Oasis Supersonic: The Complete, Authorized and Uncut Interviews

The world of the Britpop mega-group seethes with offstage mayhem, electrifying music, and intense sibling rivalry in this rollicking oral history. Bandmembers and brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher are joined by bandmates, associates, and relatives in recapping the group’s rise from Manchester obscurity to superstardom in the 1990s and 2000s thanks to their Beatles-meet-Sex Pistols sound. The account traces a classic rock ’n’ roll arc from mildly delinquent, working-class adolescence through obsessive rehearsals, grungy early gigs, breakout albums (Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory), frenzied tours, and nearly incessant ingestion of drugs. At the heart of the saga is the perpetual feuding between songwriter Noel’s sober devotion to the music and frontman Liam’s unruly appreciation for excess. The two regularly came to blows—sometimes over Liam’s habit of “walking off stage halfway through countless fucking gigs because he’d been on a bender,” in Noel’s exasperated telling—though it was their unique chemistry that made the band more than the sum of its parts (“When it all came together, in a venue or in a field.... We made people feel something... indefinable,” Noel recalls). Unvarnished, high-spirited, and full of pungent Mancunian eloquence (“It was biblical, man, it felt fucking biblical. All the rest of it is a load of bollocks really”), this captivates. (May)