In this life we are all very cool until our nemesis appears: sometimes it happens at thirty and sometimes at five, as it happened to Noel Gallagher with his brother Liam.
You see it coming and click your tongue as if to say “this is it, we screwed up”. It’s here and there’s no turning back. Somehow, we’ve been waiting for it. It’s a radical love like loading the shotgun forever. A love demanding to never rest again, to live on guard until the end. A love that takes measures to swallow us up very precisely: her belly is our shape.
It happens like this. He will beat us, he will defend us by surprise, he will teach us what is important, he will fill us with anger, he will admire us, he will challenge us, he will make us very intelligent and very stubborn and very happy and very unhappy.
He will set traps for us all the time so that we do not fall into mediocrity or boredom. With this, I mean that life will be difficult but we will live it awake. Also that it will bother us without ever killing us, because the sworn enemy is preferred alive.
Yeah.
We say to the sworn enemy: it’s terrible that you exist, but if you didn’t exist, I would never know who I am. And a “thank you, bitch” is whispered with a small mouth.
I’m fascinated by the Gallaghers because when they were teenagers and one of them would talk, the other one would look at him dumbfounded, like he was thinking “there’s no funnier person in the world”, and ten minutes later he’d be looking for a cricket bat to smash him over the head with. They’re both bloody adorable. Or maybe they were, I don’t know. Maybe the things they did are only funny when you’re very young, very talented, and very good looking.as it was his case. So the world allows you everything. This arrogance so kind and free. This pile of things that were better broken. This bunch of idiots that we called by their first names.
Then you collapse. Then you move away from your favorite day every day.
Then even your friends start to break away from the group because they can’t stand you, and the industry starts to make you a star, and the yellow press conspires with your father’s abuser to make him rich selling trash, and your expression gets twisted and it turns sour, and the drugs aren’t as stimulating and turn you into a tired, erratic, irascible, cruel guy, a guy who lives off the income from his own genius.
What is difficult to recognize is this: You were never better than when you had someone by your side who could destroy you. Liam was never as good as he was with Noel. Noel was never as good as he was with Liam.
I love watching them kiss on the lips in old videos. It’s like playing chess with yourself. It’s like masturbating. It’s the nemesis of the nemesis. One two-headed monster with two brains.
I noticed that Liam was always sticking his tongue out so he could curl up around his brother. It’s possible that she loved him more, or more purely. Liam was more sentimental, more irrational, more wild… and also more dependent. Fragile, ultimately, behind his short lock of hair. Chaos full of pain. Very easy to inflate and deflate. I spat on you and it doesn’t matter if I’m still gonna love you, you fucking asshole. When reporters told him that Noel had said he wanted to leave the group, he said pitifully: “I don’t want to do it. We won’t. I don’t know why he says that. He needs a cake in his face to clear his mind and that’s it.” You’ll see how it goes. I’ll give it to him.
Christmas was different: I kissed him with my teeth. I mean, it bit him. I think he was smarter, more cryptic and psychological. He wasn’t interested in blowing up hotels, like Liam, but in blowing things up from the inside. It was great. He knew how to hurt. He was more envious.
Sure, he was the brains, the poetry, the composition, the boy who knew the anatomy of the perfect song and slept with it whenever he wanted… but his rage was greener and more phlegmatic, like his public statements.
Noel was hit by his father during his childhood and adolescence (as was his mother), but Liam was never hit.. Is that when you started competing with your brother, that kid who always landed on his feet? Was that when he started to understand that he would have to build creative empires with a lot of effort and discipline and that Liam would only need a cool haircut, a trench coat that fit him like a god’s robe and tons of undeniable charisma?
Liam was looking at you with his alien eyes under his single eyebrow and you already wanted to give him all your money. He was the cool one, the handsome one, the extravagant one, the one with the natural elegance, the guy to follow everywhere, and Noel, who was the strategist, was never going to forgive him for that. Deep down, the two of them would have joined hands to get each other’s presents.
It is not necessary to choose, but it would be fair to recognize that Without Noel, Liam would never have existed as an artist.…and that the same thing would not have happened the other way around. That’s how it is!
Noel said he was like a cat (independent and feisty) and Liam was like a dog who was always looking for someone to play with him. I would say that is still the case. Liam always wants to play with Noel: he knows it without him you have nothing to say. Noel is always angry with Liam because he knows how to do things effortlessly. To be loved, to be looked at. To embody the triumph of the rocker over the musician.
They were the kings of a world that no longer exists and now they are our brilliant disinherited. They arrived before social networks, cancellations, contractual dynamics, the sticky respect that is imposed on us above all. They arrived at something in time: choosing a number for which to sell their old red lines.
We will go wherever it is necessary to see them share tiles and feel how electricity is born and dies.
It is possible that this promised reunion tour, after 15 years without sharing a roomnever happens. It’s possible that next summer we’ll travel to Manchester or Dublin or London to see them – morbid and nostalgic – and go home without doing so because someone said something they shouldn’t have before the gig and punk and the big bang and the Great Detachment came back for a while.
Life is funny, especially because it can go to hell at any moment. They’re always the best at it.
