Noel Gallagher was astonished by what Liam did in Oasis film, says Steven Knight

The Berlin Wall came down, Nelson Mandela walked free, and, eventually, Liam Gallagher reached over and raised Noel’s hand in the air in front of an arena of fans. Some symbols of reconciliation and hope are more unexpected than others.

For Oasis fans, though, the moment at the brothers’ first reunion show in Cardiff felt even more improbable than any past historic peace accord.

After 15 years of insults, estrangement and one of music’s most spectacular sibling feuds, the simple gesture became the defining image of a comeback many had stopped believing would ever happen.

And apparently, nobody was more surprised by it than Noel himself.

‘Oh, it was astonishing!’ Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, who helmed the new Oasis documentary, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, told Metro. ‘Because you can see Noel wasn’t expecting it!’

And Noel’s recollection afterward was characteristically less sentimental, with Knight recalling the elder Gallagher brother wondered in the moment: ‘What the f**k’s going on?’

For the filmmaker, however, that tiny bit of bewildered brotherly affection was significant.

‘The stepping stones towards the destination are beautiful,’ he told us. That destination, of course, was two brothers who spent a decade and a half seemingly more likely to share custody of a live grenade than a stage, finally finding their way back to one another.

Oasis famously imploded in 2009, with Noel quitting the band following a backstage row with Liam shortly before they were due to perform in Paris.

Years of increasingly inventive insults followed before the seemingly impossible happened and Oasis announced their reunion, turning the question from whether Liam and Noel would ever share a stage again to whether they could actually stay on one.

It was a question the documentary team was asking alongside a global legion of fans.

‘Are they going to fight again? Will they make it as far as the first show? What will the rehearsals be like?’ co-director Dylan Southern recalled wondering when the project began.

But he said it quickly became clear ‘from day one of the rehearsals’ how committed the brothers were.

‘It wasn’t just about going out and doing the songs,’ he said. ‘It was about making the Oasis that turned up on these stages around the world the best version of Oasis that fans could see.’

Liam, in particular, approached the tour with considerably more discipline than the Oasis mythology might suggest.

Southern revealed he ‘didn’t drink or smoke for months before the shows’ and went to bed early throughout the tour.

‘He kind of trained for it like an athlete, a boxer,’ he said, adding that both brothers were ‘really committed to putting on good shows’.

Knight, meanwhile, had gone into the project hoping the film could become about something much bigger than a lucrative rock reunion.

‘Here are two human beings who are famously split, and there has been a lot of bad feeling, a lot of bad words,’ he explained.

Against what he described as an era of ‘spite and silent screaming on social media’, Knight wanted to make something about ‘love and reconciliation and forgiveness and redemption’.

It was a fairly ambitious brief when your leading men were Liam and Noel Gallagher. ‘I really wanted that,’ he admitted. ‘It could have not gone that way.’

Still, after speaking to both brothers separately early on, Knight knew ‘they were both committed’. That commitment did not manifest itself in a tearful reunion.

When Liam first arrived to rehearse with Noel after years apart, Knight recalled: ‘There was no high five, no hug, no words, no tears.’

Instead, Liam loped into the room and, without even glancing at his brother, spotted something on a drum, wanted it removed, and then they got down to work.

‘Okay, you ready? Should we go? Should we go?’

‘Yeah. Okay, let’s go.’

‘Bang! And they just start playing,’ Knight recalled of the tense moment.

For him, the lack of some huge emotional display was actually part of what made the reunion work. ‘What I didn’t expect was huge expressions of emotion, and that was great that it didn’t happen,’ he said.

Instead, the relationship began shifting a little at a time.

‘From that moment, where it’s established, “Okay, we ain’t gonna budge.” The budging begins.’

The production placed 10 fixed cameras around rehearsals so the Gallaghers could forget they were being watched, capturing what Knight described as the ‘moment by moment thawing’ between them.

Which makes what happened in Cardiff feel like the next little crack in the ice.

Southern said that opening night will ‘forever be the most special one’ because nobody really knew what was about to happen.

‘Nobody knew the setlist. Nobody knew, you know, if they would turn up. Nobody knew if they were actually getting on,’ he said.

‘You could feel it pent up before they walked on stage, and then you could feel that moment of release.’

And then Liam reached for Noel, thrusting his hand in the air as Noel’s face — for a brief moment — revealed not only his shock at the gesture, but a mixture of grief and profound relief.

Co-director Will Lovelace said it became ‘this iconic moment’ precisely because it was not planned between the brothers.

‘Noel didn’t know anything about [it] when it first happened,’ he said. More revealingly, Liam continued doing it, as if it was a silent, nightly apology to his older brother.

‘Across the tour, as the months passed, they became closer and closer to each other, and that moment sort of took on a different significance,’ Lovelace explained.

‘It’s the iconic moment from the tour.’

That gradual change is also apparent when the brothers finally sit down together in the documentary.

The filmmakers deliberately held off on conducting a joint interview until the tour was well underway, having spoken to Liam and Noel individually beforehand about their ‘worries and apprehensions’ and how each thought the reunion would unfold.

By the time they put them in the same room, Lovelace said it was ‘like seeing them back in the day’.

‘They’re two very funny people sat down, seemingly having a good time talking,’ he said.

Southern added: ‘I think people are going to see a different side of them. They’re older. They’re still, like, natural comedians, but it’s just so nice to see them laughing together and reminiscing.’

The pair also speak about one another ‘in a really candid way’, something Lovelace called ‘an amazing thing to capture’.

Knight has a phrase for the peculiarly Gallagher way of displaying all this affection without ever appearing particularly interested in displaying affection: ‘emotionless emotion’.

‘I think [it] is very English,’ he said, pointing to the brothers’ habit of using humour when something more vulnerable might otherwise sneak through.

His favourite example comes from Liam himself, dismissing the scale of the brothers’ feud with: ‘You’d think I’d stabbed his cat or something.’

‘What a way of saying it!’ Knight laughed.

He also believes the brothers’ eloquence and intelligence can be underestimated. ‘These people are really smart,’ he said.

Perhaps the strangest bit of symbolism, however, was one even Knight insists he could not have manufactured.

He had decided to include a local priest in the documentary, eventually returning to film a sermon in a church the Gallaghers used to attend.

Knight was then told the priest had already been given the subject — by the Vatican — he was supposed to preach about that week. It was brotherly reconciliation.

‘I mean, can this be true?’ Knight said, laughing. ‘But that’s what I’m told.’

The priest duly related it back to Liam and Noel.

It would almost be too neat if the reconciliation Knight’s cameras captured looked anything like a conventional one.

Instead, the film begins with two brothers reunited after 15 years who cannot quite bring themselves to hug, cry or even really acknowledge the other.

Weeks later, in front of a stadium full of people in Cardiff, Liam reaches across and grabs Noel’s hand without warning.

Noel looks astonished. Liam lifts it into the air. And then, at the next shows, they do it again. One night Liam leans over and kisses his brother on the cheek. Another night, they embrace.

For a pair of brothers specialising in Knight’s ‘emotionless emotion’, perhaps that was about as close to a reconciliation speech as anyone was ever going to get, and made all the more moving for its subtlety and authenticity.

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