Liam Gallagher on stage at Knebworth House, 1996 © Roberta Parkin
► Oasis Knebworth 1996 is in UK cinemas now.
‘People pay to see others believe in themselves,’ wrote Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth for Artforum in 1983, on the subject of the profound confidence trick, the magical thinking which powers the spectacle of rock music. Oasis, or at least its creative core of brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, understood this more intuitively than any other group in the mid-90s Britpop scene. ‘We need each other / We believe in one another’ Noel sings on ‘Acquiesce’ in this doc, not so much a line as a closed circle, rippling out concentrically from the Gallaghers, to include the band, their fans, and at Knebworth in August 1996, a quarter of a million people all at once.
It’s easy to be sceptical of Oasis, to note their musical limitations and tail-chasing aesthetic, but the immense scale of Knebworth shows them at their most undeniable, every song freighted with the same emotional charge of the biggest football crowd imaginable, not so much Maine Road as the Maracana, singing as one. The oceanic quality to their music described by writers such as Alex Niven, in the tidal waves of layered guitars, and hazy yearning, finds its purest expression here in songs like ‘Slide Away’, ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Champagne Supernova’. According to Noel Gallagher, the madness of the crowds in their scale and unity could be too much for rhythm guitarist Paul Arthurs in this period: ‘Bonehead used to be moved to tears… he was a bit emotional.’
Jake Scott’s direction is functional and effective, but rarely more. Presumably limited by filming choices made at the time, what Scott does add tends towards the overly obvious. The band play ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ – cue a rapid-fire montage of fans swigging lager and puffing on fags. One reference point for Knebworth would be Shane Meadows’ Made in Stone, which documents the Stone Roses reunion concert at Heaton Park in 2012, and also the low-key dramas of its build-up, as the reformed Roses got cautiously reacquainted with their songs and each other. Scott has no similar narrative to build around the performances, so instead a representative sample of fans offer memories and anecdotes of the scramble for tickets, the wait, the shows and the aftermath. These are, ironically, fairly unmemorable, and Scott focuses in on period details – Ceefax, the lack of smartphones and iPads, fuzzy TV news coverage – in a way which lurches towards TV nostalgia-fests like I Love the 90s.
There’s a poignancy the film never acknowledges though: in its haste to stress the group’s supernova of success, from nowhere to Knebworth in barely three years, that this was also their high water mark. Noel Gallagher observes of Liam in voiceover that it was the peak for his voice, looks and charisma, a compliment with more than a hint of the backhand. But it surely applies to Oasis as a whole. The 1997 album Be Here Now doubled down, upped the ante, and fell horribly flat. Some fans simply had experienced too much of too much. This is a film which never tires of reminding you that there were 125,000 people in the audience each night – it feels like it’s mentioned nearly 125 times – and that Oasis were following in the footsteps of giants like Queen and Led Zeppelin. But it is also true that Robbie Williams sold out Knebworth just seven years later, a fact which leaves Oasis poised quite appropriately on the Knebworth scale, sliding precariously from the sublime towards the ridiculous.
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