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Burying the Hatchet, D’You Know What I Mean?

There are bands who break up, and there are bands who really break up. Post-break-ups, the individual members of Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, even the Beatles, have interacted with each other occasionally -even reuniting on stage once in a while. Not so with Oasis -since disbanding abruptly in 2009, its duelling creative forces, the Gallagher brothers, spent fifteen years completely estranged. They had always been uniquely volatile and antagonistic towards each other, and that apparently hadn't diminished with age. A reunion of Oasis was just about the least likely thing to ever happen.
And then it did. In 2025, Oasis reformed for a global reunion tour -Liam and Noel Gallagher came back into each other's lives and went back on stage together, and remarkably it lasted the length of the tour -no bitter fights, no reports of friction behind the scenes that would have derailed the enterprise halfway through. Such little chaos really isn't like Oasis, and in a way that was part of the message of the tour. It's emphasized several times by the brothers in Don't Look Back in Anger, a concert film-documentary about this unlikely tour, that the point is to redefine the band's narrative, or at the very least turn a period into a comma. But whether they truly actually achieved that or not, it doesn't matter. As this film demonstrates, the tour on its own did exactly what it needed to, for the fans and for Liam and Noel.
The film is written by Steven Knight and directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, a pair who ironically previously made the 2010 Blur documentary No Distance Left to Run. The tour is followed in a general chronological order from the quiet rehearsals to its launch in Cardiff and ending on a U.S. performance, though not charting every stop along the way. The crux of the movie is the newfound cordial relationship between Liam and Noel juxtaposed against the wider reaction to an Oasis reunion through largely the fans in different corners of the world, honing in on specific people and their stories and relationship to Oasis, many of whom young enough not to have been around for the band’s heights. These narratives and the performances are often interspersed together alongside commentary from the Gallaghers and occasionally footage from their past events as signifier of how far they have come.
It is easy to see the movie as a giant puff piece on its surface, an empty celebration of Oasis and the image of its reconciled leads. But there is something truly deeper at its heart that I think is best exemplified in a beat that we see after their first Cardiff show, when the camera fixates on a teenage boy or young adult by himself, cheeks flushed with tears aimlessly meandering in place after a transcendent experience. After a while, a couple older fans approach, putting an arm around him and guiding him out of the venue. It isn't even about Oasis -it is that power that music has to move people and bring them together. All through the film we get examples of this. The tour moves early to Manchester -the Gallaghers' hometown- where legions of fans engage in acts of subtle rebellion to trespass into Heaton Park to catch the show. It might as well be the Harlem Cultural Festival with kids sitting on tree branches and a full park exuberantly bouncing along. More intimately, on the Brazilian and Korean legs, the film touches on the stories of individual fans who resonated with Oasis's music, usually a particular song or verse, ecstatic at this unexpected opportunity to see them live. And however Lovelace and Southern do it, they find these folks subsequently during the concert and capture their jubilation -along with everyone else's. All through the film, regardless of venue we see tear-strewn faces enthusiastically singing along, couples making out, and waves of enthralled movement that seem supernatural -once in a while even someone with eyes closed just taking in the sensational atmosphere of the moment.
And it is both important and incidental that it is the music of Oasis spurring this on. In some ways, this particular discography is merely the vessel for an outpouring of joy and a pervasive screed. But on the other hand, the narrative of the Gallagher brothers coming together is clearly a heavy one. Yet the film never manufactures anything that isn't really there. There is some anticipation early on as the rehearsal sessions are about to kick off around Liam's arrival, which would mark the first time the brothers are in the same room in over a decade. He comes in (predictably late), acknowledges his brother, the sound crew, and the band, and gets into playing. Yet the camera captures their silent reconciliation, wholesome chatter at a distance, and despite Noel's admitted nerves, it all gets better as the tour commences -the pair walking out at each venue hands raised together in the air. The film wisely does not rehash their history -the time that Liam sued Noel for defamation or heckled him on MTV Unplugged, all the times Noel spontaneously quit the band. Instead the focus is put on where they are now and the visceral, humbling effect (as humbling as possible for these two) of the widespread love there still is for their music, fully acknowledging their past antics don't necessarily preclude that. It is just a remarkable amount of grace amidst a reunion that feels contented and that, though it has every reason to be manufactured, is not. Making heavy use of the Gallaghers' voiceover on a few occasions the film will cut to a talking head of one of them -about two-thirds of the way through, they are revealed to be giving the interview from the same room, and when one makes a joke that the other chuckles at or when you see a certain gleam in Noel's eye (Liam keeps his under shades per usual), it is something quite moving.
The suggestion of the film is that this tour was what was needed to get there, and it makes a very good argument. There is a healing power in music and in the performance of music -and the audience's rapt enthusiasm is symbiotic with the pleasure of Noel and Liam being there -not to mention the rest of their band. a corner of the movie given over in praise of Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, the band's original rhythm guitarist, who also rejoined them on the tour. The songs themselves are performed with a triumphant energy that might be intoxicating even if you aren't a fan. Most of the old favourites are included -"Rock 'n' Roll Star", "Wonderwall", "Live Forever", "Roll with It", "Champagne Supernova". When it gets to the title track, paired with one fan's story of what it meant to her Edinburgh community in the wake of the 2011 airport bomb scare, and its philosophy more broadly, Liam steps aside and lets Noel perform it himself because of how much the song means to him personally. An unexpected gesture, and perhaps another film would have found a performance where they play it together in further reinforcement of its theme relative to the premise of this movie. But there is something more earnest in its showcase here.
Noel and Liam Gallagher do not look back in anger. A touch of regret maybe -Noel speaks candidly about his eighteen year-old-son never having met his cousins only to find against the backdrop of this family reunion, they get along really well and in fact remind Noel of himself and Liam when they were young and more strongly bonded. It is a shame they could not have known each other earlier. And one of the things that apparently connected them was their fathers' music. Don't Look Back in Anger relishes in that spirit of connection through music, even if it might not have been what the music was originally made for. But Noel and Liam accept it, just as they accept each other and what they hope can be a reformed legacy for the band. Maybe it's not permanent. Maybe they could have another falling out tomorrow and Oasis will be put on ice for another decade and a half, but in a way that wouldn't change what the movie does and what it expresses. Its joy is not limited. It's not ever gonna burn your heart out.

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