Brother beyond: why Oasis aren't reforming anytime soon

In a week of political rancour, from Helsinki to Westminster, from Brussels to Washington, one tweet yesterday bucked the trend with an apparent gesture of reconciliation: “Earth to noel ... I forgive you now let’s get the BIG O back together.” No, this wasn’t Boris presenting an olive branch to Theresa but Liam Gallagher reaching out to his estranged brother Noel, apparently genuinely interested in reforming Oasis. “I’m not desperate just think it’d be a nice thing to do,” the younger Gallagher added.

So far the brotherly love has not been reciprocated by Noel, and it’s unlikely that it will any time soon. Seeing him and his High Flying Birds recently in the wonderful setting of Greenwich's Old Naval College, Gallagher seemed perfectly at home in his solo skin, drawing on his three HFB albums and a smattering of crowd-pleasing Oasis standards, including Don’t Look Back In Anger, Wonderwall and Little By Little. He walked out on Oasis in August 2009 saying that he “simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer” and that has been the situation since. Indeed, Noel has said relatively little about either his younger brother or Oasis, whereas Liam has maintained a constant stream of invective towards his sibling, mostly via Twitter, including the somewhat comical barb of “Potato”. That said, he also wished his brother a happy Christmas in December last year, raising the prospect of a thaw in their relationship. However, the tweet was later dismissed as a “wind-up”.  And so the tweets have continued.

There’s every chance that yesterday’s supposed peace gesture is another joke by Liam, even if he has said in recent months: “I don’t want to be solo. I don’t want to do it on my own – I’m not a guitar player or a prolific songwriter.” The Gallagher brothers released two of 2017's strongest records in Liam’s As You Were and Noel’s Who Built The Moon?, arguably better albums than anything Oasis produced towards the end of the period with both Gallaghers as members. If - and it’s a big ‘if’ - Noel was to accept Liam’s offer and reform “the Big O”, they would certainly be putting together one of the biggest and most lucrative reunions since Sean Connery agreed to play Bond again in Never Say Never Again.

Simon Poulter © 2018

"He’s rude, arrogant, intimidating and lazy. He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup," Noel told Q magazine in April 2009, four months before their bust up at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris, in which Liam is alleged to have thrown a bowl of plums at his brother (“A plum from a plum”, quipped Noel later).

The issue is, perhaps, more deep-seated than typical inter-band creative tensions. Last year Noel revealed that the brothers’ feuding began when they were teenagers, still living at home, and when the senior sibling returned, drunk, from a night out and urinated on his brother’s brand new music centre. Though Oasis were, technically, Liam’s band to begin with, Noel’s joining set them on the path to become one of the biggest British rock bands in history, a trajectory that came with the Gallaghers' headline grabbing antics, from public fights to stage walkoffs and concert no-shows.

For the most part, this was all grist to the mill, generating unprecedented publicity and the resultant record and ticket sales. Post-Oasis, the feuding has, at times, become decidedly nasty. For Liam, in particular, there’s been no let up (”Lots of people say I need to chill out about Noel. Not until they stop Twitter,” he said in one memorable interview.) And so it has gone on.

Noel, for his part, has adopted a position of relative silence as the better part of valour. A resumption of hostilities over Noel’s absence from the concert for victims of the Manchester Arena bombing prompted Liam to comment on an apparently tearful Noel: “NG broke down in tears cmon,” he said in yet another tweet. “You seriously ain't buying that he doesn’t give a f**k. Don't buy into his PR stunt he doesn't give a f**k if the same thing had have gone of [sic] in Edinburgh he'd been up there like a shot ahem.” Noel responded a month later: “He needs to see a psychiatrist. I don’t say that as a joke. Because young Mancunians, young music fans, were slaughtered, and he, twice, takes it somewhere to be about him. He needs to see somebody.” Liam hit back: “As for seeing somebody I bet you and the mrs have got a few on the go you pair of chameleons.”

Frankly it has become tedious, even if occasionally quite entertaining. Liam, with blatant disregard for syntax, grammar or the use of a spellchecker, has made Twitter his medium for assaults on his brother. “I guess it was about him staying relevant,” commented Noel after Liam started the first of his “potato” taunts. “If you’re him, what else is there to tweet about?”. While Noel has recognised that the publicity garnered by the feud has been a boon to business (“As long as he keeps promoting my record, there’s a good boy”), he drew the line in a BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview in which he said “maybe [Liam] should stop tweeting [about me]” for the “ugly” things he’s said about Gallagher’s wife and children. “People come after them, and … it’s not very nice,” said Noel. “It only heightens my resolve that I’ll never walk the stage with that band again for that reason.” That, I believe, is your answer.