Earlier this month, The Battle opened in Birmingham (neutral ground?). It’s a comedy stage play about the Blur vs Oasis chart battle that took place in the UK in the summer of 1995. Last weekend, I went to go and see it.
‘Damon’ and ‘Liam’ // ‘Liam’ and ‘Noel’
Here are some (not particularly well-organised or coherent, sorry) assorted thoughts and observations.
the tl;dr version of this
Okay, well the tl;dr version of this is: it was fine! For the most part it was working on one pretty linear level and barely delved below the level of the main players’ tabloid-ready archetypes.
Reviews have been mixed, and I think that’s fair: nothing novel is delved into and there’s certainly no wheel-reinventing. There’s definitely a few flaws in terms of the staging and sometimes there just wasn’t enough happening. I laughed sometimes though!
If I was reviewing this on letterboxd, which I’m not because it’s a play, I’d probably give it 2.5 stars (but I don’t think the 2-star review from the guardian was terribly unfair). As someone extremely deep in the britpop sauce right now (Oasis specifically), on a simple straightforward level I enjoyed listening to tunes from the time play during scene changes, watching plodding man-fanfic versions of my blorbos stomping around irl, etc. If this wasn’t my fandom right now, well. It wasn’t that scintillating. If you don’t know who these people are or you do but don’t really care about their place in pop culture, I definitely don’t recommend it. But if you do know who they are and care at least a bit, it was sometimes funny and it was alright!
The basics
First of all, it’s a play, not a musical. There’s only singing on one occasion (see separate spoiler section on the ending, below). You will of course hear Country House and Roll With It (the two singles vying for the number 1 spot), you will hear other tracks from the time period, none of which are still that well-known with the exception of Common People – the original tracks played over speakers, that is. It’s an ensemble piece, and the main characters are the members of the two bands and a few connected individuals (girlfriends, record label execs). There’s not really any ‘from the perspective of the little-known behind-the-scenes xyz’ here – it’s mostly the guys in the two bands (usually separately) hanging out.
The entire play takes place over the six weeks leading up to the day the singles are released, the week following up to the chart announcement, and then there’s a denouement three months away (once the bands’ 1995 albums have been released). That’s it! Yes, it was a cultural moment, but is this slightly thin material for a play that’s 2 hours 10 minutes including interval? Somewhat! But it really is this narrow a focus, and the storyline really is around what happened on the way of finding out which of these songs got to number one. Naturally themes like class come up, because this is Blur vs Oasis we’re talking about, but it’s mostly a framework on which to very tentatively and surface-level-ly consider the key relationships involved (Damon and Graham, Noel and Liam, and the inter-band rivalry), and tell some jokes.
I’m trying to remember the kind of jokes as an example. During a discussion in the Blur camp of why Oasis were releasing a single so early from an album that wasn’t going to come out for a good while yet, exec Andy Ross says ‘well this is Creation Records we’re talking about, they probably just threw some cocaine at a Beatles calendar’. That sort of thing! (I laughed.)
Liam and Noel
well they didn't make out so it has to be a 0 out of 10 obvs
(although yeah occasionally their faces go really close together like the photo above – when Liam decides they’re not ‘aving it [the Blur win] – and at one point Noel stops Liam fighting someone by grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and I felt a bit 😳 about that tbh.)
Zero incest vibes. In short: they act solely like brothers! (historically incorrect.) It was more like being in a parallel universe of what they should be acting like as brothers, if they were normal. They don't physically touch that often, they kind of square up against each other a time or two (but don’t fight seriously), they bicker and make fun of each other, but there is relatively little warmth (nor do they loathe each other, it has to be said) and NONE of the weirdness we all know.
Sometimes this was funny and cute and sibling-relationship-endearing, like when Liam’s like ‘wait until mam finds out this!’ or whatever. Noel is cleverer and perpetually Dealing with Liam (although also, like, canonically says the stupid AIDS comment, so. which isn’t particularly brought up as going against the grain of who gets into trouble other than Liam crowing as per quote above). Liam smashes things up! Liam fancies Damon’s bird Justine! Liam says Oasis are the greatest band in the world and everything else is bollocks! I’m not saying all of these things aren’t true aspects of their behaviour at some point or another (they are all true aspects of their behaviour at some point or another), but we are not delving deep into their deepest souls nor hidden depths here.
Whilst the playwright was doing A&R in the 90s and the research is there for all the important events and stuff, there’s still some strange, or at least some ‘let’s make this simpler’ choices. I might mention some of these later, but one example would be Liam wanting to go after Justine – who is a musician herself and a character in the play – but there’s absolutely no mention of Lisa Moorish, which seems to be much of the root of their interpersonal rivalry, such as it was.
Also – perhaps this is just 30 years’ remove from the time (were we ever so unsophisticated?) or simply just not the level of research the writer was getting into, but I was dryly amused by Oasis mocking Blur for being all fancy and probably eating things like risotto, and Liam suggests he’d take a sophisticated girl to Bella Pasta (the joke is that Bella Pasta was a chain restaurant and Liam thinks this is a sophisticated date location when it isn’t), when Liam in fact thought eating any sort of pasta was gay, never even needing to get onto the complex level of risotto.
Incidentally, their mam in this never finds out about Noel’s stupid AIDS comment in the interview, when in real life Noel has said practically the first thing that happened post-publication was his mam calling him to chastise him about it. In this play, there’s a comment about her not finding out about because she surely doesn’t get The Observer(!) And there’s a call from her during the chart countdown that’s funny but fairly Irish mammy generic. Writing about the working class, or writing for them? We’ll come back to that one.
Damon and Graham
Harder for me to comment on this since I simply don’t know them as people and their relationship as well.
I feel their relationship is developed a little more – I mean they’re not making out sloppy style or anything, but we see Graham’s alcohol struggles, we see Graham’s anger-anxiety in a dressing room on set to the Country House music video (he objected to the ironic sexism &c). There’s a scene where they’re separated by a bathroom door and Damon is trying to coax Graham and his alcoholism out of the bathroom.
They also have two entire women to talk about their feelings to! Justine and (in one scene) Graham’s girlfriend Jo. More on that below.
In some senses it did feel like there was a bit more for Blur to do – I guess they were making the Country House video and Graham was crashing out, whereas Oasis were mostly a) recording at Rockfield b) Noel did that Bad interview while Liam and Bonehead get interviewed at the beach. Really in the whole play there’s not THAT much happening to anyone though. At one point we are actually treated to a brief scene of two warehouse operatives stressed due to having to put stickers over all the barcodes on the Oasis CDs that weren’t working. Gripping stuff! (Also a weird sole break-out of pov of one band or the other. But I suppose you can just think about it as a funny cutaway joke.)
Has to be said though: at one point I am sure Graham, when hysterically telling a list of lies people/(Damon?) have told him (in the context of being told lies to get him to do the Country House video) gives one such lie as “I won't come in your mouth!" Do with that what you will.
Women! (yes they exist!)
Meg is in this quite a bit – if anything, too much, as I’ll explain – but not fully formed. Because of Justine you get the sense the playwright reached into the pockets of Oasis looking for an equivalent female character that can be in lots of scenes rather than having different random women and came up with largely jack shit, and so in a panic have put Meg in basically every single Oasis scene. The play opens at the 1995 Brit awards, where Meg was in fact present (although this Noel looked suspiciously fussed about her sitting on his lap rather than totally heterosexually ignoring her or whatever). She’s there at Rockfield studios! (She wasn’t.) She’s there when they’re meeting with Alan McGee. She’s there. She’s often there to provide a voice of feminist critiquing reason rather than, say, snort a huge line of coke off Kate Moss and shove her hand in Noel’s mouth (criticism). Also, the actor playing her is 37; it’s theatre, it doesn’t really matter, but this feels a little harsh! She has almost no characterisation of her own and you really feel like she’s only there because Justine Frischmann (and, I think in just one scene, Graham’s girlfriend Jo – who is deeply aghast at Country House’s “ironic sexism”) are there for Damon and Blur, and providing feminist perspectives (?) to them, but Justine is also a musician and also gets to be an actual character (and a private school foil to Damon’s state education). It’s not fantastic, frankly.
(Maggie is in one scene (she’s there purely to set up the interview with Miranda Saywer in which Noel said the infamous AIDS comment about Damon and Alex). There are three female actors in a total cast of thirteen, and all play multiple characters. I wouldn’t expect otherwise in a Blur vs Oasis play, but it doesn’t help the interchangeableness of the women aspect, nor is it particularly interesting.)
The rest
Sure! Bonehead’s main role is to tease Liam by pretending Liam likes Take That (believe it or not, this has a dramatic payoff later – more below). The guy playing Alan Mcgee is from Manchester, not Glasgow (and you can tell). Everyone else is, you know. There. Actually the young guy playing Alex James wasn’t half bad, but didn’t have tons to do.
There’s one scene in a nightclub and there’s one girl dancing in a dress and bucket hat to give the illusion of lots of people dancing outside the VIP area. Anyway, she was girl-Liam, to me.
Re. the mocking Liam for being a front man like Robbie / liking Take That etc – I do wonder. Is this just to set up the play’s ending (see below)? Is this from the factual Robbie feud but with pretty much all of that cut out of the play itself? Does the playwright know about Liam and Robbie’s musty lived-in smelling glasto coke sex adventures? Does he know?? I sort of felt like I was applying extra context to this throughline in a way that (probably) wasn’t intended. But something for the Liam/Robbie fans. I guess.
Performances, audience and staging
Overall: decent! Apart from Matthew Horne, major participant in certified British Sitcom Institution ‘Gavin and Stacey’ (who is fronting most of the promo – it’s ‘starring’ him because he’s famous, not because he’s in it more than anyone else), mostly these are a bunch of young-ish unknown-ish actors. I was sitting too far away to see exact facial likeness (obviously never achievable anyway) but the accents and the physical movement were decent. Overall: good job. Liam guy was great – a 21-year-old straight out of drama school with good Liam cadence, had clearly studied the blade (i.e. Liam's psychedelic toddler walk) 👏
Noel was pretty good, right sort of size and shape (slightly shorter than Liam, extremely Irish-looking), good at being exasperated at Liam. I don't know Blur as people as well, but Damon’s lankiness and Graham’s bespectacled neuroticism were dutifully portrayed.
Still some weird choices sometimes though – Justine’s class and her going to a private school were mentioned, and yet she was played with pretty much a cockney Lundin accent.
Not colour-blind casting at all (as is common in UK theatre). Every character is white and all the actors were too.
The (almost full capacity; Saturday matinee) audience was into it; they GASPED when Noel said the catch AIDS and die comment and also when it was revealed some of the barcodes for the Oasis single were faulty and wasn't registering! yes correct guys it really was that serious.
Audience fairly mixed but with a bias towards those of the right sort of age to remember this chart battle first time around, and I’d actually say about a 50/50 gender split (male britpop bias battling with female theatre bias).
(Side note - got really pulled into the guy in front of me going on his phone during the interval (the theatre has a steep rake) who googled 'members of blur' and looked through their photos, then 'Damon Albarn', then 'who won country house roll with it' (couldn't wait another hour to find out despite being the entire storyline of the play he was watching, I guess?). then he put a bet on for a football match. incredible scenes.)
The scene changes took a long time – it always felt like things lost some momentum during this – and the both acts combined excluding interval were around 1 hour 55 minutes. (Also the second act was longer than the first which, like, never happens.) I'm glad it wasn't longer because it should be quite nimble and punchy, something like this, but in some ways was too narrow a focus or should have at least been more ambitious.
The ending (spoilers – no really, I promise)
Putting this information here mostly because it isn’t easily findable online – the press were asked to avoid spoiling the ending in reviews. If you might actually see this play, maybe don’t read this bit.
Now, you may be thinking: how on earth are there major spoilers for this play when it is historical fact who won the chart battle? And the play doesn’t change this – Country House at number 1, Roll With It at number 2. (If you even care.)
Oasis are listening to the radio; Take That’s Want You Back For Good falls to number three. Then Roll With It is announced as number two. Liam smashes up the stereo as soon as it’s announced in anger (liam amirite!!! #lad #trauma). Liam gets real close to Noel’s face and says are we having it [Blur at number 1] we’re not having it. We cut to Blur’s number one party, where they are celebrating. Oasis are silhouetted in the door at the back of the stage. They’ve come for a fight! It’s the play’s only break with realism, and it’s completely different to what has come before.
Both bands have a big stage fight to Firestarter (wouldn’t actually come out for another year but who cares this bit isn’t real) [wait I think I got this wrong! sorry. It was Setting Sun! great choice], with various gory deaths depicted by cartoons done for the production on screen. (During those long scene changes these cartoons have been of radio presenters from the time (actual audio) talking about the chart battle in between contemporaneous songs. Some reviewers didn’t like this, I thought they were fun and sometimes funny! It’s just more around the scene changes and the physical shifting of stuff around being quite long.) On stage there’s swords, axes, fake blood, a prop decapitated head, etc. There’s several one-on-one battles: Damon fences with proper posture while Noel fights back with his foil more scrappily (songwriter v songwriter, hashtag classcommentary).
It’s all been swords and axes and so on up until Liam pulls out a gun and shoots Damon in the chest. (To be fair the main clue to something like this happening at some point is that there a warning for the play for strong violence, blood, gunshots.) Liam’s the last one standing. He surveys the dead (touching his brother on the back and saying only now can he admit he loves him! by the way! - what, Liam the clingy puppy dog that spends his life going I love you Noely I love you why won't you tell me you love me? see this is what I mean about the play's characterisation, true only in certain senses) and starts soliloquising (!) in not-quite-Shakespearean language.
After saying he is mostly his stereotypical character self in this play – which is true, although he is still charismatic and younger-brother-annoying and kind of sweet, he’s not just a sort of angry monster – it’s an interesting attempt at giving him real interiority.
Liam initially tries to put the gun to himself (this was foreshadowed, that in such a situation he would kill everyone and then himself) but he can’t go ahead with it. He then starts singing Take That’s Want You Back For Good in the style of Liam Gallagher (this was pretty funny, and the actor was good at this!), and the other characters start to join in with the singing and reanimate. Words come up on the screen for the audience to sing along also. Graham Coxon (who has been shown earlier in the fight via cartoon as falling out of the window, surviving, then getting run over by a milk float) reappears on stage from the ceiling dressed in an all-white angel version of his milkman costume from the Country House video (which he gets changed into under duress in an earlier scene).
At the end of the sole musical number (question: does this mean Gary Barlow is getting money from this), Liam and Damon are facing each other, Liam declares ‘I love you, Damon Albarn!” and then they have a proper kiss that lasts for several seconds. Congrats to the liamon shippers! You won!
It has to be said that this theatricality in otherwise a very straight narrative retelling lost some audience members sitting around us (based on what some said afterwards). But equally I feel one has to at least attempt something in addition when everyone in the theatre (except interval phone guy I guess) knows how the story ends. It was the only time something experimental happened. It was pretty bonkers and I'm not sure it always entirely worked, but was actually surprising and was fun. The fighting stagecraft wasn't exceptional but it was pretty thrilling, especially after a play where most of the scenes are The Band sitting around in A Location.
I don't fully have time to develop this thought – and I’ve banged on for long enough already – but I think one could make a point about this play vs transformative fandom on the nominally male vs female, violence vs sex upping and then releasing of (narrative) tension. That is, in the same way we’re making them fuck about it, Niven’s having them violently fight about it. Either way, there’s release.
(Although this play does have a inter-band kiss in it. And I’m not necessarily saying all the fic is unviolent. But you know what I mean.)
-
Incredibly this is not the last scene in the play! We get a back-to-reality denouement set three months later, set in Damon and Justine’s flat where she’s making dinner. (It’s risotto, so there’s a callback for you.) By this point (What's the Story) Morning Glory? has been released and it’s starting to seem to Damon like Blur might have won the battle but lost the war. An idea that was raised earlier is returned to – that Damon writes about them [the working class], Noel writes for them.
And that’s how we end. I would just want to point out that Country House isn’t even about them (it’s about a man who lives in a very big house in the country), and Roll With It is, er, about rolling with it I suppose (and being true to your rebellious self, to keep going). We’ve all learned something here today, I’m sure.
(spoilers end)
Finally: this did get me thinking about Doing This Properly, i.e. what a good Oasis biopic might look like, or what sort of other things you could make that aren’t just featuring impressions of the Gallaghers or the Gallaghers as a punchline.
My instinct for this is that if you’re actually going to make something that deals with the emotional and/or physical incest of it all, the more complex narrative on offer, their ‘real’ personalities… you’re going to get sued. (Not to mention the horrific abuse of their childhood, Noel’s gay roadie days, etc etc.) And also the scrutiny might well affect their real current lives. It feels like at a minimum you would have to Velvet Goldmine it and make a film about Neil and Larry Gaughan or whatever. But their life story is so singular and also insane I’m not entirely sure how you would do that. For now we have this sort of thing, I suppose.
But if I was doing their proper biopic I’d probably open with a bit of Knebworth euphoria and then stylishly flash back to kid Noel holding crying baby Liam in his arms and realising with horror that his life has changed forever. Or something.
more missives from the britpop play: there’s a scene (in which noel gives the “catch AIDS and die” quote) where there are concurrent pre-show interviews happening on opposite sides of the stage. liam and bonehead doing a tv interview on one side, noel talking to the observer on the other. noel has been talking about tommy (which is a whole other devastating thing) and liam has been talking through the gamut of their usual questions. he says something like, “once you’ve crossed noel, that’s it. he holds a grudge forever.” then cut to noel, talking about tommy, and he says something like: “im not sitting around crying about it. i hardly ever think about it. can we talk about something else now?” and it’s like. it just captures so well the way both of them work and the way that liam almost knows noel better than noel knows himself….. 🥲
