'It was famous before it even happened': Looking back at Oasis's historic 1996 Knebworth shows

It was perhaps the most audacious event in British music history: two gigs, 250,000 people, from a band just shy of marking two years since the release of their debut album.

In that time, Oasis had pretty much bypassed mid-size venues, progressing from small clubs straight to stadiums, to hosting Britpop's biggest party at a stately home in Hertfordshire. "This is history," Noel Gallagher famously told the Knebworth crowd. "Right here, right now, this is history."

The tickets were £22.50 and the line-up included The Prodigy, Manic Street Preachers, The Chemical Brothers and The Charlatans, depending on which night you were there.

It is estimated more than 2.5 million people applied to go, breaking box office records, and the stories from the shows are the stuff of music legend: the helicopter arrival, Liam Gallagher's golf buggy joyride, the celebs mingling backstage; Mick Hucknall, for some reason, the one that everyone seems to have a tale about.

But the real story of that weekend is that of the band's unique relationship with the fans, says Jake Scott, director of the 2021 documentary Oasis Knebworth 1996. Interspersed with footage from the two gigs, the programme took the viewer back to the 90s, to the buzz of finally of getting through to buy tickets on the landline, the excitement building on car trips, the queuing to get as near to the stage as possible.

"Everyone wanted to be there," Scott tells Sky News. "It was already famous before it happened, the biggest rock concert on British soil in history.

"The contact between the band and the crowd, I think, is palpable. It's a tangible thing. And for a lot of those people who went, it was maybe their first gig ever. There's a lot of stories. And those anthems really resonated with that audience because it sounded like them."

Michael Spencer Jones, a photographer behind Oasis's albums and singles covers during that period, says that after first seeing the band play to just a handful of people less than three years earlier, it was a momentous weekend for those who had been with them since the beginning.

The rise and rise of Oasis

"You spend all this time with a band and you get to know them... there's huge emotional investment in the music and what it means to everyone. So being in the crowd and thinking, 'wow, they've gone from playing in front of, like, 12 people to this in just over two-and-a-half years'. It was astonishing, that journey from humble beginnings to the whole country being completely captivated."

Scott's documentary is an unapologetic celebration of the band in its heyday and of the 1990s, setting the gigs up against the backdrop of Euro 96, the explosion in the art scene at the time, and "this bloke Tony Blair who was going to change everything". It also highlights how different things were at gigs before camera phones came into play.

Even Spencer Jones, off-duty for Knebworth, has only two quickly snapped pictures from the weekend, one of the fans and another of the clean-up. "I think Noel once said that the only problem with being in Oasis was that he never got to see them," he says. "So it was nice, not having the responsibility of taking any photographs and just being able to watch."

'It was so intense'

Many who were there - including Liam and Noel - have said they don't remember a lot of it. Not necessarily because of alcohol or drugs - "speculation about anyone being drunk or high on stage or anything like that is quickly dismissed [when you see the footage] because you can't be that good, for two nights and sustain it like that, and be out of it, it's just not possible", says Scott - but perhaps the intensity of the occasion.

"I watched both nights from the stage, so I had the best view in the house," says Brian Cannon, the band's artwork designer at the time. "But I don't remember a single second of either gig - not because I was hammered, because I wasn't.

"I remember vividly other bits of the event, but the actual gig itself, I genuinely can't remember a single thing about it, which, funnily enough, is what both Liam and Noel say. It's like it was almost... it was just so intense, it just wiped itself from my memory."

What Cannon recalls most is "the insane size" of the event. The backstage guestlist, for about 7,000 people, was in itself bigger than most gigs. "I remember thinking I'm glad I'm not a punter out the front there because I couldn't imagine using a toilet or getting a drink or food or anything, it was just immense," says Cannon. "That was the overarching memory for me."

The 2021 documentary features emotional fan accounts of the weekend - the guy who found out just before that he was to become a father, another who ended up with Liam Gallagher's tambourine as a souvenir, and the particularly poignant story of the girl who attended with her brother, not knowing he would soon be diagnosed with cancer and this would be one of her last memories of the pair together "just enjoying life".

There is also an anecdote from the fan who ended up being invited into a limo to give directions to a driver transporting Kate Moss and Anna Friel.

As well as those stories, the programme highlights the relationship between Noel and Liam at the time, before things turned acrimonious.

"You're only as good as your frontman, any band, and if that is Oasis at its peak - which it is - it's because Liam's at his peak," says Noel in the programme, his younger brother's distinctive, snarling live Slideaway playing in the background, demonstrating his point.

"A big part of telling the story was showing that camaraderie and brotherhood," says Scott, who first met the band when he directed the video for Morning Glory in 1995.

"They're two brothers, with their best mates... the meteoric trajectory of [playing Knebworth] and they're having a laugh and mucking about it, really enjoying themselves. I love seeing that relationship, the spontaneity of it... There's a sweetness in it and something very emotional about it."

The documentary is all about the good times. Both Spencer Jones and Cannon say that even at the gigs, there was a sense that things couldn't get any bigger than Knebworth.

'It couldn't get any bigger'

The band were getting "harder and harder to be around", says Spencer Jones, purely because of the level of fame they had reached and the growing amount of people working around them. And the cracks in the brothers' relationship were there. "When they were together, they were very funny and witty," he says. "It was incredibly entertaining to watch... They were close. But there was always that frisson between them.

"I think Liam described it perfectly. He said, 'if we had a fruit and veg store, we'd argue about where to put the tomatoes', and I think that really summed up their relationship. There was a serious fault line. The irony is that it created that creative relationship, the very thing that ultimately drove them apart was the very thing that made that relationship special."

"Where do you go from that?" says Cannon, of the Knebworth shows. "It couldn't really get any bigger. I mean, they carried on in terms of excess because they recorded Be Here Now, a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool on the cover. The excess continued, just not in terms of big gigs."

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Not of Knebworth size, at least. The band continued to fill arenas until Noel eventually called it a day in 2009. For years, he made it clear he had no plans to kiss and make up with his brother. Then came 2024, when the band's comeback was announced, and those triumphant reunion shows followed in 2025 - Oasis sounding as good as they ever did.

A new documentary, Don't Look Back In Anger, will be released next month, telling the story of those shows, of the brothers making up, and featuring their first interview together in more than 20 years.

So the Oasis juggernaut is still going strong. Liam has said there is more to come. So 30 years on from their biggest ever shows - and with everything in place for gigs to happen - is it time for a Knebworth encore?

This article is an updated feature first published in 2021

(c) Sky News 2026: 'It was famous before it even happened': Looking back at Oasis's historic 1996 Knebworth shows