to emerge from the mouth of Noel Gallagher in relation to his brother Liam. But in Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger, the new documentary about the band's reunion tour last year, we hear just that. Noel is probably being a bit sarcastic, but not a lot. That tour, as any semi-retired Britpopper and bucket hat owner knows, was the result of the brothers reconciling after 15 years of estrangement and getting the band back together.
This documentary, it was hoped, would show everyone how that happened - how one of the biggest beefs in music was squashed, or at least shoved to one side for the sake of an extremely large amount of money. Does it? Kind of, a little bit. As per reporting in The Mirror last year, the film, written by Steven Knight and directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, had cameras in the room for the brothers' first meeting in over a decade, and for all the tour negotiations.
Either the paper's sources were engaged in some Gallagher-style braggadocio, or that footage was cut. After an opening section on the band's breakup in 2009, due to a backstage bust-up before a show in Paris, the doc leaps straight to tour rehearsals in May 2025. Nada on what made that tour possible. No one was realistically expecting that the Gallaghers' performance fees would be revealed, but a bit of juice on the surrounding circumstances, and on the conversations that first thawed their separation, would have been very, very welcome. Equally, something on the scandal around ticket prices, of which the only mention is an on-stage remark from Liam: "There [are] no cheap seats. Sorry about that."
What we get instead is largely a document of the tour itself; of the overwhelming emotion brought forth in fans around the world. There are shots of the crowd singing, screaming, drinking, kissing, crying, and even praying. We meet some female South Korean divers who love Oasis, and a Brazilian who's named her dog Bonehead, after the nickname of rhythm guitarist Paul Arthurs.
There is, all this aside, still some interesting - if not mountain-moving - stuff on Liam and Noel's apparent reconciliation. There's a bit of drama in the rehearsal sequence, with Liam only attending sporadically and Noel wondering aloud to the others if "our kid" is enjoying himself. As they go on stage for the opening night in Cardiff, Liam grabs Noel's hand and briefly lifts it in the air; neither commits to the gesture with much enthusiasm.
But the momentum of the tour and the unflagging ecstasy of the audiences work their magic. We're shown another hands-in-the-air moment before a Dublin show a month and change later, which both Gallaghers seem to be a bit more into. And we get Noel, in his own way, conceding some amount of admiration - even love - for his little brother. Amid complaints in a voiceover about Liam not rehearsing properly, turning up 20 minutes before the gig and grabbing his hand, he admits Liam can still sing like he used to.
As he later acknowledges: "There's two Liams. There's the guy who turns up at rehearsals, and then there's the guy on stage who balances a tambourine on his head." A lot of the doc is given over to reverence about the enduring power of Noel's songwriting, including how it's hooked younger generations, but Noel also recognises that Liam singing said songs means just as much to people. More than halfway through, there's the money shot: the pair being interviewed together. They even talk about how they now message each other funny videos.
Which is lovely, but opinions on what's motivated this reconciliation may vary. Noel, the more candid of the pair here, says the tour "fixed a lot of things": namely, that the band's legacy would no longer be dominated by the chaos of their split. That, plus all the money, may have had just as much importance as any rediscovered brotherly love. Given we don't get behind those locked doors where Manchester's own Cold War was ended, there's plenty of room for speculation. But all the fans wanting to relive last summer might be too busy singing along to care.
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