Liam and Noel Gallagher are executive producing a new feature documentary about the Knebworth concerts their band Oasis played in August 1996.
After 2.5m people applied for tickets, 250,000 fans attended the Hertfordshire gigs over two days, seen by many as the peak of both Oasis’s career and the wider Britpop scene. The Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Manic Street Preachers, the Charlatans, Cast and Kula Shaker also performed.
Director Jake Scott described it as “a story driven entirely by the music, a rock’n’roll experience, told in the moment, like a visual stream-of-consciousness that is built around the extensive archive footage from the event”. He said there would be “no on-camera interviews or unnecessary celebrity recollections”.
A previous Oasis documentary, Supersonic, charted the band’s history up until the Knebworth concerts. They would go on to have further success with third LP Be Here Now in 1997, plus four further UK No 1 albums before their breakup in 2009.
The years since have been marked by infighting between the Gallagher brothers, leading some fans to hope that the new joint film venture could pave the way to a reunion. The pair formed a new film production company earlier this year, Kosmic Kyte, with Liam celebrating on Twitter: “There gonna put in the movies there gonna make a big star out of me c’mon you know.”
The film will be released in cinemas later in 2021, to mark the 25th anniversary of the concerts.
It should hopefully trigger some memories for Noel Gallagher, who claims he cannot remember being there. “Genuinely, now, if I close my eyes, I can’t remember walking on stage at Knebworth,” he told Kirsty Young when he appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “I know it took place because there were lots of people there.”
