The night when one pop star and his maracas took on the world
Liam Gallagher
O2 Arena, London SE10 ★★★★★
‘Leeee-ammmm! Leeeeammmm!” The chants echoed around the arena whenever there was a lull in proceedings, worshipful and celebratory, acknowledged by the star jutting his jaw out and bashing a fist against his chest. Liam Gallagher was among his people, mainly (but not exclusively) male, and mainly (but not exclusively) old enough to have witnessed the imperious rise of Oasis back in the Nineties.
“Come on London, no excuses, let’s f---in’ hear ya!” Gallagher snarled, and the O2 Arena erupted, bodies surging and heaving, plastic pint glasses being tossed into the air, 20,000 voices rising in unison in a huge bellow. And the mildly inconvenient fact that the Britpop veteran’s voice was ropy and flat, his band were turgid, his between-song babble was borderline incoherent and all his best songs were written by his estranged older brother over 20 years ago did little to detract from the occasion. It was an awesome, ridiculous, inspirational display of tribal bonding in a wall of belligerent noise. It was rock and roll.
Rock has long thrived on cults of personality, but the gap between Gallagher’s limited talent and charismatic appeal can be perplexing. In the studio, with the right song, his sneery John-lennon-meets-john lydon vocal style has often been scintillating but it’s got rougher as he has got older, with a tendency to bellowing self-parody.
His singing was particularly shouty on Thursday night, although he had an excuse, blaming “the sniffles” from a seasonal cold (“It’s the time of the year, our kid, so go easy on us”) before adding, “Don’t be saying I been doing the cocaine. That’s tomorrow night!”
Gallagher can even make an apology sound like a threat. He has the mesmerising intensity of a sociopathic yobbo who might hug you or punch you without warning, glaring aggressively at his devoted audience as if ready to take them all on armed with nothing more than a pair of oversized maracas. He delivered songs as if yelling in the face of an enemy, standing in a taut, crouched pose as if prepared to hurl himself into a headbutt at any moment.
As each song finished, he stomped away, nodding triumphantly, like a boxer returning to his corner at the end of a winning round.
There was a time when that dangerous swagger was backed by the all-conquering gang force of Oasis. But since the Gallagher siblings acrimoniously split 10 years ago, he has seemed isolated and strangely vulnerable. It is no secret that everyone at the concert would have preferred to be at an Oasis show, Gallagher probably included.
Nevertheless, his slightly reluctant solo career has been a triumph, even if it has meant hiring musicians to effectively function as an Oasis tribute band and collaborating with pop teams to write pastiche Oasis anthems.
“I don’t like them people who do nostalgic tours where they don’t have new music, I think they’re c----,” he snarled in pugnacious gratitude for the audience’s rowdy and good-natured response to nine solo songs in his set. But it was 11 Oasis songs that ensured the arena erupted into spectacularly effusive celebration.
The sheer volume of crowd singing was overwhelming, lifting you up in an almost physical wave of sound. People hugged, they threw their arms wide, they sang as if each one of them believed the Oasis mantra: “Tonight, I’m a rock’n’roll star!” And whatever your reservations, you might be forced in those moments to suspend disbelief and see Liam as he sees himself: the last of the rock stars, ready to take on the world single-handed, and utterly convinced that, in his moment, no one would bet against him.