5 Best Music Documentaries About British Artists

Oasis: Supersonic almost feels necessary for fans of the band ahead of Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger. It could be helpful for lifelong fans to revisit and for new ones to watch for the first time. Oasis: Supersonic is not necessarily required viewing, of course, but it does fill in some blanks. This feature documentary focuses on the context around the band’s meteoric rise in the ‘90s. 

Directed by Mat Whitecross and produced by Asif Kapadia, who directed another documentary on this list, Oasis: Supersonic is for those Oasis fans who did and didn’t live through that time. It’s beneficial and generous in the time it covers, trailing all the way back to Noel and Liam Gallagher’s upbringing in Manchester. However, this documentary does not deal with the brothers’ fractured relationship—it charts their fame before the band’s break-up and reconciliation. The latter of which is the subject of Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger.

Robbie Williams remains one of the most fascinating public figures in my opinion. There’s a great chance that a lot of people who weren’t fans of his solo music or the boy band Take That, which he was a part of for the band’s first five years, discovered Williams more recently. The biopic Better Man (2024), where Williams is depicted as a monkey, went viral a few years ago.

Regardless of if you’ve seen Better Man, there is another way to experience Williams’s story. Netflix released a four-part documentary series about the singer just a year earlier called Robbie Williams (2023). The episodes aren’t all that long, but they are deeply introspective and retrospective. Williams’s candor about different chapters in his life is both surprising and refreshing. He has a self-awareness about his time in the band, his solo career, and his personal life that is both deeply funny and incredibly piercing.

There are so many documentaries—feature-length or episodic—to watch about The Beatles. Of course, that is to be expected about one of the world’s biggest and best bands. Ahead of Sam Mendes’s four-movie project about the band, I imagine plenty of people will be seeking out supplementary material to learn more about The Beatles. One of which should be the documentary series The Beatles: Get Back.

Going into this, viewers must be warned that it is a bit deceiving about its runtime. The docuseries is only three parts. However, those three parts accumulate feature-length runtimes individually. Together, The Beatles: Get Back is around eight hours of footage—found footage, interviews, performances, and so on—about the band. That said, it’s so well-directed by Peter Jackson that I never really felt it. It’s impressively immersive.

Amy Winehouse is one of the most beloved British singer-songwriters whom the world devastatingly lost far too soon. Rightfully so, there are also many documentaries about her career and life. Notably, Amy won Best Documentary Feature at the 88th Academy Awards. Directed by Asif Kapadia, it feels like one of the most personal documentaries about Winehouse—partly because it hears directly from her. 

Not to mention, Amy heavily features people in and around Winehouse’s life that recontextualize chapters that are seemingly well-known to the public. The feature documentary expectedly explores so much of Winehouse’s life, including her struggles with substance use disorder. It does all of the above through an empathetic approach and a huge amount of unseen footage that makes Amy stand out from other, more recent documentaries about Winehouse.

Technically, this qualifies as a documentary about a British and Irish artist. Either way, One Direction: This Is Us (2013) is special for so many reasons. In all honesty, One Direction is my favorite band of all time, so I’m extremely biased. Beyond that, though, One Direction: This Is Us is the only real documentary that fans have of the band. One Direction: Where We Are – The Concert Film (2014) came out the following year, but it’s exactly as described. There is a brief interview with Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik, but it mainly focuses on the Where We Are Tour performance at the San Siro Stadium.

Meanwhile, One Direction: This Is Us is exactly what One Direction fans, myself included, want. It follows the band on their Take Me Home Tour, traveling from Tokyo to New York City and home with Styles, Horan, Payne, Tomlinson, and Malik. There are interviews with the band, their family members, and fans themselves. I actually appreciate how much One Direction: This Is Us values the fans and the relationship they have with the band. The documentary features heartfelt (and humorous) reflections on the members’ The X Factor (2004) auditions, giving a new lens to the band’s stratospheric rise, as well as their cultural and musical resonance.