Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In February 1996, I was on tour in the UK with my band. It was two weeks of crap gigs, bad food, and constant rain. Our per diem was 5 pounds a day and the only cheap thing in the entire country was the beer. Each night after we played and nursed our disappointment at the bar, one of those Oasis singles like “Wonderwall” or “Don’t Look Back In Anger” would come on the pub’s jukebox like a clarion call and the whole place would burst into song, singing every word arm in arm at the top of their lungs. Everyone in the pub. Every single night. I have never seen anything like it. I was smack dab in the middle of a cultural phenomenom: Oasis-mania.
Oasis: Supersonic starts six months later, when the group headlined back to back sold out concerts at England’s Knebworth festival grounds, playing to 125,000 people each night. Their first single, the song “Supersonic,” had only been released a little over two years earlier. How the band went from the council estates of Manchester to playing for a quarter of a million people is the basic premise of the movie. Like other recent rock docs, such as their heroes The Beatles’ Eight Days A Week, Supersonic focuses in on that early crucial period, leaving out the band’s later, lesser years and acrimonious breakup.
Currently available for purchase and rental on Amazon Video (as well as a variety of other platforms), the film was directed by Mat Whitecross and executive produced by filmmaker Asif Kapadia, who directed 2015’s Oscar-winning Amy Winehouse documentary. Like Amy, the film relies on voiceover narration along with archival footage and intimate home movies. As you might expect, the narration works well considering the two main characters in the Oasis saga are the colorfully loquacious Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam. With their sharp Mancunian accents, the brothers deliver an endless stream of profanity-laced one-liners, alternately braggadocios and self-deprecating, and mostly braggadocios, but always amusing. As Noel says at one point, “Writing songs is difficult. Talking shit is easy.”
The Gallagher’s were born to Irish immigrant parents in Manchester, England’s second largest metropolitan area and one of the centers of the industrial revolution. The city also has a rich rock n’ roll legacy, being home to such iconic and influential bands as The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, and The Smiths, among many others. Described by Liam as “a bit of a stoner, bit of a loner,” Noel was obsessed with music from a young age; his younger brother of five years, Liam, preferred soccer and was “a devil,” according to his mother. Liam claims in the movie his own love of music was awakened after getting hit in the head with a hammer by a member of a rival school gang.
While Noel roadied for local also-rans Inspiral Carpets, his little brother put a band together with Manc homeboys Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs on guitar, bassist Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan and drummer Tony McCarroll. When Noel returned from tour he was genuinely incredulous to hear Liam had a band and that he also exhibited some genuine talent as a singer and frontman. For all his love of music, Noel never had any ambitions to play in a band, however, after seeing the nascent Oasis he offered to join as lead guitarist and principal songwriter.
The songs Noel Gallagher wrote for his new band stood out against the prevailing dance music and foppish Brit indie rock of the day. They featured big hooks, big guitars, often rather familiar sounding choruses and a definite punk rock sneer. They combined the best elements of 30 years of British rock, from The Beatles through The Sex Pistols to fellow Mancunians The Stone Roses, and with timing on their side, landed on the charts right as the Britpop movement began to break.
From the moment they burst onto the national scene, the band played up their laddish image, Noel saying in an early TV interview, “We’re a band. We’re into football, we’re into taking drugs, and meeting woman, and all the rest of it, right?” However, as the band’s reputation as drunken louts began to attract actual drunken louts looking to challenge the upstart band to a fight, their chief songwriter began to rethink things. He nearly quit the group after their disastrous U.S. debut and when he came back, put his foot down that if they wanted him to continue as a member and hit songwriter, they would have to act more professionally.
Peggy Gallagher says at one point she knew her son’s sibling rivalry would eventually tear the band apart. That rivalry began to run hotter during the record of their sophomore effort, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which would make Oasis superstars at home and sell 22 million copies worldwide. Noel had also began singing some of the songs he was writing for the band, including “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” one of the album’s biggest hits. This alienated lead singer Liam, who acted out by skipping gigs and generally being more of a pain in the ass than usual. An epic blowout at the end of recording ended with Noel attacking his younger brother with a cricket bat.
As Christine Mary Biller, part of the band’s management team, says in the movie, “Noel has a lot of buttons. Liam has a lot of fingers.” Though the animus between Liam and Noel truly would lead to the end of the band in 2009, that end is only hinted at here. Noel tritely dismissing it as “Liam’s like a dog. I’m like a cat.” That tension was also one of the things that made the band so exciting, the threat that every gig could be the last depending on the moods of the respective brothers.
Supersonic ends where it begins, at Knebworth in August of 1996. Looking back on it, the band all agree it was the top of the mountain, “the end of something,” rueful that they didn’t break up at the absolute height of their fame. Ending the film here makes the storytelling more powerful and also avoids all those rock doc clichés most band bios fall prey to; fame, complacency, substance abuse, maybe an overdose or two, reflection, etc., etc. It’s fitting as self-pity doesn’t suit “the most arrogant fucking bastards in the music business,” as Noel calls the band. As Liam so eloquently says at the film’s conclusion, “Did the good times outweigh the bad times? 100-fucking-percent.”
[Where to stream Oasis: Supersonic]
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician who has seen more of England than most English people, yet oddly has never been to Manchester. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
