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How Liam Gallagher went from laughing stock to national treasure
In 2015 Liam Gallagher considered moving to Spain. The downcast singer's career was in the doldrums and he was worried that he couldn't afford to live as he wanted to in London. Oasis – the band with which Gallagher made his name – had split up six years previously and his follow-up group, Beady Eye, had withered on the vine of public indifference.
Without a band or a record deal, just through a bitter divorce, at war with his older brother and former bandmate Noel, running low on cash and drinking too much, the then-42-year-old pondered starting afresh. 'I was depressed and really f------ bored,' he told GQ in 2017. He started 'Googling properties. It weren't f------ Magaluf, I'm not that broke, but not far off,' he said.
Friends and family were worried. 'He was very down and fed up with himself,' Gallagher's mother, Peggy, said in 2019. His brother Paul described his younger sibling as 'pretty much at the bottom'. Former bandmate Bonehead said Gallagher was 'f------ terrified' that his career in music was over.
Fast forward a decade and Gallagher is about to embark on one of the most anticipated rock tours in decades. The Oasis reunion will see the Britpop stalwarts play over 40 vast concerts from Edinburgh to São Paulo as part of a world tour that will net Liam and guitarist Noel between £75 million and £100 million each, if industry estimates are to be believed.
Some 14 million people tried to snap up the 1.4 million available tickets for the 17 UK dates when they went on sale last summer, meaning that Oasis would need to play 170 stadium shows just to satisfy domestic demand. When the tour – which kicks off in Cardiff on July 4 – is done, it's safe to say that Gallagher will be able to live where and how he wants.
So what went right? Lazarus Liam's resurrection must rank as one of the most impressive in music history. How exactly did Gallagher go from 'sitting at home being Billy No Mates', as he put it to the Evening Standard in 2017, to this?
Analysis of Gallagher's comeback, via interviews with insiders, reveals a series of steady year-on-year incremental gains since he launched a solo career after almost becoming an episode of A Place in the Sun in 2015. What's equally note-worthy is that as Gallagher rebuilt, he pulled in a whole new generation of fans who weren't even born during Oasis's mid-1990s heyday. 'There's no one quite like Liam,' 20-year-old Oasis fan Jettson Dearlove tells me. 'I can't really think of anyone that's come after that's been as interesting in terms of his personality.'
Some have gone so far as to suggest that this summer's reunion shows wouldn't be happening without the solo success that Liam has enjoyed in recent years. 'Without question, the respect that Noel had for his brother increased enormously with the success [Liam] had as a solo artist. What Liam did, I would argue, more effectively than anyone else, was actually lay the ground for the comeback,' says Mike Smith, the industry A&R veteran who signed a publishing deal with Gallagher as boss of Warner/Chappell UK in 2016.
To understand the peak, you have to understand the trough. And, boy, was Gallagher in one. So let's go back to 2015, some six Prime Ministers ago, when Adele's 25 was the year's best-selling album and Wayne Rooney was the England football captain. Gallagher seemed lost. Beady Eye – essentially Oasis without Noel – had split up in 2014 and his life lacked structure. An expensive divorce from second wife Nicole Appleton, the former All Saint who he'd married in 2008, didn't help. Nor did his brief fling with New York Times freelancer Liza Ghorbani, which resulted in a 2014 child support squabble in a New York court over their baby daughter Gemma.
These issues aside, insiders say that Gallagher was exhausted. He'd leapt into Beady Eye soon after Oasis imploded backstage at Paris's Rock en Seine festival in August 2009 (Liam threw a plum at Noel, an almighty fight followed, the band was over). 'Let's not forget, Liam probably hadn't had a holiday since 1990,' says Smith. 'Being in a band is like being in campaign mode. When you stop it's like coming back from Waterloo. All you know is life on the road with the five members of that band.'
Money was tight. 'His bank account was dwindling and for the first time in over two decades, Liam Gallagher was without a band… He was spending more and more time down his local,' wrote biographer PJ Harrison in his new book Gallagher. Even 'our kid' – as Noel called Liam in the good times – was tiring of his 'mad for it' shtick. 'Do I really wanna be Liam Gallagher?' he asked in an interview with Huck Magazine. 'Can I be arsed with the bulls--t that goes with it? Maybe it's time to walk away and not do anything.'
Two things lifted Gallagher from his funk. Firstly, he 'got bored' of being bored, he told Huck. Secondly, he started a relationship with the eminently sensible Debbie Gwyther, formerly his PA and now his co-manager (and fiancée). Gwyther encouraged him to get fit, look after his voice and stop moping. She 'pulled him through', says Smith.
'You can't overestimate Debbie's input,' says Andy Prevezer, who was director of PR at Warner Music, the label that'd later sign Gallagher. 'He was absolutely at rock bottom and humbled by the experience. Now he was listening to people.'
Smith suspected a mojo revival when Gwyther, who he knew, invited him over to the pair's Highgate flat. There, Gallagher – a solid if unspectacular songwriter – picked up a guitar and played Smith embryonic versions of four or five songs he'd been working on. 'He'd got the coffees and the pastries in. He was a little bashful when it came to showing me the songs that he'd written,' recalls the music exec. Numbers included Bold and Greedy Soul, which would go on to form the core of Gallagher's first solo album, As You Were. Smith was impressed. No business was done that day but they discussed possible songwriters that Gallagher could work with to flesh out other song ideas.
Months later, Gallagher signed a record deal with Warner Bros Records in the UK (different from the Warner that Smith worked for). The label was run by a man called Phil Christie who 'stuck his neck out' to bring Gallagher in from the wilderness, says Prevezer. The strategy involved teaming Gallagher up with gold-plated songwriters such as Greg Kurstin, who co-wrote Adele's Hello, and Andrew Wyatt, who'd worked with Bruno Mars and would go on to co-write Lady Gaga's Shallow and the Barbie soundtrack.
'The masterstroke was to make a record on which all the tracks, like lead single Wall of Glass, sounded like they could sit very comfortably on an Oasis record,' says Prevezer. Smith, at Warner/Chappell, then signed a deal for Gallagher's publishing (as opposed to his recorded music). 'Liam could have sung the phone directory at one point and it would have sounded beautiful. He was the greatest rock 'n' roll star this country produced in the last 30 years. It seems crazy to say this now, but I felt he never quite got the level of respect that he was due,' Smith says. All the ingredients for a revival were in place.
In May 2017 Gallagher played a comeback show at the modestly-sized O2 Ritz in Manchester. Crucially his set included six old Oasis songs, something he'd assiduously avoided with Beady Eye. With considerable chutzpah, he walked on stage to Oasis's old intro track F-----' in the Bushes. Bonehead guested. The buzz was off the charts. The particularities of the singer's rift with Noel are not for this article – it would take a whole book – but it's safe to assume that his older brother took note.
Gallagher's comeback concert was same month as the Manchester Arena suicide bombing in which 22 people died at an Ariana Grande concert. Days later, he appeared at the One Love Manchester memorial concert at the Old Trafford cricket ground. There, he sang the Oasis classic Live Forever with Coldplay. In devastating circumstances, the world was reminded of that track's poignancy – and the power of the voice behind it. Weeks later, Gallagher played Glastonbury. When As You Were was released in October 2017 it went straight to number one.
From there, momentum grew. Gallagher's formula – bit of the old, bit of the new, strong voice, work hard – was bearing fruit. His next two solo albums, in 2019 and 2022, also went to number one. The venues got bigger. In a gigantic 'Oh, hi!' to Noel, Gallagher played two vast concerts at Hertfordshire's Knebworth House in 2022, equalling the brace of nights that Oasis famously played there at their zenith in 1996. 'It was a juggernaut. It was kind of nostalgia but the key thing was that he wasn't avoiding Oasis, he was embracing Oasis,' says Prevezer.
The comeback might have wobbled when, in 2018, The Sun published CCTV footage appearing to show Gallagher grab Gwyther by the neck in a corridor of the Chiltern Firehouse in London. Gallagher wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he'd 'never put my hands on any women in a vicious manner', while Gwyther called it 'fake news'. He was questioned by police but no action was taken. The narrative swiftly moved on.
Gallagher's final action as a solo artist prior to the reunion announcement was to play a huge arena tour last summer to mark the 30 th anniversary of Oasis's debut album Definitely Maybe. I recall sitting on the tube near London's O2 and being surrounded by young men in their late teens belting out Oasis tunes en route to one of the shows. They were loud and larky – just like the original Oasis fans. Gallagher had hooked in a younger cohort of rabid acolytes.
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One such fan is Gabriel Bird, 25. He got into Oasis after seeing the 2016 documentary Supersonic. 'I love the story, I love the sense of humour and I like the swagger and charm. Maybe at the time some people found it exhausting but if you're a bit younger, you didn't really have all that [growing up],' says Bird. Gallagher is a 'complete counterbalance' to the more sensitive frontmen of Bird's own era, like the 1975's Matty Healy or the Arctic Monkey's Alex Turner. For people who came of age with so-called normcore stars like Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi, Gallagher has a powerful, stylish and edgy 'aura', Bird says. He filled a void.
There's another factor behind Gallagher's resurrection, slightly less tangible but equally important: his humour. Gallagher is often the funniest and most cutting man on X, formerly Twitter. His surreal posts – heavy on capital letters, with grammar and spelling secondary to impact – have regularly taken shots at Noel. In May 2016, Liam posted a photo of his brother with a one-word caption: 'Potato'. The next month he posted a picture of Noel with his lips pursed. The caption? 'Pouting Potato'. He has ribbed Noel relentlessly about his experimental solo music with his band High Flying Birds, often taking the mickey out of the group's use of instruments like the 'saxaphone' [sic] and (yes) scissors. Noel had gone 'all Pink Floyd', Liam wrote.
His use of puns and his distinctive 'LG' sign-off have seen him develop his own vernacular on the social media site. 'Snore patrol Noel Gallaghers high flying smurfs who said rock n roll is dead LG,' from 2012 is a typical post. He once posted a paparazzi shot of Noel buying milk. 'Scary clown buying milk last seen in waitrose Maida Vale call the cops as you were LG x,' ran the caption. You get the idea. Gallagher has regularly seemed to tease non-existent Oasis reunions and taken on critics whose reviews he didn't agree with.
Scary clown buying milk last seen in waitrose Maida Vale call the cops as you were LG x
— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) October 14, 2016
But there's a serious point to all this. Gallagher's humour has reminded people, quite brilliantly, that he's not a mindless knuckle-dragging rock star. Young people I've spoken to cite his very British humour as one of Gallagher's most attractive assets. His followers on X have risen from 830,000 in 2014 to 3.8 million today. That's seven times the population of his native Manchester. Gallagher follows no one.
Two days after Gallagher headlined last August's Reading Festival to a Gen Z audience comprising people like Bird and Dearlove, Oasis announced their reunion. From zero to hero in 10 years; a decade in which 'our comeback kid' turned the heads of the music world, Britain's youth and his estranged sibling. Quite the feat. The astonishing revival highlights another undeniable facet of Gallagher's appeal, one that perhaps – ultimately – explains everything. 'He backs himself in a fight,' says Bird.
