heres a new aussie review:

Fab Four of '90s recaptured
By Philippa Hawker
October 2, 2003


FILM: LIVE FOREVER (M)
Nova

There is a Fab Four in John Dower's entertaining, erratic documentary about British pop music, although his decade is the '90s rather than the '60s, his significant quartet not John, Paul, George and Ringo, but Noel, Liam, Damon and Jarvis.

The film takes its name from an Oasis song: there are nods to other bands and personalities, to fashion, politics and art. But the focus keeps returning to three years of musical hype and glory, 1994 to 1997. This was a time when Oasis and Blur dominated the British charts, a phenomenon dubbed Cool Britannia (a retread of Swinging London) was hailed in the pages of Vanity Fair, another phenomenon known as Lad Culture fuelled the publication of magazines such as Loaded, and Tony Blair's New Labour was on its way to power.

The film can't help being drawn to its four central characters. There might be newsreel footage; talking head-pundits with socio-political analysis and nostalgic anecdotes; punctuating shots of motorways, Manchester lanes and Camden Town pubs - but the boys, mouthing off, dominate the story. The feuding Gallagher brothers, a fraternal relationship with distinct echoes of Cain and Abel, are a wonderful combination.


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There are glorious generalisations from Liam, who is puzzled by being described as androgynous, but eventually concedes: "I'm a pretty boy, yeah. You've got to have a decent haircut if you're the frontman of a band." The articulate Noel is consistently funny, a mixture of the absurdly overblown and the sharply self-critical.

Jarvis Cocker, of Pulp, has a thoroughly sardonic, wittily detached take on it all, while Damon Albarn of Blur seems to have come off worst: for him, talking about Britpop is a look back in anguish, with bitter memories of a Blur-Oasis rivalry that he denies, yet finds impossible to escape from, even now.

Louise Wener, of the band Sleeper, is a lone female voice, providing a sharp, analytical perspective, without self-flagellation or self-aggrandisement. For her, a final moment of disillusionment was Noel Gallagher's decision to accept Tony Blair's invitation to Number 10 to celebrate Labour's victory; even Noel, rarely at a loss for words, seems a little uncomfortable justifying it.

But the film doesn't seem to want to take a particularly critical distance from its subject: in the end, Live Forever feels as if it is celebrating, with quite a degree of fondness, a moment in British popular culture that turned out to be a combination of hope and hype, a marketing exercise masquerading as a significant cultural moment. The filmmakers know this, and they don't really mind: it was fun while it lasted, and the stories are hilarious.

***1/2