The Oasis books you should read before the grand reunion

This is what bookworms might call 'havin' it large'. The brief was simple: to read and judge – so you don't have to – seven new books about Oasis ahead of the Manchester band's hotly-anticipated Live '25 reunion tour next month. That's almost 2,000 pages on the Gallagher brothers. A big commission? Some might say. Too much? Whatever. I'm mad for it, me.
Mirroring the seven studio albums that Oasis recorded between 1994 and 2008, a few of these books are great, some are patchy, and all come at their mission from slightly different angles. One thing is clear from the volume of tomes being released: Liam and Noel's reunion is a Major Cultural Event, of which Britain's publishers want a bite. Never mind that singer Liam once said that books are 'for losers' while songwriter and guitarist Noel called authors 'f------ idiots'. By July 4, when the Britpop rabble-rousers perform in Cardiff for the first time in 16 years, Oasis-mania will be in full swing. So take off your parka, loosen those Gazelle trainers, sit back and – as Liam never said – curl up with one of these.
Andy Bollen's Definitely Maybe: The Birth, Death and Resurrection of Oasis (Polygon, out now, ★★★☆☆) is a readable history hung on the fact that its author was at the May 1993 gig where Oasis were signed by Creation Records boss Alan McGee. An 'I was there' moment, for sure. But Bollen, who was a drummer before he became a writer, refreshingly admits that he found the concert, a sparsely-attended affair at Glasgow's King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, 'unspectacular'. It's gritty eyewitness stuff, and Bollen's valiant tracking down of seven other attendees – who give their accounts of the night, Rashomon-style – is to be applauded. But Bollen dedicates seven separate chapters to King Tut's. It's a lot.
In a somewhat similar vein, And After All: A Fan History of Oasis (Gallery Books, out July 17, ★★★☆☆) by Melissa Locker tells the band's story through fans' accounts of around 55 concerts, running chronologically. Early concerts include the band's doomed show at Los Angeles's Whisky a Go Go in September 1994, which descended into chaos after bandmembers snorted crystal meth pre-show, thinking it was cocaine. An ultra-wired Liam threw a tambourine at older sibling Noel, who stormed off to San Francisco. On the other hand, it's cheering to see how many fans ended up going for a beer with Noel; one devotee even found themselves hanging out with Kate Moss, Jude Law and Sean Bean. The book creates a neat, exhaustive, bottom-up mosaic of a generation-defining band.
The debut book by Merseyside-born PJ Harrison – Gallagher: The Fall & Rise of Oasis (Sphere, ★★★★☆) – charts the brothers' story through the prism of their post-Oasis solo careers. The band split up in 2009 after Liam threw a plum at Noel backstage in Paris, sparking a terminal fracas. After that, in brief, Noel's solo career started stormingly then wavered, while Liam's started waveringly before storming ahead. There's plenty of juicy detail about simmering brotherly resentment, though Harrison also suggests that Liam's latter-day solo success made Noel see him as more of an equal and 'moved the needle' on the eventual reunion.
Of the imminent tour, Harrison provides three fascinating nuggets: one-time Oasis drummer Chris Sharrock allegedly turned down the reunion because the wages were 'derisory'; if these dates go smoothly, the band are holding big venues for more shows in 2026 followed by a final 'lap of honour' of major festivals (Glastonbury 2027?); and the publishing rights to Oasis's songs revert to Noel this year, meaning that on top of the £100 million tour booty that both brothers may receive, Noel could bag a 'Brucie Bonus' worth £250 million from selling on his freshly-popular songs to the highest bidder. And yet, for all that, it's hard to ignore the fact that Harrison's book is curiously structured, with chapters about the Gallaghers' childhood and the band's early days thrown in. You might call it a bit of an Oasis soup. Shame there's no roll with it.
Journalist and musician John Robb gives us the broad historical sweep in the chunky Live Forever: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Oasis (Harper North ★★★★☆), a 424-page epic that's unauthorised but comes heartily-praised by both Noel and McGee. There can't be many other books about rock bands that contain the words 'In the 19th century, British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli said'. Robb was part of the Manchester scene, and he's particularly strong about Noel's musical incubation in the city's Acid House clubs (the Haçienda and the Kitchen in the Hulme Crescents housing estate), his friendship with The Smiths' Johnny Marr, and his job as roadie for 'Madchester' band Inspiral Carpets. Just like Robb's 2023 history of Goth music, The Art of Darkness, this book feels like an authoritative inside track by one of pop culture's grand inquisitors.
Before I get to the best of the lot, let's pause to note, amid the wall-to-wonderwall of serious books, two decent humorous ones. The first is Oasis Talking S---e, a compendium of the Gallaghers' most outrageous quotes (Simon & Schuster, ★★★★☆, out June 24). It's easy to forget the daftly macho surreal genius of the brothers' take on life. Liam: 'I'm getting up earlier and earlier, man. I try and beat the alarm clock. The alarm goes off at six, and I try to get up at 5:59 just to do its head in.'
And there's a revealing quote from Noel stating that rock groups should contractually be banned from ever reforming once they split up. 'There's nobody, absolutely nobody, who's better the second time around,' he once said. Hmm. Then there's The Secret Diaries of Liam and Noel Gallagher, a parody by Bruno Vincent, who wrote the Enid Blyton for Grown-Ups series (Century, ***). The book is based on the fun premise that a mysterious cache of papers was discovered in a skip in Burnage, where the brothers grew up. The 'diaries' are dry, droll and historically accurate. But when the Gallaghers are famously dry and droll themselves, how much parody is really needed?
But the best new Oasis book of all is A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Recorded by music journalists Ted Kessler and Hamish MacBain (Macmillan, out July 3, ★★★★★). I had initial doubts when I noticed what seems to be a pretty obvious mimicking of Revolution in the Head, the scholarly 1994 book in which Ian MacDonald unpacked every Beatles song in painstaking detail. Oasis are not the Beatles, despite what they think – Paul McCartney once called them 'derivative' – and few will have been waiting to learn the provenance of Mucky Fingers, a filler track on Oasis's sixth album Don't Believe the Truth (2005).
But Kessler and MacBain use the Gallaghers' songs as jumping-off points for head-spinning anecdotes, interspersed with accounts of the writers' dozens of personal dealings with Oasis. (Both first met Liam and Noel in 1994; Kessler was the last editor of now-defunct Q magazine.) Crucially, the authors' own clear love of the music comes with enough journalistic objectivity to balance the zing of rollicking storytelling with the ballast of serious scrutiny. The pair have written something special: a book of wit and verve about why Oasis matter. F------ idiots.

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