Oasis’ success may sound like a tale of wine and roses. But it’s not: quite the opposite, it’s the most outrageous fratricidal tragicomedy since Bobby Ewing punched his brother JR during one of the show’s family dinners. Dallas. And the relationship between Noel and Liam Gallagher, the two brothers who brought Oasis to the top, is a veritable manual on how not to act when life smiles on you. Or how to go about it if you want to ruin the career of the most successful English pop group since the Beatles and who announced their reunion on Tuesday.
But like all stories of failure and self-destruction, Oasis’s hides its roots in the Gallagher brothers’ unhappy and wild childhood. Since they were little, they had all the figures to end up as pub meat and perhaps the National Front: children of Irish immigrants, they grew up in the Mancunian district of Longsight, one of the most depressed areas in England that in the early 90s, when the Gallaghers were just out of their teens, was infamous for its shootouts between rival criminal gangs.
To add even more spice to the family atmosphere, Tom Gallagher, their father, was a chronic alcoholic who abused his wife, Peggy, and their three children. Especially the middle one, Noel, took most of the paternal batons, since Paul ran away from home early and by the time Liam was grown, Peggy had already abandoned Tom.
The Gallaghers grew up with these things: Liam, quarrelsome, a fan of pubs like his father and (too) extroverted, faults which made him a leader top-notch with his badass and arrogant attitude on stage. Noel, on the other hand, grew up introverted, depressed and obsessive, characteristics that helped him develop an unprecedented talent for songwriting and remarkable skills as a guitarist. As you can see, the Oasis germ came to fruition based on emotional nitroglycerin.
Looking for action
The decade of the 90s found the Gallagher brothers disoriented and unstructured. On your wonderful theme Cigarettes and alcoholfrom his album Certainly maybe, They sing: “Is it my imagination? / Or have I finally found something worth living for? / I was looking for action / But all I found was cigarettes and booze.” Years later, when asked if the lyrics were intended to encourage legal drug use, both said no, that it was simply a reference to the escape routes you have when you’re poor.
They knew this feeling well when they alternated unemployment with the more or less occasional tasks that their father gave them as construction workers. Liam, less clumsy in physical work, alternated these tasks with his musical beginnings in various groups until he found himself in The Rain, which soon became Oasis. And during this time, he lived with his mother.
Instead, Noel, unsociable and unloving, left home to live in a caravan lent to him by an acquaintance. There he spent time composing and managing the warehouse of a work, months before injuring his foot. As luck would have it, between drunkenness and drunkenness, between pack after pack, between fights with rival supporters – they had always been fervent Manchester City fans – they developed their talent for music.
The roadie of Inspiral Carpets
Liam contacted various local bands to sing and eventually co-founded The Rain in 1991, with whom his career gained a certain reputation in Greater Manchester. Noel, after leaving the caravan and warehouses, joined the touring band Inspiral Carpets, one of the exponents of the sound Madchester, as road manager and he spent two years on the road.
When he returned in early 1992, unemployed again and with nowhere to go, his mother told him that his little brother had formed a band that had had some success. Noel contacted Liam and he, knowing some of the songs Noel had written while touring with the Carpets, proposed him to the rest of the band, who accepted.
Noel claims in a television interview that in order to convince The Rain to accept him, he told them something similar to this: “You can listen to me, play my songs and be the best English band ever or you can continue to be a third-rate band and move on from me.” Whether true or not, Noel joined the band and the first thing he did was change the name to Oasis and then show them his songs. The rest is popular music history.
The worst brothers in the world
But with two personalities as antisocial and crazy as Liam and Noel Gallagher, far from the desired harmony, Oasis turned out to be a long succession of disagreements, irresponsibility and mistakes that, over the years, moved the group forward. The quarrels between the two brothers, due in part to artistic jealousy but also to deep quarrels dating back to the time when they shared a room, were constant from the beginning.
Noel considered Liam a stupid, irresponsible thug who went from party to party and got a new couple pregnant every year, eventually racking up three children by different women in a few years. And he wasn’t wrong: from time to time, Liam would appear in the tabloids, once for sticking his body out of a car window and grabbing a cyclist; in another, for punching a fan who asked him to sign a photo; another, for getting into a beer can fight with West Ham fans in London…
For his part, Liam described Noel as a twisted, antisocial cocaine addict who thought he was the only one in the world. And he was right: during Oasis’ first North American tour, with the first album at its peak, Noel returned to England, leaving his bandmates hanging because, according to him, the American public was looking for a new Nirvana in them. Kurt Cobain’s death was still fresh and Noel did not accept the desperate atmosphere of the concerts.
The times when Noel abandoned the band mid-tour – a habit that Liam later joined – were not uncommon. This habit of escapism culminated in 2009 in Paris, when after a fight between the two brothers, they both decided not to go on stage and that was the end of Oasis.
Hitting with a cricket bat
The times when the Gallaghers fought in public are notorious and celebrated by the British tabloid press. It is said that in 1995, during the recording of (What is the story, Morning Glory? Noel was in the studio making arrangements that Liam didn’t like and Liam invited a whole pub to the studio to bother him. Noel took a cricket bat and started beating his brother.
On another occasion, when in 2000 Liam publicly joined in the rumours that Noel was not the father of his newly-born daughter, he split his lip as soon as he found out. In the final argument in 2009, in Paris, Liam allegedly destroyed Noel’s prized guitar. But it wasn’t all physical fighting; humiliation also added points in the Gallagher war.
During the taping of MTV’s Unplugged in 1996, Liam refused to sing, forcing Noel to do so while he watched the band from the box. After the taping was over, he limited himself to commenting live on air about how badly his brother had done. Revenge came in Tokyo in 2002, when Liam suffered from pharyngitis that made it impossible for him to sing and Noel, on an open mic, told him in front of thousands of spectators that he had a sore throat “like a little woman”.
Things didn’t improve over the years: in 2000, an incident in Barcelona led to Noel temporarily leaving the band. Later, in 2002, problems with Liam’s voice and a bar fight in Munich nearly caused Oasis to end prematurely. But from fight to fight, they resisted until 2009.
However, despite their antagonistic personalities, Noel always knew that his brother was the one who interpreted his songs better with his attitude, his way of stretching the pronunciation of words like a piece of chewing gum and his charisma on stage. But when Liam disappeared, he took over the singing.
And Liam seemed to be clear that there was no better songwriter for Oasis than Noel, although he also wrote some notable songs such as Shaker manufacturer, Supersonic either Stanb by me.
Reunited thanks to Pep Guardiola
Meanwhile, the Gallaghers were united on only two things: one was to laugh and attack their great rival in the fight for the Britpop throne: Blur. At the 1996 Brit Awards, they took advantage of the awards ceremony to perform a version of the song life in the park Londoners, but changing the title to Shitty life (shitty life). The animosity of the “northern posh” (Oasis) towards the “London posh” (Blur) was so radical that Noel even declared that he wanted their leader, Damon Albarn, to “get AIDS and die”.
The other thing that has continued to unite them all these years, 18 since their separation, is their love of football for Manchester City, a love that has gone from painful to joyful with the arrival of petrodollars at the club, which has allowed them to sign the best coach of the moment, Pep Guardiola, and is already a team designed to win the Champions League.
In fact, the good relationship between Noel and Pep is public, as is Liam’s admiration for him and the team he has built. To the point that in 2023, they both promised that if City won the Champions League, they would meet again. The citizens They are already European champions – thanks to Madrid’s Rodri’s goal in the final against Inter Milan – and now it seems that Oasis are finally fulfilling their promise.
Perhaps the trophy is not the main reason for the return of one of the most special bands that the 90s gave us, with a seventies and southern flavor, uncompromising guitars, a good rock attitude and a behavior of superstars who do not know how to digest success. But the fact is that in the summer of 2025 the public will meet the brothers together on stages in the United Kingdom and Ireland and will be able to enjoy their music again.
