‘Noel is a potato. He dresses like Gary Barlow’
Ahead of a new Oasis documentary, Andrew Perry asks singer Liam Gallagher if he and older brother Noel will ever make up
In a corner of Highgate’s Café Rouge, Liam Gallagher is acting like a man half his age. And he looks the part: bronzed from a recent holiday in Majorca, and irrepressibly Tigger-ish in manner, it’s hard to believe he recently turned 44. After three troubled years out of the game, British rock’s one true icon from the Nineties is revelling in the limelight cast upon him by a new film about his first band, Oasis. Called
Supersonic, it’s a timely reminder of how this garrulous, magnetic Mancunian was once a pop saviour.
Today, he’s bang on time for our 10am meeting – unthinkable in 1994, unless actually on his way to bed, gin and tonic in hand – and in buoyant mood, having kicked off his day at 5.30 with a seven-mile run on Hampstead Heath. As Supersonic electrifyingly shows, when Gallagher surfaced as a cocky twentysomething back in the mid-Nineties, Britain was crying out for what he calls a “chin-out” rock frontman, after years of American grunge, acid house and shoegazing.
The stirring two-hour movie, put together by the team behind the award-winning documentaries Amy and Senna charts Oasis’s meteoric rise from dreary Manchester, to the cusp of world domination. It culminates with their two epochal shows at Knebworth in 1996, before a combined audience of a quarter of a million people.
Gallagher describes the film as “euphoric and lovely”, accurately adding, “The majority of it’s comedy gold, man!” Certainly, their escapades on their first visit to Los Angeles, where they over-indulge in potent narcotics and end up playing different songs at the same time onstage, will have viewers reeling in the aisles.
Liam does admit, however, that parts of it are “emotional – seeing us all together, starting off young, not knowing where we’d end up”. He pauses, clenching his teeth. “And then the way it ends – with me and our kid.”
“Our kid” is his elder brother, Noel, with whom Liam has an infamously tempestuous relationship.
I first met the Gallaghers in 1994, at the BBC’s studios in Elstree, where Oasis were performing Live Forever on Top
of the Pops. That day, they were non-stop entertainment, excitable about their whirlwind success. There were rich pickings for a journalist in the contrast between Liam, the lairy, impetuous frontman, and Noel, the thoughtful, acerbic tunesmith, who, the movie reveals, kept his emotional core well guarded, after suffering physical abuse from their father in early childhood.
As one insider remarks in the film, “Noel has a lot of buttons to press, and Liam has a lot of fingers.”
“Those times were great, man, and dead fast,” Liam recalls. As Oasis’s star ascended, the aftershows became wilder and more extravagant, with the likes of Madonna, Bono and George Michael turning up to bask in their reflected glory. “It was like one big, long night out,” Liam affirms, “like going to loads of parties one after another, for the first two and a half years. I didn’t want to be on TV talking about it. I didn’t want to be on holiday with me feet up. I wanted to be f------ there, singing them tunes, ’aving it, and then afterwards getting off me tits.” This was the essence of Liam in his “mad for it” majesty. Oasis were different from the other Britpop bands. “Blur, Menswear and all them,” he says, “Their music was all jolly and wa-heeey [waves his arms around in a silly manner]. Our music was more serious, classic.” He says he never had stage fright, even as the audiences got bigger. “Knebworth was easy, man,” he says. “I was only scared when it was empty. Then you thought, ‘F------ hell, a bit big, this, innit?’” That weekend, I interviewed Noel on site. The crowds were unimaginably vast, and bellowed Oasis’s songs so loudly they could be heard in neighbouring counties. Noel was upbeat after the first show. “We thought we were big when we played Earls Court, then Maine Road,” he said. “But now I know what big means.” He went on to confide that he’d had Mick Hucknall thrown out of their family enclosure. “He was p------ me off,” he said. “I didn’t want to look at his head.”
I share with Liam my memory of Noel strolling into an empty compound behind the stage – one little guy whose magical songwriting had convened this imponderable throng of 125,000 people beyond the fence.
“He’s the Ronnie Corbett of rock!” Liam roars, referring to this brother’s lesser stature, which hadn’t been my meaning. After Knebworth, the Gallaghers’ sibling disagreements turned into a never-ending scrap, resulting in cancelled tours, declining fortunes, and, eventually, a bitter parting of the ways in 2009.
So, Supersonic concludes at Knebworth, presenting a fabulous rags-to-riches tale, mostly narrated by the disembodied voices of Liam and Noel. Each reminisced for around 20 hours, often verging on mutual affection, though never in the same room together. Here in Café Rouge, it soon becomes clear that no hatchets have been buried.
“Noel’s far too busy to promote the film,” Liam bristles. “Apparently, he’s doing a fun album, and he’s too f-----busy to be going down the nostalgic route. He won’t be at the premiere, and he’ll come back with some quick remark, like, ‘Oh, I’ve no need to be doing this, but that’s all Liam’s got’.” He thumps the table angrily.
The tirade goes on. Noel “is a potato”. He “dresses like Gary Barlow”. He “stirred up” the final argument in 2009, “because he wanted to go solo”. Noel indeed soon got up and running with Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Band, and quickly established himself as an arena headliner, with a set of Oasis and solo hits. In interviews, he often states that he simply doesn’t need the aggro of an Oasis reunion.
“Anyway,” Liam adds, “his missus, Sara McDonald, won’t let him get that band back together. She wears the trousers, mate.” Liam suggests that a further difficulty lies in the fact that half of the songs were written about Meg Mathews, Noel’s first wife.
Ouch, I say. Talking that way will hardly accelerate a reconciliation.
“The olive branch has been put out many times, and he’s blanked it,” Liam fumes. It’s a shame we can’t bury the hatchet, but it’s not like I’m messing with the brakes on his car, or he’s putting my windows through. It’s just banter, until one of us grows up.
“It is a shame. I don’t see his kids, he doesn’t see my kids, and it hurts my mum. It’s all very childish, but there you go.” There’s a long pause.
“So yeah,” he concludes, “here we are now, 20 years later, bored out of our f------ minds. The party is well and truly over!”
Liam Gallagher has had a rough ride since 2009. From the ashes of Oasis, he started Beady Eye, but the band folded in 2013. Around that time, his second marriage, to All Saints singer Nicole Appleton, ended abruptly, after it came to light that he’d fathered a child by an American tabloid journalist – he also has two sons, one by Appleton, and one by his first wife, Patsy Kensit.
“The stuff that happened was my own doing,” he admits. “I apologise. I’ve hurt a lot of people, but that’s life. I’m in a good place with my kids, the divorce is all done, and we move on.”
He’d never use a touchy-feely word like “rebuilding”, but that’s what the Oasis hellraiser has been doing of late. A few weeks ago, he signed his first solo deal with Warners, for an album he’s been co-writing.
“I guess it’s the last chance to dance, know what I mean?” he shrugs. “There’ll be some rock ’n’ roll bangers on there, but also some softer, John Lennon-y things. That’s who I am. I can’t cook. I refuse to cook. All I can do is do what I do.” Even pre-release, however,
Supersonic has already sparked talk of an Oasis reunion. Will it happen?
“At the moment, it’s a bazillion light years away,” Liam says. “I’d love to, but it’s down to Ronnie Corbett, innit.”