181. Don't Look Back in Anger

I.

A concert like Oasis’s show at Wembley last year is not something I’ll experience again anytime soon. The pent-up sense of anticipation that all 90,000 people released at once was extraordinary.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, the film made from the reunion tour, captures that feeling from last year’s run of shows perfectly. Incredibly well done. Alongside crowd footage, rehearsals and interviews with the Gallaghers, you also get mini-portraits of fans. You see not just British fans losing their minds, but that the music means just as much to Koreans and Brazilians.

I grew up with Oasis’s swagger on MTV and TMF, but missed their last Amsterdam show in 2009. It seemed unlikely the band would ever get back together. So when it happened last year after all, I booked tickets to London with friends straight away and, going all in on the hype (buying merch, drinking pints, falling into the arms of strangers), experienced the concert of my life.

That feeling, the tears and the goosebumps, came flooding back while watching the documentary. It’s still a bit bizarre that Oasis became a band that has meant something in so many people’s lives. Afterwards I talked about it with a friend. The concert forced us to face the facts: running entirely on nostalgia, you inevitably thought back to the moments in your life when Oasis’s music was there for you. Head up, shoulders back, arms wide: us against the world.

That’s also what made it so tragic that the Gallaghers tore each other apart to the point that the band stopped existing. Thankfully they’ve found each other again. Older and wiser, you’d think watching the film, until Liam shows up in the rehearsal room and immediately takes charge of everything. Sing a few songs and he’s off again. The rest of the band is left a bit bewildered, but by now they can laugh about it. Forgiveness and acceptance are key themes in the film.

As the tour progresses, you see the brothers grow closer together. They’re water and fire, but each in his own way lives for the band. Oasis will save them, just as it saves their fans. (Next year at the ArenA!)

II.

Last year the Oasis tour also produced incredible footage on social media. Filmmaker Daniel Broadley was hired to capture moments during the concerts. Along the way he came up with the concept of ‘postcards’. These are static shots of moments on stage, fans in the crowd and experiences outside the stadiums. I find those images genuinely amazing, not just for the camerawork, bokeh and colour grading, but also because they actually capture the feeling of the tour.

Broadley talks about it in an interview with PHOTO CINEMATICA. Well worth a watch, by the way. “We had the idea to capture moments,” he says. “They had to be zoomed-in moments of specific cultural events around Oasis.”

This video in particular inspired Broadley. It’s 27 April 2025, and Liverpool are crowned Premier League champions for the twentieth time. Jacob Davenport films a group of young people climbing onto a roof to get a better view of the celebrations. In the background: the stadium and trails of red smoke. “The shot tells you everything at once,” says Broadley. “I thought: ‘What? This is amazing.’ We had to try and make this kind of footage happen around Oasis somehow.”

So Broadley sent his team out to make this kind of footage. They scouted for interesting people and interesting moments. “Waiting is the only way to get a good postcard,” he says. “That was pretty scary. Sometimes you’d find an interesting person doing nothing interesting. Then you’d hold the frame and just hope something would happen, the way it does at an Oasis show.”

That wasn’t just true for the crowd, but for the band too. Broadley describes filming Noel Gallagher for an entire song, hoping for a special moment. “And then Liam walked past and gave him a fist bump. Perfectly centred in the frame. My instinct was to move because Noel had moved out of frame, but if I’d listened to my instinct, I’d have missed the moment.”

That fixed frame gives an image like this the feel of a (moving) postcard. It’s a memory of a moment and a place. What also helps is the often grainy image and the colour correction that lends the videos a layer of nostalgia. Broadley also made a lot of use of a Petzval lens. That let him capture Liam Gallagher razor-sharp, with the crowd a dizzying blur in the background. “It gives images a dreamlike effect,” the filmmaker says. “It elevates the reality unfolding there to another level. All the beer flying through the air hit the edges of the frame and turned into a kind of smeary, painterly haze. Hands ended up at the edge of the frame, where they turned into pixels and motion.”

Beautiful to see. I mean, just look at this guy. There are plenty more postcards on Broadley’s Substack.

Broadley travelled with Oasis for the whole tour. He saw footage like this everywhere. “Something had changed since Oasis stopped in 2009. Back then the band was associated much more with football crowds, much rowdier. Now it was more like a kind of Woodstock. There were strangers finding each other, grown men standing there crying, and lots of kids around. The nice thing was that it wasn’t just diehard fans at the front with casual fans at the back. Diehard fans were everywhere.”

PS.

Artificial intelligence is busy preparing for the apocalypse, and so has no time to type up Micha Wertheim’s newsletter. Wertheim writes:

So, dear reader, once again you’ll have to make do with my own crooked, self-written sentences. According to our prime minister that’s terribly inefficient, but personally I’m becoming more and more convinced that anyone who truly wants to be efficient might as well jump off a building.

For my blog on NU.nl I sacrificed myself this week by watching Odysseus: The Fall. It’s an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, made almost entirely with AI. There’s the occasional decent shot in the 2.5-hour slopbuster, but the film itself is boring and incredibly inconsistent.

Matt Berninger surprises with a new EP: Type It Up. A few new original songs and covers of Blue Monday (New Order) and Who Loves The Sun (The Velvet Underground).