An Oasis reunion? Liam hasn’t called but I will be free next year

Noel Gallagher talks about the midlife strife that inspired his new album and the conditions he has set for any Oasis reunion.

Noel and Liam Gallagher. (Photo: Stefan De Batselier, Idols.)

A week or so before Noel Gallagher meets me at his studio in London’s King’s Cross, the Oasis reunion rumour mill went into overdrive. In March, Gallagher’s brother Liam wrote on Twitter of returning to his frontman duties: “It’s happening.” Last month, rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs said: “I’m ready.” Then came reports that Knebworth had been booked for four nights in 2025. So I begin by asking Noel: “What’s happening?”

“Liam ain’t called,” the band’s 56-year-old leader, songwriter and guitarist says, sitting deep in a sofa, an authoritative presence with cropped grey-black hair, wearing Levi’s. “I’m not expecting him to because he’s full of shit and very disingenuous with his beloved Oasis fans. I say to him, ‘Get somebody to call somebody my end. Let’s see what you’ve got to say.’ Guess what? My phone has not twitched once.”

According to him, there is a simple reason his problem child of a brother will not pick up the phone. “He knows for a fact that should someone call me, and I go, ‘You know what? Let’s do it,’ then he has to actually stand in the same room as me. Then it will be, ‘All right, dickhead, how you doing? Before we go any further, there’s a few things I have to say to you.’ That’s when the arse will fall out of his trousers.”

On top of that, an Oasis reunion would have to be off-the-scale brilliant to not be a let-down. The end came in April 2009 when Liam threw a plum – and then, more dangerously, a guitar – at his brother before a concert in Paris.

“If it’s going to happen, Liam has to pull it off. It’s got to be the best it has ever been. But he’s one of these guys, and they’re 10 a penny, particularly up in Manchester, the bully, who when you put it on ’em and say, ‘Come on then, let’s see what you’ve got,’ start doing a lot of harrumphing.

“Liam is like a violent version of Arthur Fonzarelli. So I’ll say it again: I’m free, back end of 2024. He could even video himself calling me. That would be good for his little Twitter feed. But since then he’s gone quiet. Funny, innit?”

All of this feels particularly relevant because the new album by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is the older, wiser, sadder cousin of Oasis’s world-changing 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe. Council Skies has a reflective mood that draws not just on memories of Gallagher’s childhood in north Manchester but also his situation as a multimillionaire rock star dealing, for the first time in his adult life, with things going very wrong indeed.

There has been a divorce, health issues and the psychological aftermath of a pandemic and ensuing lockdown. Perhaps that’s why a handful of the songs, Dead to the World and I’m Not Giving Up Tonight in particular, have that hymnal, bittersweet quality of the Oasis classics Live Forever and Don’t Look Back in Anger. Oasis meant so much to people because it offered defiance against the everyday grind. Council Skies harks back to that feeling.

“I always thought there had to be a price to pay for happiness,” Gallagher says of his situation. “I’ve had over 20 years of absolutely no turbulence in my life whatsoever and I kept thinking, ‘It cannot be this great, all the time, until it comes to the end and I go, may as well die now and end up in heaven.’ It turns out I was right. Luckily, as an artist you get to write about it.”

Dead to the World is one of those songs Gallagher has a special knack for, which don’t do anything hugely different from what has gone before yet capture a universal feeling in a signature melancholic, soaring fashion.

“It seems I peaked in my 40s because the moment I hit 50 it’s been one thing after another: personal issues, health issues, the city we love (London) going down the toilet. Definitely Maybe was born out of anxiety, thinking, this is the one shot we’ve got … There’s something similar here. Uncertainty is at the heart of it.”

Oasis took that uncertainty and made people feel, for one small moment, like they really might live for ever.

“People will never forget the way you made them feel. You can’t go back to 1995 because things cannot be the same – parents grow old, your cat dies, things rust – but the feeling remains and there is something beautiful in that. That’s why Dead to the World is up there with Live Forever. It’s just a different version of it.”

Gallagher grew up, by his own description, as a loner, estranged from his frequently violent father, Tommy, after his Irish parents’ divorce and taking solace in his bedroom where he taught himself guitar and learnt to write songs by listening to the Beatles, Slade and T. Rex. While Liam was busy being the good-looking lad about town, the carefree kid who never second-guessed himself, Noel worked on an escape route via rock ’n’ roll.

“I didn’t invent anything,” he says. “I had good taste in music, a cool record collection, I could write a melody simple enough to make it work and it was 50 per cent inspiration and 50 per cent copying. It was a Tuesday night, raining, when I went into the rehearsal room and said, ‘I’ve just written the greatest tune of all time.’ We started Cigarettes & Alcohol and Bonehead went, ‘You can’t get away with that.’ ”

Bonehead was referring to the fact Cigarettes & Alcohol is essentially Get It On by T. Rex after a trip to the off-licence, of which Gallagher says: “It’s not like I was expecting nobody to notice.” The genius of the song was in its celebration of working-class hedonism; the idea that you may as well live for the moment in the absence of any deeper meaning or nobler purpose.”

Oasis’s take-no-prisoners assault targeted a few victims along the way, most frequently Phil Collins. “The best thing about the Phil Collins thing is that Liam got accosted by his children one day because they thought he was me. They had a pop at him, saying, ‘Why are you always having a go at our dad?’ ”

As for Oasis becoming the biggest guitar band since the Beatles, Gallagher thinks it was down to a lack of artifice.

“Oasis had a laddish, yobbo image, built in the image of the singer, but look at footage of Knebworth (two nights, 1996, 2.5 million ticket applications) and you’ll see loads of girls down the front.

“Melodically it spoke to the masses, lyrically it spoke to people our age … Oasis will never make another record, but if we put a tour on sale it would destroy everything.”

In 1994 Oasis played the legendary Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, shortly after taking what they thought was cocaine but which turned out to be crystal meth. It resulted in the band members playing different songs at the same time before attacking each other. “Ringo Starr was there that night,” Gallagher recalls. “He walked out. One of the Beatles comes to see the new Beatles – and it’s shit.”

THE TIMES