How Oasis Came To Rock The Doc World – And What It Might Mean For Bond 26

For decades people have flocked to Abbey Road Studios, home to one of the most famous instruments in the world: Mrs. Mills’ 1905 Steinway Vertegrand. A holdover from the music-hall era, Mills had instrumental hits with this piano in the UK until the ’70s, almost until her death in 1978, aged 59. For some reason, though, music fans are less enthralled by the fact that Mills used it on such ragtime classics as 1969’s “Battle of Britain Medley” as they are by the fact that a band from Liverpool, known as The Beatles, borrowed it for songs such as “Penny Lane”, “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “The Fool on the Hill”.

Abbey Road — long seen as the spiritual home of The Beatles, who practically lived there during their comparatively short-lived recording career — was the scene of a fan event held by Disney+ earlier this week to launch the home-ent debut of a new documentary starring The Beatles’ most famous protégés. Titled Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, the film hits streaming with added extras pulled from hours of footage, from Cardiff to South Korea and beyond, including the songs “Half the World Away” and “Do You Know What I Mean?”

Though brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher were absent, the film’s two directors —Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace — were present with writer Steven Knight, more on whom later. Like the band’s 2025 reunion tour, which this 2hr-plus film documents, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger debuted to high demand, taking taken £2.66 million at the UK and Irish box office during its opening weekend, making over £4 million gross since its premiere less than a month ago, comfortably taking the number one spot for a doc.

Inevitably, the film begins late 2024 with the media’s incredulity that a band that had famously — and famously acrimoniously — imploded moments before going onstage at a French rock festival in 2009 were announcing a reunion tour for the following year. It soon transpires, however, that whatever had fueled the Gallagher brothers’ feud is now water under the bridge, and instead of looking for drama onstage, Southern and Lovelace train their eyes and ears on the millions of people all over the world who battled dynamic pricing to see a band that many thought had hit its peak in the ’90s.

Said Knight, “The whole point of doing the thing was to explore why this music, these words, and the poetry of these words have this effect on so many different people around the world, to the point where it makes them emotional, where they feel as if the songs are about their lives. You see that unfailingly happen every single time, no matter what you do, no matter how you put it together — somehow those songs have that effect on people. So, [the film] is about the power of the music, but also about the fact that they are bulletproof, somehow, as a band.”

The financial success of the doc suggests that it came as solace to the many who failed to score tickets or simply couldn’t afford them. “It’s been so amazing to see the reaction to it,” said Southern. “We lived it for 18 months from the rehearsals, through the tour, through a year of editing it. And then you get a bit snow-blind. You watch this thing over and over again, and you get too concerned with details. But then to be in a cinema, and see people walk out crying, it’s so validating. We knew that it was in there, but the way that this film has been received has been beyond what we could have imagined, but then always so obvious — because people love Oasis, and this whole tour meant so much to them — that all we had to do was point a camera at it and show it back to people.”

Knight, who wrote the film’s framing structure and interviewed the band at length, explained that part of the appeal of the project was that the results were far from expected. “Noel said that when they announced the tour, they didn’t realize what the response would be. They were completely overwhelmed by the demand for tickets. And so, it became quite obvious that it wasn’t just the original fans, it was a whole new generation, probably two generations of people who wanted them. So, the question was to find out why people had developed such a relationship with this music, which had not been advertised or marketed for 16 years. That’s why we wanted to find people around the world who had personal connections with it. But it’s Dylan and Will who crafted this, who put the cameras on the people in the audience and did the whole architecture of it, saying, ‘Look at this. This is the real story. Look what’s happening out there.’”

Lovelace duly shared the credit with the many sound recordists and cinematographers, including Oscar winner Lol Crawley, who captured the images seen in the film. “We had a team of brilliant camera people and sound people all over the world,” he recalled, “and as Steven said, we knew we wanted the film to be as much about the fans as the band, but we didn’t quite know what that really meant until we got to [the first show at] Cardiff and realized what this music actually meant to people. And so, our team of camera people, we threw them into the crowd. We wanted them to be as close to the fans as you could get, search out people who might have been seeing the band for the first ever time and find the kind of stories that were unfolding in the audience.”

Southern summarized the attitude succinctly. “I think our ethos was, in a way, that the most important member of Oasis is the crowd. The band, as charismatic as they are, stand still; the emotion is happening out there amongst the crowd. So, the question was, how do we convey what this band means to people? And we did it by training the camera on those people in the crowd and seeing the immense emotional effect that they were having. I mean, it sounds crazy, but making this film brought me back to some core human values that living in London and grinding at work every day makes you forget. Like, being kind is a good thing. Forgiveness is a good thing. Remembering how short life is is a good thing. I cried during the edit of this film, I cried during the filming of this film, and I cried watching it with an audience. It was really special.”

At this point, we may note that throughout the gestation of the Oasis project, Knight has been busy with the small matter of Bond 26, the first in the franchise to be made since Daniel Craig quit and without any input from the Broccoli family. So, what can Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger tell us about how that might be going? Well, quite a lot, actually. Like many of Knight’s fiction projects — notably Peaky Blinders — the film is a working-class underdog story with strong undertones of allegiance and duty. Knight also wrote and directed the single-set drama Locke, in which Tom Hardy plays a construction foreman forced to confess an infidelity to his wife and sons, suggesting that his Bond is likely to be a man of his word, and perhaps more blue-collar that previously shown.

The intriguing part, however, is the Oasis film’s use of international footage, taking in more countries than the average Bond movie. Knight said that he and the directors wanted the film to have a particular message “at a time of division and all the bollocks that’s going on”; that message being that “in every different place in the world with loads of different sorts of people and different backgrounds, the reaction and the effect of the songs is the same. It’s always the same with everybody. All these people are the same.” Quite how that credo jives with the now-controversial Cold War conspiracies, exoticism and colonial mindset of Ian Fleming’s original novels will be interesting to see…

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger streams exclusively on Disney+ from Friday 9 October with previously unseen footage