Over cigarettes and alcohol on a hot London terrace, the voice of the 1990s, Liam Gallagher, is talking through a job he had before Oasis were famous. Like many of his anecdotes, it involves the singer standing up, legs apart, arms waving: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on a stag do.
“You know the old Granada TV studio?” he says, Mancunian accent intact, despite living in the capital for half his life. “This geezer held me feet, and I dangled down to change a lightbulb, stoned. What else? I built a fence.” He believed the band would happen, though? “I knew it,” he claims, sitting down again. “The world would go dark if I wasn’t in that band. Take what you want from that — well, I wouldn’t have killed myself.”
Gallagher is here to talk about a new film, Supersonic, that charts the rise of Oasis — the band he was in with his brother Noel from 1991 until implosion in 2009. Their first two albums, Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, sold 37m copies and led to two vast gigs at Knebworth in 1996, which 4% of the country tried to get tickets for. That is the largest demand ever, and, suitably, where the excellent documentary — from the Senna and Amy team — ends. The gig, though, is far from the last thing Gallagher wants to talk about.
“If you put out a good interview, people get to know you more,” he says. His hair is neatly hanging around his face, and he is dressed exactly as expected: blue anorak, jeans, spotless white trainers. His girlfriend and manager, Debbie, spilt her coffee on them the other day, but he used Vanish and all is fine. He is approachable, and this has always been the split in his personality. On stage, he is fearsome and still, whereas off it, like his older brother, he offers quotes as good as their choruses: the football-chant anthems that defined Blair’s Britain and ushered in a decade of lad culture.
“I am never going to be on stage, talking about what I’ve been up to that day,” he says. “I can’t be doing with chat. So we’d give everything in interviews. Then everyone in the venue knows who we are. Like it or not, we were entertaining.” Yet the biggest stars now, such as Beyoncé, Radiohead, don’t even speak to the press. “Sad, isn’t it? Nobody’s got anything to say any more. They are all scaredy-cats. It’s just boring these days.”
And we’re off. In the film — named after their debut single, Supersonic — as Oasis are chucked off ferries and bottled by fans looking for a reaction, Gallagher says: “Any band worth their salt is not just music.” Do you really mean that? “Without a doubt. If it’s all about music, then it’s Coldplay. The most rock’n’roll thing Chris Martin did was wear a leather jacket. I thought, ‘Go on, lad. That’s a start.’” The Sex Pistols are the band he admires, but he adds: “Even if I was selling flowers, I’d probably be arrested for whacking some c*** over the head with a bunch of geraniums.” Which does set his bar rather high.
Surely, he argues, pointing at my iPhone, new bands should be filmed getting up to mischief. But, I say, that’s the issue. They are afraid, as there’s nowhere to hide. “Yeah, but if I was a 20-year-old in a band and somebody stuck that in my face, I’d stick it up their arse, or mine,” he argues, believably. “There is no excuse for young bands to act like grown men. When you’re older and have kids, cool it out a bit, but I get up to more mischief in my butcher’s than [they] do on their f****** tours. Maybe it’s just where we’re from,” he ponders, after a rare pause. “I guess it goes back to the working-class thing. The shit-kickers aren’t breaking through. A lot of music these days is by middle-class kids.” Is it a lack of funds in deprived areas? Gallagher shakes his head. “I don’t know the answers. I don’t really care about politics.” He did take to Twitter after Brexit, though? “Did I?” When Leave won, he tweeted: “Stop the world I’m getting off LG x.”
“I was listening to the song,” he says — the one by the Stone Roses. “I don’t vote, but I’m not one of them people that moan. People go, ‘You don’t vote, you can’t moan.’ I’m not moaning. I pay for my kids’ school fees. If I need to make their life better, I’ll do some graft.”
A waitress comes over and asks if we want olives, which we clearly don’t, and Gallagher asks her to turn down the music. It is David Bowie. “He’s great and that,” says the singer, smiling. “But he’s not that good to get in the way of my shit.”
“Off stage, he offers quotes as good as Oasis choruses
This youngest Gallagher is 44 — five years the junior of his brother Noel, who turns 50 next year. The pair were both Oasis’s great strength and what drove them apart. The film shows them young. And God, was Liam good-looking, like a young River Phoenix in one family photo — shaved head, piercing blue eyes. Noel was an awkward stoner who sat with guitars. Their father was abusive, and in the early 1980s their mother, Peggy, took Liam, Noel and their elder brother, Paul, away. A decade on, their spirited band formed. Noel says Liam is cooler, funnier and prettier, but that his sibling wishes he had his talent as a songwriter every day.
Is that true? “I don’t think so, man,” Liam says. “I was happy with singing. I’m a rock’n’roll singer.” But come the fourth Oasis album, he wrote as well? “I didn’t really want to.” The first time that happened, he was playing guitar when Noel said the tune should be on a record. “It wasn’t me booting walls down, saying, ‘I want to be a songwriter.’ I’d have been happy singing his, because his were better.”
At times like that, Liam sounds sweet, subdued, even a little sad. He would, of course, deny that. Sagging confidence is not what he does, let alone give an inch in a standoff that has existed between him and Noel since a fight in Paris ended Oasis seven years ago. It’s a pity. Definitely Maybe, especially, is an album that has aged surprisingly well — more Appetite for Destruction, by Guns N’ Roses, than the Beatles copyists the Gallaghers were labelled. If they got drunk and made up, the comeback gigs could be Knebworth-sized.
“I would love us to reform,” Gallagher says unequivocally, a couple of pints in and warmed up. (According to Debbie, he’s giddy with drink quicker than people expect.) “Not because of money — I’m far from skint, believe you me. I love that band. That’s putting it out there. I still think we could make good records. I’d love it. There has been a big hole in my life since 2009.” Again, he stands up, towering above me. “I feel I am walking around like I’m the geezer in a band, but I’m its shadow, walking behind it. People go ‘Oasis! Oasis!’, but I am not that now. I’m just Liam now.”
After the acrimony, the singer founded and fronted Beady Eye, but had little desire to go “flogging a dead horse”, so finished them. Thanks to that, along with a series of widely publicised breakups and children, Liam has stayed in the news, while he and Noel no longer talk. How does Peggy — an “angel” — feel? “Obviously she’d like us to be chatting, sit around the table at Christmas. But it’s a stupid standoff, and we should know better, as we have kids. It would be nice for me and our kid to get back together as brothers.”
“Because,” I start, but he cuts me off. “For me mam and for us and the kids.” I try my next question again, but he returns to the subject. “But it’s good, the standoff. I’m enjoying it. I ain’t backing down. He ain’t backing down. At least people are still talking about it. They’re obsessed.” He smiles and, again, we go back to the tabloid spat. “There’s no harm in it. He says shit about me. I say shit about him. I have held the olive branch out, and there has been nothing, so there you go. Potato it is, mate.” This refers to tweets of Liam’s that suggest Noel looks like a spud.
I ask what it was like when Noel took the vocals for Don’t Look Back in Anger, from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? — the first album track Noel sang. Liam can’t remember. There was that song, and Wonderwall, and he chose the latter, “even though I kind of didn’t like it, because it was a bit groovy”. He says he would gladly have sung on both, as it was his job. So was it then, in 1995, that the problems began? “Maybe. I let it happen, but when it got to three or four on an album, you’re thinking, ‘He’s after something.’” In Supersonic, Noel makes out that it is his band, which Liam now corrects to say the band was both of theirs, along with the three other original members: Bonehead, Guigsy and Tony McCarroll.
“As much as I love our kid, he definitely did change,” Liam says. “I don’t care what anyone says. He’s not the first to have his ego rubbed, but he changed, mate. And obviously I don’t want to lose my brother. But you can sell loads of records, be loved — the main success is if you get out of it pretty much the same as you went in. You live in a different house. Drive a different car. But you don’t have to turn into a nob.” Plenty of very big bands stay together for decades, I say. “Yeah, but they are not brothers.”
So he’s the same? “Without a doubt.” And Noel’s not? “I don’t think he is. You can see the clientele he hangs round with. He’s on the verge of turning into Sting, but I’m blind to the bullshit. I know I’m great. I was great before I joined the band.”
When Liam is on stage, he stands still. As such, he feels like he is controlling it all: the crowd, the pace, the adulation. Also, he can’t dance. But a stillness happens when he sits, too. Often I realise he is staring at me when I really didn’t think he was — locked again in the to-camera glare of video shoots from the glory years. He is headline-worthy company, full of opinions like his brother, but without a decade spent honing them into predictability.
You pick up titbits, honest appraisals of a life well lived. He isn’t grateful, more vindicated in his self-belief. He saw the Stone Roses as a teenager and that was it. He wanted to front that type of band. “I didn’t want to be in the Smiths. I could never see me with flowers out my pocket.”
When I ask if the “bubble of good vibes” popped when sales fell, he says he always had fun. “I’m not curing cancer — just making tunes.” He is “not having” Kanye West and his “designer rap”. On America, where his first band struggled to make an impact, he shrugs. “I knew Americans weren’t going to get us,” he says. “They want razzamatazz. Five lads stood there, staring you out? It’s going to be intimidating for them, the poor souls. But in England, I was the f****** man, and still do believe I am today. The thought of someone else being the main frontman in England? My hair would’ve gone grey.” Which, I note, it hasn’t. “It hasn’t, mate.”
Next year is the big one for Gallagher, with the release of his debut solo record. “I can only say it’s sounding promising,” he says. A spoof tracklist circulated on Twitter with titles like Meat & Potatoes, Mad for It. Is that just snootiness?
“There’s disbelief, without a doubt. That spurs me on. It’s like when people body-shame someone, and two minutes later they’ve got a six-pack. I’m not a media darling, so people go, ‘He can’t write songs.’ And maybe I can’t, but what I’ve got is good. It’s a bit of everything. A few are a bit Working Class Hero, which suits my Rolls-Royce. And garage-rock psychedelia, in your face. There’s a song I like called Over — acoustic, faraway voices. Cool. I think it will put a few people in their place.
“The main thing is, the voice is sounding delicious. It’s still banging it. Then there’s nice falsetto bits. Bit chilled.” I think Songbird, one he wrote in Oasis, is the best number that’s not on their first two albums or the great B-sides collection, The Masterplan. He nods, a fan of that simple song. “McCartney’s been trying to write a song with two chords for years. He can’t do it. There’s an art in being shit.”
I don’t think he would have been this self-deprecating a decade ago. But his pedestal wobbled with the collapse of Oasis, Beady Eye and a lot of his personal life (he divorced Nicole Appleton in 2014), and he knows he is out on his own now, for the first time — he always seemed more sure of himself than his brother, but that might not be the case any more. “It’s the best I’ve been for a bit,” he says when I say he seems calm, focused. “But it’s all my own doing. You live by the sword, you die by it, but, yeah, all that shit’s in the past. We move on.”
He will play Oasis hits when he tours. “They belong to me as much as to [Noel]. He wrote them, but I raised them.” And hard-up fans spend £20 to see him, so he wants to give them what they want. “I’ll start with Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Definitely? “Maybe.” He laughs, tells me to stay cool and bounds off to suss out dinner with Debbie. A rock’n’roll star in his head for ever, who needs a stage again.
Supersonic is screened today at selected cinemas, with a live Q&A with Liam Gallagher and its director, Mat Whitecross. It goes on general release on Friday
