How Oasis fell out — and who brought Noel and Liam back together
The biggest British band of the Nineties is back, but what led to a truce between rock’s most famous warring siblings? Their 81-year-old mother — and their own children.
This month I asked Alan McGee if and when he thought the Oasis reunion would happen. “It won’t,” said the man who discovered the band that epitomised the Britpop era when they turned up unannounced at tiny King Tut’s in Glasgow in 1993, played a handful of songs and blew the founder of Creation Records’ mind. “Too much has been said. The animosity between Noel and Liam is too real.”
McGee, who saw Oasis rise from a surly bunch of Mancunians given to arguing with each other on stage to the biggest band in the world, turned out, as we now know, to be wrong. Yesterday (Tuesday) the band announced that they had re-formed to play 14 dates in the UK and Ireland next year. The explanation being put out there is that Noel is facing a costly divorce, a reputed £50 million (AU$97.4 million) for a handful of gigs is hard to turn down and Liam has finally held out the olive branch after variously calling his elder brother a “dickhead”, “the evil one” and, most memorably and repeatedly, “a potato”.
I have another theory. The Gallaghers’ beloved mother, Peggy, is 81, and the brothers – whose bond goes extremely deep, despite what has been said ever since Liam launched a plum and then, more dangerously, a guitar at his brother’s head before a concert in Paris in 2009 – would not want her last memory to be of her sons squabbling like a couple of ten-year-olds.
And so we are now facing a reunion concert that will at the very least induce nostalgia for the mid-Nineties and at the most kickstart a new enthusiasm for guitar bands after years of pop and rap dominance.
Still, I am with McGee in being surprised that it has happened so fast, having talked to both brothers at length about the forces stopping it from happening. “Liam ain’t called,” Noel told me last year.
He was a resolute, unmoving presence in denim on a sofa in his studio in King’s Cross, London, still bristling with anger at the way his brother, younger by five years, had been teasing the idea of a reunion on social media. “And 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 someone to call my end. Let’s see what you’ve got.’ And guess what? My phone has not twitched once.”
“He knows I’m not going to call him,” Liam countered when I put this to him this year.
“He’s the one who split the band up so he’ll be doing the calling, and if there is no calling there will be no getting back together.” I guess he must have called. “To be fair though,” Liam continued – and this was shortly before he went off on his own for a 30th anniversary tour of Oasis’s classic debut, Definitely Maybe – “I can see it happening. Now things have changed in his personal life I can see him looking back, not back in anger, and saying, ‘Do you know what? I was really mean to my little brother. Now it is time for me to send him a box of chocolates.’”
What made it happen, after Noel resisted for so long? A string of late night phone calls between the brothers, or at least their representatives, is the official reason given for Noel caving in and burying the hatchet. The announcement of his divorce from Sara MacDonald in January 2023 after a 12-year marriage is most likely a factor, not so much for financial reasons as for the suggestion that she and Liam were not exactly best friends. Asked about a reunion in 2018 by Q magazine, Liam claimed MacDonald wouldn’t allow Oasis to re-form, stating: “His missus won’t let him.”
Now it is time to repair those damaged fraternal ties. And Peggy Gallagher is at the heart of what is most of all a family story. She still lives in the same house in Burnage that Liam, Noel and the eldest brother, Paul, grew up in. According to her youngest son she is “not impressed by this rock’n’roll business and rightly so”.
One of 11 children from Charlestown in Co Mayo, Peggy came over to Manchester aged 18 to work as a childminder and cleaner. She raised her sons single-handedly after getting legal separation from her husband, Tommy, a builder and sometime pub DJ who, Noel once claimed, “beat the talent” into him (the brothers are still estranged from their father). I believe putting Peggy’s mind at rest is the main reason for what will be the biggest reunion of the decade. “Obviously, our mum is alive and she gets upset about it,” Liam said in 2019 about her sons not talking to each other. “The most important thing is about me and him being brothers.”
Then there are the children. “I get the feeling my dad wants it,” Gene, 23, Liam’s son with Nicole Appleton, told The Sunday Times in August. His brother Lennon, whose mother is Patsy Kensit, is 24, and their sister Molly, whose mother is the singer Lisa Moorish, is 26. Anais, 24, Noel’s daughter with Meg Mathews, was photographed hanging out with her cousins in 2023, suggesting cordial familial relations, while Noel and MacDonald’s sons, Donovan and Sonny, were born in 2007 and 2010. All are old enough to go to the concerts. As is the way with most dads, Noel and Liam surely want their offspring to see for their own eyes that it wasn’t just old war stories, that they really were the most important British band of the Nineties. On top of that, Liam lives in Highgate in north London with his fiancee Debbie Gwyther (his former PA), while Noel has returned to Maida Vale, northwest London, after leaving his Hampshire mansion following the split. Hopping down to Noel’s studio for rehearsals – which is where the real test of their rapprochement will happen – has never been easier.
There is also a sense of timing to the whole thing. Noel is 57. Liam, 51, has complained of arthritic knees and an inability to be the hellraiser he once was. A new Labour government has brought a new level of hope to the country, although it is worth bearing in mind that for all their associations with Cool Britannia, Oasis’s first two albums (by far their best) were released under a Conservative government.
And the desire for an Oasis reunion has never been higher. The Gallaghers’ great heroes, the Stone Roses, got back together in 2011 after their guitarist, John Squire, promised they never would, playing to huge crowds in Heaton Park in Manchester and making a lot of ageing men in oversized parkas very happy indeed. Last year, two concerts at Wembley Stadium by Oasis’s arch rivals, Blur, proved the cross-generational appeal of songs that captured the spirit, both melancholy and carefree, of Nineties Britain. Bar The Smiths, who really will never get back together, Oasis were the last great British guitar band yet to let bygones be bygones and do it all over again.
Will it be any good? As anyone who saw Oasis in their heyday knows, their appeal was very much in the less is more camp. Liam never did much more than stand before a raised microphone with his hands behind his back while looking like he might challenge the entire audience to a fight. Noel always had a slightly bemused look as he played guitar, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was getting away with it, while the rest of the band had a nervous, not entirely joyful air.
The songs are as simple as it gets: Wonderwall consists of four basic chords, Cigarettes & Alcohol is essentially T. Rex’s Get It On with added hedonism. Yet they were incredibly exciting because they made it all seem possible, whoever you are. It was laid out in the fantasy image of the first song on Definitely Maybe: Rock ‘n Roll Star.
What will it be like this time round? “If it’s going to happen, it’s got to be good. Liam knows it’s got to be the best it’s ever been,” Noel told me. “And in order for it to happen, he’s got to stand in the same room as me. That’s when the arse will fall out of his trousers.” Don’t be surprised if there could be a few bumps on the road to Wembley, then. Still, a reunion concert by the funniest, most maddeningly audacious, outrageously basic and yet still brilliant band of the Nineties? I’ll be down the front for it.
The Times
