Watching Supersonic, the new Mat Whitecross-directed documentary film that the Gallagher brothers have executive produced about their glory years in Oasis, you cannot help but realise that rock stars and jazzers are poles apart.
Yes there are, have been and always were wild jazzmen and women but most jazz musicians live lives more akin to your favourite geography teacher or less introverted than type librarian than their rock star counterparts essentially more attuned and hard wired to chasing the lowest common denominator in every which way.
The documentary on release right now concentrates on charting the football loving working class Gallaghers’ lad status back in the day, getting deported from the Netherlands after drug and drink-fuelled fighting ending up with the full band arrested on a cross channel ferry; getting off their faces sufficiently on meth in LA to play several of their tunes disastrously all at once leading to Noel going AWOL in San Francisco; and trashing a perfectly nice recording studio after an otherwise productive day laying down what are now legendary songs, feats that they share in a gruesome litany of bad behaviour and lots in common in terms of sheer destructiveness with Charlie Parker and his tragically dysfunctional life, although Bird never cracked anyone over the head with a cricket bat to the best of my knowledge unlike the brothers Gallagher, the outcome of a particularly frank exchange of views between the brothers.
The film has a compulsive mad-for-it narrative driven by low quality backstage video footage taken on tour. And rather than relying on staged full face to camera interviews with the protagonists and talking heads uses only their voices, the minimal captioning more than enough to enhance what we’re seeing and straining to believe. Noel Gallagher in particular is pithy and witty even though like Liam he is not at all likeable and the film scores dozens of points for its candour. The crowd scenes (particularly from Earl’s Court) are brilliantly edited while the music as ever with Oasis is simply a thrill.
By staggering or rather sobering contrast most leading jazzers since the 1980s have avoided excess or at least the public disclosure of it like the plague and genuinely wild jazzers are thin on the ground. I can’t imagine Pat Metheny throwing a TV set out of his hotel room window or Stacey Kent writhing around the stage like Janis Joplin or lobbing her tambourine at her unsuspecting hubbie on sax. But then again I also can’t imagine Noel Gallagher delivering an absorbing 20-minute improvised solo let alone revving up a beast of an orchestrion that he has spent months developing with boffins and then has the balls to take on the road bored with the bother of having a band but geeky enough to suffer the indignity of a robot instrument breaking down on stage.
Gallagher never claims to be the greatest musician alive in a rare burst of modesty. But as a songwriter he’s up there with anyone, and Liam is one of the great lead singers on the planet. Jazz leaders could learn something from Oasis in terms of stage charisma that is for sure but that is about it really. Everything else is not exactly ideal. The drugs and booze helped wreck the band. But ultimately as the film demonstrates the sibling rivalry between the Gallaghers did for them all. The violence that Liam suffered as a child at the hands of his hated father is never far away either when Noel and Liam translated their love for each other into horrible, destructive and highly public hate.
Definitely worth seeing for the ear poppingly magnetic bursts of Oasis in their pomp that no one much since has got close to replicating. While it is pretty obvious that you cannot teach charisma at rock or for that matter jazz school yet somebody out there must have the formula to be let out and used in the live playing setting and the film gives plenty of clues to the sheer maverick nature of a most elusive quality.
Stephen Graham