Oasis: Knebworth 1996

On 10 and 11 August 1996 Oasis played Knebworth Park on two consecutive nights. A quarter of a million people came across the two nights and more than two and a half million applied for tickets; a notable share of the country queued for those two evenings. The film is about those concerts and the road to them. Jake Scott directs. Most of the footage comes from the concert recordings and from archive shot by the people who were there. The formal decision is this: nobody speaks to camera. Neither the band nor music writers appear; all the commentary is heard as voice, and the weight is on the audience. The people who describe what the concert was like are the people who went. It appeared in 2021, twenty five years after the event. The concerts were the high point of Britpop and the film delivers them as the end of a period; the tension inside the band and the later collapse are not discussed. The sound was remixed from the concert recordings and that is the film's strongest side. Who it is for: Oasis listeners and anyone curious about nineties British music culture. Who it is not for: there is no critical distance, the film is a celebration, and two hours is long for a viewer with no interest in the band.