In front of me, a sea of lads in bucket hats and Adidas, with pints. Behind me, a sea of lads in bucket hats and Adidas, with pints. A luxuriantly barneted Richard Ashcroft is concluding his warm-up act and tells us to give it up for the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, which those in Wembley on the last Wednesday in July do with abandon.
A montage of headlines flashes across huge screens about the reunion – the hatchet being buried, the dynamic pricing queue to buy tickets that was so long everyone joked Oasis would have split up again by the time it was your turn to shell out.
And then the brothers strolled on. Liam in a bucket hat and zipped cagoule with a rollneck collar, scowling but still managing to look like sex on a stick. Noel, lean and buff in a tartan shirt. Were they… holding hands? Was this a showmance, or had the healing – helped by the billion quid the global reunion tour was reportedly generating – begun?
I texted Noel afterwards. ‘Sank three pints, cried twice and my bucket hat fell off during the Poznań.’
I’ve spent time with Noel twice, which was why I got tickets. Once, we were both guests on a Scandi chat show. Noel was asked if he would swap out Liam for Boris, and I was asked if I’d swap Boris for Liam. You’ve got to roll with it, as they say.
A month later, the Sunday Times asked me to interview him. He agreed. Then I got calls and emails from his management team threatening to pull out if I mentioned Liam. ‘He has chronic fatigue with people talking about his brother,’ I was told. ‘Fear not,’ I assured them. ‘Possibly more than any living journalist on this planet, I feel his pain.’
The shoot was at Kenwood House, all sparkled up with festive lights. Bored, I read on my phone as the photographer got Noel to pose. All he could do was put him in different places as he never changed expression. As it was ending, the photographer called me over. ‘One for your scrapbook for you, doll,’ he said, and made me stand with Noel for all of two seconds in front of the Christmas tree. Then we hopped into the convoy back to Supernova Heights to do the chat. Noel made me a cup of tea, then we sprawled on one vast leopard-skin sofa, amid the guitars and black-and-white blow-ups of Bowie and the Beatles. My tape recorder was balancing on a cushion, tea on a coffee table. And of course, I asked about Liam.
Would he get the band back together to mend Broken Britain? If Noel and Liam could patch it up, I said, then people would realise there was more that united us than divided us, blah blah. Noel gave me a stony look. ‘I’d be doing it for other people,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t be enough for me.’
That was five years ago. Now here we are at the height of the 2025 tour, and Liam is putting a tambourine on his bucket hat and singing his guts out. Banger follows banger as dusk falls and phone lights come on and the ecstatic, oceanic mood builds. Noel sings ‘Stand By Me’, a song he wrote when he had food poisoning. Behind him, photos of the Gallagher family flash up on vast screens. The boys, Noel, Liam, Paul; the council house they grew up in; Peggy the matriarch, Dad… and this is when I tear up for the second time (the first was when I saw the queue for the loos) as I take in the images – their journey, yes! Like the royal family, the Gallaghers are every family, and we can understand our own dramas through theirs.
It was seeing their humble roots in a two-up, two-down in a Manchester street… the ascendance and then sudden detonation of Oasis, the biggest bust-up between brothers since Cain and Abel… and seeing them here, together, transcendent and triumphant, as if this moment was written in their lyrics and in the stars. ‘Stand By Me’. ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. What that montage told 90,000 of us was that even though they had the world in the palm of their hand, all the money, all the fame, what mattered was Nan and Mam and fam. Even if it’s not entirely true, it worked its magic on the beery, soppy crowd.
When my interview came out, the editor of the Sunday Times mag had somewhat double-crossed us and put the photo of Noel and me on the cover instead of a moody portrait shot, so I sent him an apologetic note. Noel replied immediately: ‘My management had called me getting themselves in a fury about some nonsense about YOU being in a fury about the cover? I must say putting a bird on the cover with a rock star without prior warning is a bit unfair particularly as you had no chance to get dolled up (no offence!). As I say I did eventually get to read the piece. And I must pull you up on one thing: You said we were drinking PG Tips in my kitchen!!??? HOW FUCKING DARE YOU!!!!!! Anyone who is anyone knows that PG Tips are for squares. I haven’t had PG Tips in the house since 1998 (a moment of weakness as I’d JUST given up cocaine and was refusing to go to the supermarket). It was YORKSHIRE TEA we were drinking!’ Etc.
Bless his cotton socks, Noel also replied to my text which ended telling him it was a magnificent show, which it was. ‘Thanks Blondie! Wasn’t bad for a Wednesday.’
I love Noel and Liam. They have what my friend Sophia calls ‘throwdown’. I can’t believe I saw them live even if Our Kid, i.e. Liam, says: ‘I just sing the songs and fuck off.’ I hope they are back together, not just for the Catherine wheel of cash that is Oasis 2025.
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