Oasis: Supersonic

Dir: Mat Whitecross

2016

***

I bought the first Oasis album when it came out and I 'acquired' the second from my room-mate at university but I never felt compelled to buy any of Oasis's subsequent albums, although I did buy the single 'Sunday Morning Call' from their 2000 LP Standing On The Shoulders of Giants. Two good albums and five albums with one, maybe two good songs on them each. You won't hear much said about the last five albums in Mat Whitecross's Oasis: Supersonic documentary though, mainly because Oasis themselves are still living in the past and still think they are as important as they did when they were cocaine-fuelled twenty-somethings. I've been to see hundreds of bands at hundreds of gigs and Oasis were one of the worst bands I ever saw live. The truth of the matter is that there were loads of great bands not getting the recognition they deserved back in the early 90s, the big labels were playing safe and the independent ones were stumbling in the dark, sometimes getting lucky but more often getting drunk/high/bankrupt/all three. Oasis weren't cutting edge, they weren't doing anything particularly new, they were mainstream all the way and the attitude and the two fingered salutes to the press were all part of the lazy marketing. I learnt an awful lot I didn't know about the band regarding their early days and what happened behind closed doors but in truth this film is a complete whitewash. It makes out that Oasis are a huge band that the world is waiting, with bated breath, to return once more to glory, and while many would be happy, I wonder whether the band are holding back because they know, deep down, that they really never were all that. Britpop was a media pop-word, it is meaningless other than it marked the time when really good indie music was commercialized and made mainstream. None of the bands really had anything in common and all the great bands split up just before hand. The people of the world that think that the bands associated with Britpop were really the best of British are probably the same that think we all still go to work in bowler hats and cried the day Margret Thatcher died. Apart from a few early days’ revelations and behind the scenes footage, this film doesn't really reveal anything particularly interesting. I'm not sure if all concerned are aware but while declaring just how wonderful Oasis was (in their minds) they actually show lots of examples of why they weren't great, and why they were actually close to awful. Any admiration I once had for the brothers' Gallagher went down two notches while watching, I had no great feelings of nostalgia and I still didn't like the songs, even having not hard them for over a decade. It's a half story by a couple of egotistical d**kheads with delusions of grandeur, yes they sold lots of albums but so did the Crazy Frog, people are idiots. From a technical angle however, the film is very well put together and edited brilliantly. I don't like the subject much but the documentary itself is crafted well.