One of pop's near certaintities is that as soon as a band splits or a member leaves, they will spend the rest of their days answering questions about a reunion. Even now, 46 years after The Beatles broke up, 36 years after John Lennon was murdered and 15 years after George Harrison passed away, Paul McCartney still - I don't hesitate to expect - gets asked if he'll ever reform the band with just Ringo. After all, their contemporaries The Who managed to lose both Keith Moon and John Entwhistle and still carried on, so why not the surviving Fabs?
Pink Floyd effectively came to an operational end when Roger Waters accrimoniously walked away after original Wall tour, threatening to take the band's name with him. David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason soldiered on, but the Floyd really had run its course creatively. That, though, hasn't stopped Gilmour playing their songs on his solo tours (which, until his death from cancer in 2008, included Wright on keyboards). To some, this is milking the canon, but to others it's keeping the flame alive. There would, no doubt, be a combination of the two should Led Zeppelin ever reform. That, however, is currently unlikely. Robert Plant maintains a somewhat icy distance from overtures from both Jimmy Page and promoters offering lucrative sums to get getting Zeppelin back on the road. "I'm not part of a jukebox," Plant frostily declared to Rolling Stone in 2014, preferring to stick to his own course, which has, for the last few years, involved touring with his Sensational Shape Shifters band, playing some Zeppelin songs, albeit with a world music twist.
Unless there's unfinished business - and there rarely is - the only reason for these old bands to reform would be to fleece mugs like me out of their hard-earned. And here, one must absorb the fact that we're no longer just talking about rock's pioneers getting back together. The '90s are catching up, too. The Spice Girls (and I clearly don't need to point out that this is not in the same oeuvre as the mighty Led Zeppelin...) have returned to the studio, though minus Sporty and Posh, and thus wish to be known as "Spice Girls GEM" (Geri, Emma and Mel - geddit?). "There's a lot to be said for bowing out on a high note," Mel Chisholm has said, and she is probably the only Spice Girl who could actually hit a high note. At least she regognises, to borrow from ABC, that was then and this is now. They had their moment, why try and recreate it?
"If it happens tomorrow, I'm ready, my bags are packed. If it happens in a year, I'm still ready, if it happens in 10 years, I'm still ready," he told Sky News, but adding that he would not be begging Noel to make it happen. "There'll be no cap in the hand and no banjo, you know what I mean? If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it fucking doesn't, we move on."
Given that the brothers G have engaged in fraternal skirmishes via the media (and, in the case of Liam, Twitter) since the 2009 split, with the barbs as cruel and as harsh as they are, actually, quite funny (the junior Gallagher has taken to calling the elder "Potato" in tweets), it would be hard to imagine them coming together. Noel was notably absent from the twin Supersonic premieres in London and Manchester, despite being a co-executive producer with his brother. "He won't be here," explained Liam acidly. "He's in one of his really, really, really, big houses, probably eating tofu, while having a fucking face peel. Ain't that right, man of the people?".
Beneath the acrimony, there might be a glimmer of brotherly love, but not much. "For someone to ruin my Oasis career to further his own, we have got to get past that a little bit," he told Sky. In a wildly entertaining interview in the October issue of Q, Gallagher went further: "If the guy doesn't want me back in our band then I don't want to either. I don't want to be in a band with someone who doesn't want me."
The conundrum, then, is what if Oasis did reform? Arguably, their albums since Be Here Now in 1996 delivered ever-decreasing rates of return on originality and, it should be said, quality. Noel's High Flying Birds project has produced two very good albums, whereas Liam's Beedy Eye outfit patently didn't. Shortly before their split there was something of a return to form by Oasis with Dig Out Your Soul, but the truth of the matter was that they were constantly retreading old ground. Definitely Maybe and What's The Story, Morning Glory? were genuinely era-defining: the whole schtick of a band of Mancunian scallies fronted by two cocky, lary and amusing brothers (you can find a guide to some of Liam's greatest pearls on my former blog), playing simple, self-written guitar-songs was a tremendous reminder that, as Simon Cowell and his evil empire pervaded the charts, Britain could still produce memorable headlining guitar bands.
But is any of this enough to warrant a reunion? Seeing the Stone Roses three years ago at the quaint Le Cigale theatre in Paris was a reminder of the good and the bad of revisting the bands who made your younger self. While it was fun to pogo amongst an audience of similarly adidas-clad fortysomething Brits, nothing could recreate the energy of the Roses the first time around.
The danger of an Oasis reforming would be the same. There would have to be something new. Something good. Very good, in fact. Noel and, surprisingly perhaps, Liam are both good songwriters, but if - and this is an epic, planet-sized 'if' - they were persuaded to get back together, it couldn't be to become a latterday Status Quo. Noel gave ample demonstration of his ability to find a new writing voice for both his High Flying Birds albums, but any return by Oasis would have to tap into what they were good at in their '90s prime, and radically jettison all that diminished their musical credibility in the albums that followed.
Supersonic, a collection of home movies, live footage archive and new interviews, will resurrect that original period, charting the brothers' rapid rise from Burnage council house to the landmark Knebworth show in 1996. Directed by Mat Whitecross, who was responsibe for the Ian Dury documentary Sex & Drugs & Rock And Roll, Supersonic is also backed by the production talent behind the Senna and Amy biopics, including Asif Kapadia who directed both (here as an executive producer). As with those productions, the audience gets to make its own mind up about the underlying characters of the Gallaghers itself, rather than ensure a narrative about the wider contemporary context of Britpop, Cool Brittania or the pre-Iraq Blair era. The film picks at the fraternal chemstry, and the wild early days of Oasis fuelled by booze and drugs and a rock'n'roll hedonism not seen since the period of music history they've been accused of copying so faithfully.
Being released in this, the week I've returned to Britain, having left in 1999, Supersonic revives memories of a period when the country appeared to be enjoying itself, with a hitherto creatively moribund music industry dusting off the verve - if you can excuse the pun - that made it a world leader in the mid-60s. The irony was that Oasis were the Stones to Blur's Beatles, despite their obvious obsession with the Fab Four. The emphasis here is on "were". While neither Gallagher has given an outright refusal to get the band back together, they're a long distance apart for now. And maybe, that's the way it should be left.
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