Walking into a recording studio last week, wearing sensible, comfortable trainers and carrying a hot water bottle – to aid his creaking back – Noel Gallagher looked like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
And no wonder. Noel, 58, is extremely busy. With just 34 days to go before the opening act of the long-awaited Oasis reunion tour, he’s been rehearsing, fixing musical arrangements, nailing down the set-list and making sure that he, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Mikey Rowe are able to recreate some of the magic which made them the biggest British band of the Nineties.
They’ve even decided their opening and closing songs: the classics Acquiesce and Champagne Supernova, which will delight fans.
There’s one essential part missing from the arrangement, however: younger brother Liam, 52. He’s currently 850 miles away, relaxing with his girlfriend, Debbie Gwyther, at the £4 million mansion in the South of France which he bought from Noel Edmonds.
‘Apparently they are sounding epic,’ Liam said on X, formerly Twitter.
That’s good to hear – but why on earth isn’t Liam in the studio with them?
The official line from the band’s publicists is that the brothers want to be sure they aren’t seen together until the moment when they step on stage at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff on July 4.
However, it’s not a particularly convincing explanation. They managed to arrive and leave separately when filming an Adidas advert last month, for instance, and could easily do the same at the recording studio.
The official line from the band’s publicists is that the brothers want to be sure they aren’t seen together until the moment they step on stage in Cardiff on July 4
Liam and Noel at Knebworth during their huge gigs in August 1996
Liam is currently 850 miles away, relaxing with his girlfriend Debbie Gwyther, pictured, at the £4million mansion in the South of France he bought from Noel Edmonds
The real reason for the distance, according to well-informed sources, is that the Oasis tour is following the ‘Rolling Stones protocol’ which has for decades limited the amount of time which fractious frenemies Mick Jagger and Keith Richards spend together.
What the beautifully professional Stones machine has found is that everything runs much more smoothly if Mick and Keith – who have slept with each others’ girlfriends and decried each others’ solo efforts and honours for decades – are apart as much as possible.
So they travel separately, have separate backstage areas and their own entourages.
Organisers have decided to try the same tactic with the equally fractious Gallagher brothers. Contact will be limited to only ‘one or two’ rehearsal days, at which both Noel and Liam are both present at the Lone Star Studios in North London before they embark on a 41-date tour, which concludes in Brazil in November.
While it may sound like a wholly inadequate amount of preparation for a lengthy sold-out global tour (which might net them as much as £50 million each), as far as the promoters are concerned, it’s a much less risky strategy than the alternative, i.e. locking the brothers in a studio together for weeks on end.
‘Everyone knows that with Liam’s personality, hostilities could break out at any moment. If Noel takes the bait then there could easily be a meltdown,’ a source said.
As this paper revealed yesterday, a deal with promoters Live Nation has been structured with this in mind, with sources saying that Noel and Liam will only be paid fully when the tour is over – a highly unusual move.
Yet everyone agrees it’s the best strategy, all-round. One source said: ‘The main thing Liam’s voice needs at the moment is rest. He has been relaxing recently and spending time with his mum Peggy.
Liam with his former wife Patsy Kensit. The pair married in 1997 and divorced three years later
Noel at a recent rehearsal session sans Liam… but with a hot water bottle for his aching back
Sources say Noel and Liam will only be paid fully when the tour is over – a highly unusual move. (Pictured: the bickering brothers in more amicable times in 1999)
‘They will jam and work out a set list, and Liam will be the last one to join in with the vocals. There is plenty of time and Liam is a born rock ‘n’ roll star who has lived and breathed these songs and performed a lot of them in his solo shows, so he doesn’t need much rehearsal.’
Let’s hope that’s true.
There has been a sense of nervous anticipation since Noel and Liam declared they would be reuniting last summer.
‘The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised,’ they said in a hyperbolic statement on August 27. It soon became clear, however, that battlelines were still very much in evidence, with reports of separate guest-lists at the gigs for VIPs, and separate after-show parties for their friends and family. Which seems a shame, because their now-adult children actually get on well together – better than the so-called adults.
How much time they’ve managed to spend in the same room since the ceasefire is a moot point too.
They didn’t, for instance, see each other at Christmas, even though a sentimental chunk of the fan base had hoped that, for the sake of their 81-year-old mother Peggy, they’d do it.
Liam hosted a big party at his £17,000-a-week property in the Cotswolds, with Debbie, her twin sister, her family, his older brother Paul and Peggy, who flew in from Ireland. Noel stayed away. He has previously said of the festive season: ‘The entire f***ing period is a stain on society. I f*****g hate it with a passion’ – so perhaps he was no great loss to the party.
Others who know the brothers, however, were not surprised in the least: ‘It is clear to me that the only reason that this reunion is happening is money. Noel and Liam still do not get on,’ one said.
‘The tour is referred to by Noel’s management as his retirement fund. All the meetings are separate – it’s not Noel and Liam in a room. They have separate managers, agents and advisers.
‘It was need and greed that brought them back together and not their mother or her feelings or anyone else.’
It’s true they could do with the money: both have racked up two expensive divorces each: Liam’s most recent, from All Saints singer Nicole Appleton in 2015, saw them splitting assets of £11 million, while Noel’s, from publicist Sara McDonald in 2023, reportedly cost him around £20 million.
It’s also true that the relationship between Noel and Liam has always been coloured by rivalry and jealousy.
Mum Peggy, who raised them in a council house in Burnage, Manchester, along with oldest brother Paul, said that Noel always struggled with jealousy because Liam came along and took the spotlight off him.
In his early 20s, while Liam was earning a bit of cash by creosoting garden fences, Noel landed a job as a roadie for the Manchester band Inspiral Carpets, and started writing songs.
And at that moment Liam – ever competitive – decided to form a band with his friends, called The Rain. Noel took over the band, renamed it Oasis, and the rest was history.
They became the biggest band in the world. Definitely Maybe was released in 1994 and to celebrate, Creation’s Alan McGee gave Noel, the songwriter, a chocolate brown Rolls-Royce just like his idol John Lennon. Liam got a watch. Their follow-up What’s The Story? Morning Glory sold 12 million copies.
Noel and wife Meg Mathews partied with Tony Blair at No 10, Cool Britannia dawned, Liam and girlfriend Patsy Kensit were on the cover of Vanity Fair. The apex was two shows at Knebworth in 1996, to a combined audience of 250,000 people. But, according to Noel, Liam’s increasingly erratic behaviour started their downfall. In an interview Noel said of his little brother: ‘He got drunk. For four or five years. I never saw him sober… he was trying his hardest to destroy everything, that’s how I saw it.’
Liam saw things differently. He always blamed Noel for the fallout, believing he wanted to ditch him and start his solo career.
It all fell apart in 2009 following a huge row at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris during which, according to Noel, Liam ‘nearly took his face off’, while wielding a guitar like an axe.
And that was it: for the next 15 years, apart from the odd text – and sparring on social media –they didn’t speak. In truth, in those years they became rather different people. Noel gave up cocaine, and the celebrity lifestyle, and split from his first wife, Meg Mathews, with whom he has a 25-year-old daughter, Anais, in 2000. He married Sara in 2011, and they have two sons, Donovan, 17, and Sonny, 14.
Liam, meanwhile, continued to live as wildly as possible: on the long list of ‘antics’ came an incident at London’s Groucho club, where he unleashed a fire extinguisher at former footballer Paul Gascoigne, who was sitting down to a bowl of soup at the time, and also being asked to leave a pub in Hampstead, after he tried to ride the dog of a fellow drinker.
Still he continued to blame Noel for their continued feud.
He said: ‘The olive branch has been put out many times, and he’s blanked it. It’s a shame we can’t bury the hatchet, but it’s not like I’m messing with the brakes on his car, or he’s putting my windows through. It’s just banter, isn’t it, until one of us grows up.’
Their separately evolved domestic lives also kept them apart. Noel’s split from Nicole Appleton – with whom he has a 23-year-old son Gene – came about after he got an American music journalist, Lisa Ghorbani, pregnant.
Nicole also happened to be an old friend of Noel’s wife, Sara. Meanwhile, another love-child of Liam’s, Molly – conceived with singer/song writer Lisa Moorish two months after his first marriage to Patsy Kensit in 1997 – became close to Noel and his family, which didn’t go down well with Liam.
Nicole, Lisa, Molly and Patsy all came to Noel’s 50th birthday party in 2017. Lisa then shared a picture of Molly and Noel at the party on X, captioning it: ‘Uncle Noel with my beautiful girl,’ with the appended hashtag: ‘Family first’.
The bitter snipes kept coming, with Liam repeatedly calling Noel ‘a potato’ and saying: ‘He dresses like Gary Barlow.’ Noel responded by saying that even if he was down to his last £50 he wouldn’t go back to Oasis.
But in 2018, things started looking up for Liam. Under the calming influence of his no-nonsense girlfriend Debbie Gwyther, he made up with his daughter, Molly. He credited her with sorting him out and telling him to ‘stop being a d***head’.
Mending fences with brother Noel had to wait until after Noel’s marriage to Sara McDonald ended in January 2023, for reasons which have never become clear.
Sara and Liam had never seen eye-to-eye, and before the divorce Liam said of his sister-in-law: ‘His missus, Sara McDonald, won’t let him get that band back together. She wears the trousers, mate.’
Last year Liam said that it was he who made the first move by telephoning Noel. ‘It had been unnecessary. I’m made up for the family, can’t wait to get on that stage and rip it up,’ he said.
The hope, according to Noel, is that Liam will stay true to his word and lay off the booze, and not start any rucks.
A few months ago, he said: ‘No, it won’t be as raucous as back in the day, because we’re on the wrong side of 50 now, so we’re too old. So there won’t be any fallouts, there won’t be any fighting. It’s a lap of honour for the band.’
And one with a pot of gold at the end of it.
Time will tell if they actually manage to collect it.
