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There We Were, Now Here We Are: The Making of Oasis (now streaming on Paramount+) joins the streamer’s music content as a standalone film after beginning life as a 2004 documentary special on Channel 4 in the UK, and then appearing in expanded form on the DVD that accompanied the 10th anniversary of Definitely Maybe. Interviews with Liam and Noel Gallagher, founding members Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs and Tony McCarroll, and managers, recording engineers, and label heads tell the story of Oasis from the band’s 1991 founding to its recorded debut and popular breakthrough three years later.

THERE WE WERE, NOW HERE WE ARE: THE MAKING OF OASIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1991, Liam Gallagher and his mates started a rock band, mostly because they were sick of no one else getting around to doing it. Liam’s brother Noel joined soon after – the younger Gallagher brother says he knew he would once the project got off the ground – and with the infusion of Noel’s songs and melodies, Oasis was on its way. “We practiced seven days a week, d’you know what I mean?” Liam says in There We Were, Now Here We Are. “When everyone else was necking pills, you know, necking E’s and going out dancing to fucking dalek music in the Hacienda, I was downstairs, trying to make a band.”

At that time, Oasis’ home base of Manchester, England was on the tail end of the druggy acid house and rave sound that coalesced around the Hacienda club and formed the “Madchester” scene. Figure in the success of the shoegaze bands, with their hangdog haircuts and rejection of the spotlight, and a brazen guitar band like Oasis seemed like a new thing entirely. The single “Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” says Oasis manager Marcus Russell, even during a session for AM radio broadcast, “absolutely ripped my head off.” From its earliest moments, Oasis also established a penchant for playing extremely, extremely loud.

A spate of solidifying live dates followed, their reputation grew, and before long Oasis was recording its first record, which eventually became the smash hit Definitely Maybe. There We Were features interviews with the recording engineers and producers that nailed its sound – Owen Morris says the master was “on the red line constantly,” no dynamics, just full-on loud – and the doc tracks Oasis’s popular rise through 1994 singles like “Live Forever” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” And by the time they hit the stage at Glastonbury that year, Definitely Maybe was a UK #1. Conquering the world was next.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The natural bookend to this Oasis doc from 2004 is Liam Gallagher: Knebworth 2022, in which the now solo former frontman returns to the concert venue that hosted the band at the zenith of their creativity and popularity. And for another perspective on the life cycle of a rock group which had gotten huge enough to flirt with irrelevance, there’s Some Girls: Live in Texas ‘78, which captures the Rolling Stones in a moment of plucky rebound.

Performance Worth Watching: The Noel Gallagher interviews included in There We Were find Oasis’s lead guitarist and principal songwriter discussing the Definitely Maybe era with reflective honesty, plus the sense of humor that’s become a Gallagher brother trademark. When the band discovered they were required to haul their own gear from boats to Cornwall’s riverside Sawmills Studio, Noel remembers thinking, “I bet Bono doesn’t have to do this shite.”

Memorable Dialogue: When music journalist Keith Cameron was catching Oasis shows at places like the Boardwalk in Manchester, when the band was on the cusp of their popular explosion, he knew they already had it. On stage, “The best bands don’t have to do anything. They can if they want to, but they don’t have to, and Oasis had that completely indestructible aura of confidence about them.”

Sex and Skin: Noel Gallagher isn’t apologetic about the structure of early Oasis songs like “Shakermaker,” which some have considered less than substantive. “I was writing about things that were true to me, and it was about shagging, drinking, and taking drugs.”

Our Take: It would all be over for Oasis five years after this documentary was made. The band broke up in 2009, and people are still griping about it, from the famously combative Gallagher brothers to Matty Healy of the 1975, who recently made headlines with his own hot take. Get back together, Healy urged Liam and Noel. Headline Glastonbury again. “Can you imagine being in potentially – right now, still – the coolest band in the world, and not doing it because you’re in a mard with your brother?” All of which makes the earliest, most rabid stuff in There We Were, Now Here We Are some of its most powerful. Grainy footage of rehearsals in tiny practice spaces, and the earliest forms of songs that would go on to move millions of units. It’s a testament to the durability of the material that it doesn’t sound that much different.

There’s definitely a visual awkwardness to There We Were, Now Here We Are in this digital form. The doc’s identifying titles appear on a slant, or seem to warble; parts of the original on screen graphics are cut off in the streaming window. And the standup interviews, shot largely in closeup or against a black backdrop, feel a bit dated, like they’d be part of a special on MTV News in the late 1990s. But that is the exact era in which this thing was shot, so you work with what you have.

Our Call: STREAM IT, despite the haphazard look of its transfer to streaming. Oasis old heads can enjoy There We Were, Now Here We Are as a moment in time, but it also stands as a concise document of the group’s formative era.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges