The Best Oasis Books Reviewed: MOJO’s verdict on the recent slew of Gallagher-related literature

A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story Of Every Oasis Song Recorded, Ted Kessler & Hamish MacBain, MACMILLAN, ★★★★★

Live Forever: The Rise, Fall And Resurrection Of Oasis, John Robb, HARPER NORTH, ★★★

Gallagher: The Fall & Rise Of Oasis, P.J. Harrison, SPHERE, ★★

Some day you will find me, caught beneath the landslide… of books timed to profit from Oasis Reunion Fever. Among the multitude that crossed MOJO’s transom but too late or too inconsequential for inclusion in our roundup of Oasis tomes currently on sale include the self-explanatory Little Book Of Oasis Insults and The Secret Diaries Of Liam And Noel Gallagher, the latter pretending to derive from “a mysterious cache of papers discovered in a skip in Manchester”. In their very pointlessness they inadvertently flag the problems inherent in retelling Oasis’s story – how do you rescue it from the status of a punchline about a punch-up (or 12)?

Of the three braver attempts at something more substantial, John Robb’s Live Forever: The Rise, Fall And Resurrection Of Oasis is the most effective straight biography (perhaps the most effective yet – though the bar is low) and benefits from the coup of a 2025 interview with Noel. While readers will search in vain for the skinny on the titular ‘Resurrection’, they’ll find Gallagher senior in reflective mood, best when revisiting the birth of the band and its demise, where he’s prepared to admit that his waning ability to write Oasis songs was at least as big a factor in the final flameout as the plum famously lobbed by Liam in that Rock en Seine dressing room in 2009. Robb’s prose is as excitable as connoisseurs of his Sounds and Louder Than War screeds will expect, and his status as an echt Manchester scene insider means good early-days colour (we don’t get to the Supersonic single release until Chapter 25), while his presence at the notorious Rockfield bust-up during the making of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? underwrites the most detailed account yet of this tragi-comic saloon brawl. Whatever your feelings or thoughts about Oasis, Robb’s book won’t challenge them, but you’ll be entertained.

P.J. Harrison – whose credentials include launching mid-aughties record label Shoplifter (me neither) and founding an LA soccer team with Sting’s son – sets himself a thankless task in Gallagher: The Fall & Rise Of Oasis, a dispiriting trawl through the years since the split, made draggier by tabloid-y supposition credited to unnamed insiders and overladen metaphors (“Oasis is [the Gallaghers’] universe. Like the big bang it expanded until they became separate planets, very far apart from each other, before gravity inevitably pulled them back together”). That said, he is forensic on business machinations, and readers will be intrigued to learn that Oasis’s publishing reverted to Noel this year, a precursor to a possible resale worth £200m-plus to big bro.

Neither Robb nor Harrison offer new ways to look at Oasis and are beholden to a story that we know all too well. By contrast, Ted Kessler and Hamish MacBain, by focusing on the songs, have delivered the one book that will make hearts still smitten by Oasis’s music beat faster – A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story Of Every Oasis Song Recorded. Regular interviewers of the Gallaghers in the UK music press, they manage to combine a keen ear for the wit and wisdom with a broader, more adult perspective on peak Oasis and their milieu. Along the way, they dig into the group’s more arcane influences – eg, goth-adjacent Mancunians The Chameleons – and there are reminders of what was mythic or near-magical about Oasis that the scrapping and slagging would besmirch and obscure: like the fact that the young Liam had zero interest in music or singing until he was hit on the head by a hooded assailant with a hammer (how about that for a deus ex machina?). Better still, they provide persuasive reasons to go back to relatively unlauded corners of the back catalogue, like Fuckin’ In The Bushes – nearly Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants’ lead-off single – or Heathen Chemistry’s Force Of Nature. If you happened to have a ticket for one of the reunion shows and were looking to get in the mood – a hope shared by this entire slew of Oasis books – this is the one to reach for.

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Photo: Camera Press