The story of Oasis

Burnage boys

Noel Thomas David Gallagher was born on the twenty ninth of May 1967 in Longsight, Manchester, to Irish Catholic parents, Peggy and Thomas Gallagher. There was an older brother, Paul, and on the twenty first of September 1972 came the youngest, William John Paul, known to everyone as Liam. The family moved to the suburb of Burnage, where Paul got his own bedroom and Noel had to share with Liam. Home was not a happy place. Noel and Paul were beaten regularly by their father, who drank, and both boys developed stammers that took four years of speech therapy to overcome. Peggy obtained a legal separation in 1976, and in 1982 she finally left, taking all three sons with her and raising them on her own.[1] [2]

The brothers were regular truants and often in trouble with the police. At fourteen Noel was given six months of probation for robbing a corner shop, and it was during that probation, with little else to do, that he taught himself to play a guitar his mother had given him. The moment that lit the fuse came in 1983, when he saw the Smiths play This Charming Man on Top of the Pops. From that day, he said later, he wanted to be Johnny Marr. He was expelled from school at fifteen, accused of throwing a flour bomb at a teacher, which he has always denied. Building jobs followed, some of them for his father's firm, which only led to more arguments.[1]

Liam had no interest in music as a boy and preferred sport. He says that changed after a pupil from a rival school hit him on the head with a hammer. Afterwards he became fixated on the idea of fronting a band, and on John Lennon above all. The first record he ever bought was the Stone Roses' debut album, and in 1988 both brothers went to see the Stone Roses play a benefit gig at International Two in Manchester. Both later said Oasis would never have happened without that night. Liam called it his favourite gig of all time, and said that if he had missed it, he would probably be sitting in some pub in Levenshulme instead.[1]

Noel's first break was an accident. He was working for a building firm contracted to British Gas when a heavy steel cap from a gas pipe landed on his right foot. After he recovered he was moved to the company storehouse, a quiet job that left him hours to practise and write. He said at least three songs on Definitely Maybe were written there, including Live Forever, and he nicknamed the room the Hit Hut. In May 1988 he met Graham Lambert of Inspiral Carpets at a Stone Roses show. He auditioned to become their singer and failed, but spent the next two years on their road crew, where he bonded with the engineer Mark Coyle over the Beatles.[1] [2] [3]

From the Rain to King Tut's

While Noel was on the road, three Manchester friends had started a band called the Rain: guitarist Paul Arthurs, bassist Paul McGuigan and drummer Tony McCarroll, with a singer named Chris Hutton. Arthurs had been nicknamed Bonehead at the age of eight, because his parents made him keep his hair cropped very short, and McGuigan was known as Guigsy. Unhappy with Hutton, the band tried out Liam, a school friend of Guigsy's. Liam got the job and suggested a new name. On the wall of the bedroom he shared with Noel hung an Inspiral Carpets tour poster, and one of the venues listed was the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon. So the Rain became Oasis.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Oasis played their first gig on the fourteenth of August 1991 at the Boardwalk in Manchester, bottom of the bill below the Catchmen and Sweet Jesus. Noel, just back from an American tour with the Inspirals, came along to watch his little brother. By then Liam and Bonehead had written a few songs together, which Noel later mocked as just awful, and Liam admitted they were rubbish. Noel turned down Liam's offer to manage the band, but agreed to join as lead guitarist on his own terms. He would be the only songwriter and the leader, and everyone had to take the pursuit of success seriously. Bonehead remembered the band had four tunes and a racket, and Noel walked in with loads of songs.[1] [2] [3]

Under Noel the sound became simpler and much louder. Bonehead and Guigsy were told to stick to barre chords and root notes, McCarroll kept the beats basic, and the amplifiers were turned up until everything distorted. According to Bonehead, the first two songs Noel brought to rehearsal were Live Forever and All Around the World. His grip on the group earned him the nickname the Chief. After more than a year of gigs and rehearsals the band made a demo, known as the Live Demonstration tape. When Noel first played the finished Live Forever to the others in early 1993, McCarroll recalled that they were openly awed by it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 1993 word reached the band that Alan McGee, co founder of Creation Records, would be at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow. Oasis were friendly with a band called Sister Lovers, who shared their rehearsal rooms and were playing that night, so they hired a van, gathered some friends and made the six hour drive. At the door they were refused entry, because nobody had told the venue they were on the bill. They got in anyway, opened the night with a four song set, and McGee, who had come to see a band called 18 Wheeler, was bowled over. He offered them a deal, although it took months to sign. The band ended up with a worldwide contract with Sony, licensed to Creation in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

Definitely Maybe

The first single came together almost by accident. In December 1993 the band booked the Pink Museum studio in Liverpool to record a song called Bring It on Down, but the session stalled, and Noel blamed the drumming. On the last day they were jamming an instrumental they used as a warm up, and Tony Griffiths of the Liverpool band the Real People suggested they turn it into a single. Noel went into a corner, wrote the words quickly, and Liam sang it in a single take. The whole thing was recorded and mixed in a day. That was Supersonic. It was technically a demo and was never recorded again. Released in April 1994, it reached number thirty one.[1]

The album was a struggle. Sessions at Monnow Valley studio in Wales in January 1994, with a producer Noel knew from the Inspirals, sounded thin and weak to the band, and the producer was let go. They tried again at Sawmills Studios in Cornwall, with Noel and Mark Coyle producing, but that did not work either. In desperation their manager Marcus Russell called Owen Morris, who stripped back Noel's piles of guitar overdubs and compressed the mix until it roared. In between came the band's first trip abroad, to play in Amsterdam for their new label bosses. A drunken brawl on the ferry, started by Liam, ended with everyone except Noel arrested and sent home before the gig.[1] [2] [3]

The singles built the momentum. Shakermaker reached number eleven in June 1994 and got them on Top of the Pops, and Live Forever, released on the eighth of August, became their first top ten hit. Noel wrote it partly as an answer to the gloom of grunge. He liked Nirvana, he said, but he did not think kids needed to hear songs about hating yourself. Definitely Maybe followed on the twenty ninth of August 1994. It sold a hundred thousand copies in four days and went in at number one, well ahead of the Three Tenors, who had been tipped to top the chart that week. It was the fastest selling debut album in British history at the time.[1] [2]

Success brought chaos. On their first American tour the band were worn out, and in September 1994, before a show at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, they took what they thought was cocaine but was actually methamphetamine. The gig was a mess. Liam changed the lyrics to insult Americans and his brother, then hit Noel on the head with a tambourine. Noel left the tour and flew to San Francisco without telling the band, the management or the crew, having more or less decided to quit music. He stayed with a girl who, he said, talked him down from the ledge, and wrote Talk Tonight for her. Creation's Tim Abbot found him, took him to Las Vegas, and the tour resumed in Minneapolis.[1] [2] [3]

Back home, Cigarettes and Alcohol reached number seven in October, and for Christmas they released Whatever, a sweeping song with strings that went in at number three and pointed to the bigger sound ahead. It also brought legal trouble. One line echoed the melody of How Sweet to Be an Idiot by Neil Innes, and after a settlement Innes received royalties and a co writing credit. Shakermaker had already cost them, because it borrowed from I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, and Oasis paid five hundred thousand dollars in damages to the New Seekers. Noel's reply was a joke: now we all drink Pepsi.[1] [2] [3]

What's the Story Morning Glory

In April 1995 Some Might Say became Oasis's first UK number one, knocking Take That's Back for Good off the top. It was also Tony McCarroll's last single. His departure was announced the week it hit number one. McCarroll said he had been unlawfully expelled after a personality clash with the brothers, while Noel said he liked Tony as a bloke but did not think he could play the new songs. The new drummer was Alan White, a Londoner whose older brother Steve drummed for Paul Weller, and it was Weller who recommended him. White's first appearance with Oasis came the day after he joined, miming to Some Might Say on Top of the Pops.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That May the band went into Rockfield Studios in Wales with Owen Morris, who claimed the album was cut in about fifteen days and called it the happiest time he ever had in a studio. There was one famous exception. Noel had let Liam choose between singing Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger, and when the time came to record the second one, a sidelined Liam went to a pub in Monmouth and came back with a crowd of around thirty drunk strangers. A brawl broke out and Noel chased Liam off with a cricket bat. By morning Noel had gone, and Morris feared the album was dead. Three weeks later he returned, and the band paid about eight hundred pounds for the damage.[1] [2] [3]

That summer the press cast Oasis as the northern working class rivals of Blur, the art school band from the south. On the fourteenth of August 1995 both released singles on the same day, and the so called Battle of Britpop led the national news. Blur's Country House beat Oasis's Roll with It, selling around two hundred and seventy four thousand copies that week to two hundred and sixteen thousand. Then in September Noel told the Observer he hoped two members of Blur would catch AIDS and die. The outcry was enormous. He apologised in a formal letter, saying AIDS was no laughing matter, and later admitted that his whole world came crashing down on him.[1] [2] [3]

The pressure told. In September Guigsy walked out, citing nervous exhaustion after a volley of abuse from Liam during interviews in Paris. His stand in, Scott McLeod, played a handful of gigs and appeared in the Wonderwall video, then went home in the middle of an American tour. When he later rang Noel to say he might have made the wrong decision, Noel told him he thought so too, and wished him luck signing on. Oasis played the Late Show with David Letterman as a four piece, with Bonehead on bass, until Guigsy was coaxed back for two nights at Earls Court in November, then the biggest indoor gigs Europe had ever seen.[1] [2] [3]

What's the Story Morning Glory came out on the second of October 1995. Early reviews were lukewarm, with some critics calling the lyrics banal, but the public disagreed. It sold three hundred and forty five thousand copies in its first week and spent ten weeks at number one. Wonderwall reached number two, and Don't Look Back in Anger, the first single with Noel on lead vocals, went to number one. In America Wonderwall became their only top ten hit, and the album reached number four. Morning Glory became the biggest selling British album of the nineties, one of the best selling albums in UK history, and has sold more than twenty two million copies worldwide.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The summer of Knebworth

By early 1996 Oasis were everywhere. At the Brit Awards that February, when the INXS singer Michael Hutchence handed Noel an award, Noel told him that has beens should not be presenting awards to gonna bes, a remark that devastated Hutchence. When the band collected Best British Group, they sang Blur's Parklife with Liam changing the words. In March the News of the World paid the brothers' father to turn up at their hotel on tour. Noel went to his room and said later that, as far as he was concerned, he did not have a father. Liam, according to a leaked phone call, told his father he would break his legs if he ever saw him again.[1] [2]

On the twenty seventh and twenty eighth of April 1996 Oasis played their first big outdoor headline shows at Maine Road, the home of Manchester City, the club the brothers had supported since childhood. Then came two nights by Loch Lomond in Scotland, and on the tenth and eleventh of August, Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire. Around two and a half million people applied for tickets. About a hundred and twenty five thousand came each night, at the time a record for an outdoor concert in Britain. The Stone Roses guitarist John Squire joined them for Champagne Supernova. Many writers see those two nights as the high point of Britpop, and nothing afterwards matched their scale.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The cracks showed within days. On the twenty third of August Oasis were due to record MTV Unplugged at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Liam pulled out minutes before the start, blaming a sore throat, and Noel had to sing the whole set. Liam watched from a balcony with a beer and a cigarette, heckling his brother between songs. Four days later he refused to fly out for an American tour, saying he needed to buy a house with his girlfriend, the actress Patsy Kensit. He rejoined for the MTV Video Music Awards in New York on the fourth of September, where he made gestures at Noel during a guitar solo and spat beer across the stage.[1] [2] [3]

The tour dragged on to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Noel finally had enough, announced he was leaving and flew home. If he was honest, he said later, he had not wanted to be there anyway, not with people treating each other like that. Several American dates and the whole Australian and New Zealand leg were cancelled, and the papers were sure Oasis were over. Instead the brothers made peace within weeks. With an album's worth of songs already demoed, they headed straight back into the studio. Their manager Marcus Russell admitted years later that the smart move would have been to take the rest of the year off.[1] [2] [3]

Be Here Now and the comedown

Most of the third album was written earlier in 1996 on the Caribbean island of Mustique, where the band stayed at Mick Jagger's villa alongside Johnny Depp and Kate Moss. Recording began at Abbey Road on the seventh of October 1996. Owen Morris said the first week was awful and suggested they stop, but Noel just shrugged and carried on. On the ninth of November Liam was arrested and cautioned for cocaine possession, and the tabloid frenzy drove the band to Ridge Farm studio in Surrey. Morris later said the sessions were fuelled by drugs and that he thought the songs were weak. Some tracks ended up with around ten identical guitar parts stacked on top of each other.[1]

Their private lives filled the papers too. Liam married Patsy Kensit at Marylebone Town Hall on the seventh of April 1997, and the couple were dubbed the President and First Lady of Britpop. Two months later Noel married Meg Mathews in a secret ceremony at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. That summer Noel went to a party at Downing Street thrown by the new prime minister, Tony Blair. A photograph of him with a glass of champagne clashed with his working class image. Liam had turned down his invitation, and so had Blur's Damon Albarn, who teased Noel with the words, enjoy the schmooze, comrade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Be Here Now was released on the twenty first of August 1997, wrapped in strange secrecy. The management made journalists sign contracts promising not to discuss it, and told shops not to sell it before eight in the morning. The hype was enormous anyway. It sold about four hundred and twenty four thousand copies on its first day and became the fastest selling album in British chart history, a record that stood until Adele's 25 in 2015. But the songs were long and dense, the goodwill faded fast, and some writers mark its release as the end of Britpop. Noel has been scathing about the album ever since. Liam calls it his favourite Oasis record.[1] [2]

By now Noel was suffering drug induced panic attacks. He says he stopped taking illegal drugs on the fifth of June 1998, and that he can hardly remember anything from 1993 to 1998. In 2020 he recalled once ending up in a hospital in Detroit after an overdose in that period. Liam had his own troubles in 1998. After a row on a flight from Hong Kong to Perth that reportedly involved a scone, he was banned for life by Cathay Pacific. On that Australian tour he was arrested and charged with assault after a nineteen year old fan said Liam headbutted him. The criminal charges were dropped, and a civil case was reportedly settled out of court.[1] [2] [3]

A new line up

In 1999 the band gathered at a chateau in France to start the fourth album. Newly sober, Noel imposed a ban on drink and drugs in the studio, which did not sit well with the two remaining founders. Tensions peaked when Bonehead poured a bottle of wine over the producer Spike Stent at four in the morning. That summer Bonehead's departure was announced, officially so he could spend more time with his family. Soon after, Guigsy followed, quitting by fax and then dodging the band's phone calls. Noel shrugged at first, saying it was hardly Paul McCartney leaving the Beatles, and the brothers told a press conference that the story and the glory would go on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Noel played almost all the guitar parts on the new album himself, and the departed members' parts were recorded again for legal reasons. Creation Records was winding down too. Alan McGee left and the label closed at the end of 1999, so Noel set up the band's own label, Big Brother, whose catalogue numbers began with the letters RKID, for the Manchester phrase our kid. The new guitarist was Gem Archer of Heavy Stereo, who was at first paid a standard session wage of about eighty five pounds a gig. The new bassist was Andy Bell, once of the shoegaze band Ride, who had never played bass before and had to learn it, and the Oasis catalogue, in time for a tour that December.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants arrived in February 2000. It was more psychedelic, full of loops, sitars and backward guitars, and it contained Liam's first Oasis song, Little James, written for Patsy Kensit's young son. It went to number one, but sales fell sharply after the first week and reviews were mixed. The tour was stormy. In Barcelona in May 2000 a gig was cancelled when Alan White's arm seized up, and the band spent the night drinking. Liam made a crude remark about Noel's wife Meg and questioned whether Noel was really the father of their baby daughter, Anaïs. Noel headbutted him and quit overseas touring, and the guitarist Matt Deighton filled in.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Noel came back for the British and Irish dates, and at the first of them, in Dublin on the eighth of July 2000, the brothers shook hands after Acquiesce. The tour ended with two nights at Wembley Stadium, and the first became the live album Familiar to Millions. Noel's marriage did not survive the year. He and Meg separated that autumn and divorced in January 2001, on the grounds of his adultery with the Scottish publicist Sara MacDonald, whom he had met at a club in Ibiza. Noel later insisted he had never actually been unfaithful and only said so to speed things up. Liam and Patsy Kensit had divorced in 2000, and he was now with Nicole Appleton of All Saints.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Heathen Chemistry, released in July 2002, was the first album with Gem and Andy, and the first where everyone except Alan White wrote songs. Liam's Songbird, a love song for Nicole, became the first Oasis single not written by Noel. The tour was eventful again. In August 2002 Noel, Andy Bell and keyboard player Jay Darlington were hurt in a car crash in Indianapolis, and shows were cancelled. In December a brawl in a Munich nightclub ended with Liam, White and three others from the entourage arrested. Liam lost two front teeth and kicked a police officer in the ribs, White was hit with an ashtray, and tests showed Liam had taken cocaine. Two years later he was fined around forty thousand pounds.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last stand

On the twenty first of December 2003 Alan White, who had drummed on four studio albums, was fired. His brother Steve said the spirit of being in a band had been kicked out of him, while Noel pointed to a lack of commitment. His replacement was Zak Starkey, drummer with the Who and son of Ringo Starr, though he was not an official member, which left Oasis as a four piece for the first time. Sessions in early 2004 with the producers Death in Vegas were scrapped, with Noel saying they had been trying to polish a turd. At Glastonbury that June the band played a set the NME called a disaster.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The recovery came with Don't Believe the Truth in May 2005, recorded largely in Los Angeles with the producer Dave Sardy. Every member contributed, and Noel said that was why it was his favourite of their later albums. Critics called it their best since Morning Glory, and two singles, Lyla and The Importance of Being Idle, went to number one. The tour that followed visited twenty six countries and played a hundred and thirteen shows to about three point two million people, including Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, without any major incident. The compilation Stop the Clocks followed in 2006, and in February 2007 Oasis received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.[1] [2]

The seventh album, Dig Out Your Soul, was made at Abbey Road with Dave Sardy again. When U2 had already booked the rooms Oasis wanted, Noel quietly bought their slot for cash. Starkey left after the sessions, and Chris Sharrock, once of the La's, drummed on tour. The album went to number one in October 2008 and number five in America. But in September, at the Virgin Festival in Toronto, a man ran on stage during Morning Glory and shoved Noel from behind into the monitors. Noel suffered three broken and dislodged ribs, and shows were postponed. The attacker, David Sullivan, pleaded guilty to causing bodily harm. Noel said it felt like being hit by a bus.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour rolled on through 2009. Early in the year, planned shows in Beijing and Shanghai were cancelled after the Chinese authorities found out Noel had played a Free Tibet benefit in New York in 1997. In June the first of three homecoming shows at Heaton Park in Manchester was hit by a generator failure that twice forced the band off stage, so they declared it a free gig and later posted refund cheques to fans. By then, Noel said, the only time the brothers spoke directly was on stage. On the twenty second of August they headlined V Festival at Weston Park in Staffordshire. The next day they pulled out of the Chelmsford show, officially because Liam had laryngitis.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty eighth of August 2009 Oasis were due to headline Rock en Seine near Paris. Minutes before they were due on, the show was cancelled after a fight between the brothers backstage, and the Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke told the crowd, with obvious glee, that his band were now headlining by default. About two hours later a statement from Noel appeared on the band's website. With some sadness and great relief, he wrote, he had quit Oasis, because he simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer. The next day he spoke of intolerable verbal and violent intimidation, and a lack of support from the management and his bandmates. The Weston Park show turned out to be their last for almost sixteen years.[1] [2] [3]

Fifteen years apart

Liam, Gem, Andy and Chris Sharrock carried on as Beady Eye, releasing Different Gear, Still Speeding in 2011 and BE in 2013 before splitting in 2014. At the 2010 Brit Awards, fans voted Morning Glory the best British album of the previous thirty years. Liam collected it alone, thanked Bonehead, Guigsy and Alan White but not Noel, then threw the microphone and the award into the crowd, and the host Peter Kay called him a knobhead. Noel launched Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds with a debut album in 2011, the first of four studio albums. Gem Archer and Chris Sharrock later joined him, the only members to play with both brothers after the split.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The war of words never really stopped. Noel called Beady Eye Stratford's finest Oasis tribute band, and Liam, most memorably, called his brother a potato. In 2011 Noel gave his version of the Paris night, involving a row over Liam's clothing label, a flying plum and a guitar swung like an axe. Liam, for his part, sued Noel over the claim that the V Festival show was cancelled because of a hangover rather than laryngitis, and dropped the case when Noel apologised. Liam's personal life was in turmoil too. His marriage to Nicole Appleton ended in divorce in 2014, after it emerged he had fathered a daughter with the journalist Liza Ghorbani.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The songs kept a life of their own. After the Manchester Arena bombing on the twenty second of May 2017, which killed twenty two people at an Ariana Grande concert, a crowd gathered for a minute's silence in the city centre began singing Don't Look Back in Anger, and it became the city's song of defiance. That same year Liam launched a solo career. His debut, As You Were, went straight to number one, and at Glastonbury he sang Don't Look Back in Anger for the first time, dedicating it to the victims of the Manchester and London attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire. In June 2022 he played two nights at Knebworth, twenty six years after Oasis.[1] [2]

The reunion question never went away. In 2012 Noel said it would be great for everyone except him. By early 2023 both brothers were saying it could happen on the right terms, and during Liam's thirtieth anniversary tour of Definitely Maybe in 2024 he confirmed he kept a seat reserved for Noel at every show, adding, you never know. Then on the twenty seventh of August 2024, almost fifteen years to the day after the split, Oasis announced they were back for stadium shows in Britain and Ireland the following summer. The guns have fallen silent, the statement said. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The great wait is over

The ticket sale on the thirty first of August 2024 was chaotic. Around fourteen million people were estimated to have tried for about one point four million tickets to the first seventeen shows. Fans described endless online queues and error messages, and many were shocked when standing tickets advertised at around a hundred and thirty five pounds were relabelled as in demand and offered at more than double that. The band said they had not known dynamic pricing would be used. The competition watchdog investigated and said in 2025 that Ticketmaster may have misled fans. Some presale buyers had even been asked to name the band's original drummer, Tony McCarroll.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourth of July 2025 Oasis played their first show in almost sixteen years, at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff. On stage were the Gallaghers, Bonehead, Gem Archer and Andy Bell, with the touring drummer Joey Waronker. The brothers walked on hand in hand and opened with Hello, followed by Acquiesce and its line about needing each other. Reviewers noticed they barely spoke to one another all night, but the BBC said they sounded better than at any time since the nineties. Before the final song, Champagne Supernova, Liam thanked the crowd for putting up with them over the years, and admitted they were hard work.[1] [2] [3]

The tour had its sorrows. On the second of August 2025, at one of seven sold out shows at Wembley Stadium, a man in his forties died after falling from the upper tier near the end of the concert. The band said they were shocked and saddened and sent their condolences to his family, and the next night Liam dedicated Live Forever to all the people who could not be there. In October Bonehead revealed he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier in the year and had played through treatment. He had beaten tonsil cancer in 2022, and he stepped away for the shows in Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne and Sydney, promising to return for South America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour closed in São Paulo on the twenty third of November 2025, after forty one concerts on five continents. In April 2026 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that Oasis would be inducted, with all eight official members honoured, after an early list briefly left out Guigsy and Alan White. Liam, who had once sneered at the institution, joked that he would bring chocolates and flowers to apologise. In September 2026 the tour film Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger reached cinemas, and days later the band announced a 2027 tour of Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and the United States, opening in Glasgow in May and ending back at Knebworth.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Oasis

Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher. Five years apart, they shared a bedroom in Burnage and later the band that made them famous. Noel wrote the songs and Liam sang most of them, and their fights became part of the legend, from a tambourine in Los Angeles to a cricket bat at Rockfield and a headbutt in Barcelona. Noel said they never hung out outside the band. After fifteen years of insults they reunited in 2025, and both said the animosity had gone.[1] [2]

Noel Gallagher and Alan McGee. McGee, the Glasgow born co founder of Creation Records, saw Oasis at King Tut's in 1993 and signed them. Their success rescued a label that was deep in debt, and McGee became their loudest champion. He was shut out of the Be Here Now campaign after publicly predicting it would sell twenty million copies, and he closed Creation in 1999. When Noel quit in 2009, McGee predicted they would reunite within about five years.[1] [2] [3]

Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn. The singers of Oasis and Blur were cast as enemies in the Battle of Britpop, and Noel's 1995 remark wishing AIDS on two members of Blur caused a scandal he deeply regretted. By 2007 things had cooled. In 2013 Noel and Albarn played Blur's Tender together at a Teenage Cancer Trust show, Noel later sang on a Gorillaz track, and in 2019 he confirmed the two had become friends.[1] [2]

Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit. Liam began dating the actress Patsy Kensit in 1995, and they married at Marylebone Town Hall in April 1997. The tabloids called them the President and First Lady of Britpop. Their son, born in 1999, was named Lennon after Liam's hero. Two months into the marriage Liam had an affair with the singer Lisa Moorish, who gave birth to his daughter Molly, and the couple divorced in 2000.[1] [2]

Noel Gallagher and Meg Mathews. Noel met Meg Mathews in 1994 through her flatmate, the MTV presenter Rebecca de Ruvo, whom he was dating at the time. They married in Las Vegas in June 1997 and lived at Supernova Heights in Belsize Park, the heart of the Primrose Hill scene. Their daughter Anaïs was born in January 2000. They separated that September and divorced in January 2001.[1] [2]

Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton. Liam got together with Nicole Appleton of All Saints in 2000, and their son Gene was born in July 2001. He wrote Songbird for her, the first Oasis single he wrote himself. They married on Valentine's Day 2008 at Marylebone Town Hall, the same place he had married Patsy Kensit. They divorced in 2014 after it emerged Liam had fathered a child in another relationship.[1] [2]

Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. The Modfather was one of Noel's closest musical friends. Weller recommended Alan White as Oasis's drummer and played guitar and sang on Champagne Supernova, while Noel played on Weller's Stanley Road and later on several of his albums. They played together on a charity cover of Come Together in 1995. Weller once described Noel's guitar playing as rudimentary but instantly recognisable.[1] [2] [3]

Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr. Seeing Marr with the Smiths on Top of the Pops in 1983 made Noel want to play guitar. A decade later Marr became a friend and patron. He gave Noel a Les Paul that had once belonged to Pete Townshend, then another when it was damaged, and Definitely Maybe was mastered at Marr's Manchester studio. Marr later played on Heathen Chemistry and on a High Flying Birds single.[1] [2] [3]

Oasis and Owen Morris. The Welsh producer rescued Definitely Maybe by stripping back its overdubs and compressing it into a roar, then co produced Morning Glory, and appears on its cover holding the master tape. His relationship with Noel soured after Knebworth, and he later described the Be Here Now sessions as drug fuelled and commercially driven. According to a 2020 report he has retired to Costa Rica.[1] [2] [3]

Oasis and Marcus Russell. A former economics teacher from Ebbw Vale in South Wales, Russell founded Ignition Management in 1984 and signed Oasis in May 1993, when they were unknown. He managed them for their entire first run and has continued to manage Noel since the split. It was Russell who called in Owen Morris to save Definitely Maybe, and he later admitted they rushed into making Be Here Now.[1] [2] [3]

Liam Gallagher and Alan White. White was said to be Liam's best friend in the band and his official drinking partner, and the pair were nicknamed Bert and Ernie after the Sesame Street characters. As the only Londoner in the band for years, White joked that he was the cockney and they were the Mancs. The friendship ended up in a Munich police station in 2002 after a nightclub brawl left both injured.[1] [2]

Noel Gallagher and Thomas Gallagher. Thomas Gallagher, the brothers' father, beat Noel and his older brother Paul regularly, and their mother Peggy left him in 1982, taking the boys with her. When a tabloid paid him to turn up at their hotel in 1996, Noel walked away and said he did not have a father. In the documentary Supersonic, Noel remarked bleakly that his father had beaten the talent into him.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Oasis

• Oasis took their name from an Inspiral Carpets tour poster on the wall of the bedroom Liam shared with Noel. The poster listed the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon as one of the venues. Liam suggested the name when he replaced the singer of a Manchester band then called the Rain.[1] [2]
• At their very first gig, in August 1991, Oasis were bottom of the bill below the Catchmen and Sweet Jesus. The show was at the Boardwalk club in Manchester on the fourteenth of August 1991. Noel, then a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, came along to watch his brother's band.[1]
• Before Oasis, Noel auditioned to be the lead singer of Inspiral Carpets and was turned down. When he heard their singer was leaving, Noel tried out for the job. He did not get it, but spent the next two years on the band's road crew instead.[1]
• Noel wrote Live Forever in a British Gas storeroom after a steel cap from a gas pipe crushed his foot. After the injury he was moved to a less physical job in the storehouse, which left him time to write. He nicknamed it the Hit Hut and claimed the walls were painted gold.[1] [2]
• According to the band's tour DJ, their first single, Supersonic, cost just one hundred pounds to make. It was recorded and mixed in a single day in December 1993 at a small Liverpool studio. Tony Griffiths of the Real People sang five layers of Beatles style backing vocals on it.[1]
• One early Oasis tour stop was the Tunbridge Wells Forum, a venue built in a converted public toilet. The band played it on the UK tour promoting their first single, Supersonic, in the spring of 1994, a few months before Definitely Maybe came out.[1]
• A recording of the brothers arguing in an interview reached number fifty two in the UK singles chart. Wibbling Rivalry was a 1994 NME interview in which Noel and Liam row about the Amsterdam ferry fight. Released in 1995 under a thinly disguised version of the band's name, it holds the record as the highest charting interview release in the UK.[1]
• Oasis's supposedly live cover of I Am the Walrus was actually recorded at a soundcheck for Sony executives. It was taped in an empty hall at the Gleneagles Hotel at ten in the morning. The band credited it to a Glasgow club gig and added crowd noise taken from a bootleg of the Faces.[1]
• Bonehead played the same 1982 Epiphone Riviera guitar on every Oasis recording and gig during his first stint. The guitar can be seen propped against the back wall on the cover of Definitely Maybe, which was photographed in his own living room in Didsbury.[1] [2]
• Bonehead was meant to sing the song Bonehead's Bank Holiday, but came back from the pub too drunk. He went for a drink to loosen up before the vocal session and returned unable to perform, so Noel's guide vocal stayed on the finished track, with drunken chatter from Bonehead and Liam mixed in.[1]
• The producer Owen Morris appears on the cover of Morning Glory, holding the album's master tape over his face. The photo was shot on Berwick Street in London's Soho, then full of record shops, and cost twenty five thousand pounds. Noel later asked who had approved the cover, and was told he had.[1] [2]
• The title What's the Story Morning Glory came from the way a friend of Noel's answered the phone. His friend Melissa Lim used the phrase as a greeting. It traces back to a line in The Telephone Hour, a song from the musical Bye Bye Birdie.[1]
• Noel originally wanted to record Wonderwall on an actual wall outside Rockfield Studios. Ladders and microphones were set up around a wall, watched by curious sheep, before the idea was dropped. A snippet of that outdoor take, with birdsong, can be heard at the start of Hello.[1]
• Noel, not Guigsy, played the bass on Wonderwall, and Liam complained that it was not Oasis. Every member except Guigsy played on the recording. Alan White used bundled rods instead of sticks, for a sound softer than sticks but fuller than brushes.[1]
• In October 2020 Wonderwall became the first song from the nineties to pass one billion streams on Spotify. It was only a number two hit in Britain, but it is certified nine times platinum there and was Oasis's only top ten hit in the United States.[1]
• The Sally in Don't Look Back in Anger is nobody in particular, and Noel says Lyla is her sister. Noel said Sally was just a name that fitted. The line about Sally waiting came from Liam, who misheard Noel mumbling at a soundcheck and asked if he was singing so Sally can wait.[1]
• The fireplace lines in Don't Look Back in Anger come from the Gallaghers' mother lining the boys up for photos. Every Christmas Peggy stood her three sons by the fireplace for a picture to send to their grandmother in Ireland, and told them to take that look off their faces.[1]
• Noel first played Don't Look Back in Anger live before it had a title, days after writing it. At Sheffield Arena on the twenty second of April 1995 he told twelve thousand fans he had only written it on Tuesday, and that he had not got a title for it yet.[1]
• Noel wrote Acquiesce while stuck for four hours on a broken down train heading to a studio in Wales. Somebody had used the word acquiesce on the phone and he had written it down. Liam sings the verses and Noel the chorus, because Liam could not reach the high notes.[1]
• The B side Half the World Away became the theme tune of the BBC sitcom The Royle Family. It first appeared on the Whatever single in December 1994 and was later collected on The Masterplan.[1]
• The cover of Be Here Now shows a white Rolls Royce lowered into a swimming pool at a Hertfordshire mansion. It was shot at Stocks House, once home to the head of Playboy's British clubs. A court later ruled that the arrangement of props was not an artwork protected by copyright.[1]
• D'You Know What I Mean contains a slowed down loop from N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. It also features Morse code in the background. Noel said he tried to tap out a rude phrase in it using a code book.[1] [2]
• The title Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is a misquote Noel copied from the edge of a two pound coin. Isaac Newton wrote of the shoulders of giants. Noel scribbled it on a cigarette packet while drunk, and the next morning found he had also written a bum title instead of album title.[1]
• Walmart refused to stock Standing on the Shoulder of Giants because of the swearing in one song title. The objection was to the opening instrumental, whose title contains a four letter word. The track samples a festival compere shouting at the crowd at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.[1]
• Heathen Chemistry and The Hindu Times were both named after slogans on T shirts. Noel bought a T shirt in Ibiza reading The Society of Heathen Chemists, and saw one reading The Hindu Times at a magazine photo shoot. The name stuck to the song while it was still an instrumental.[1]
• Oasis records released on their own label carry catalogue numbers beginning RKID, for the Manchester phrase our kid. The label, Big Brother, was set up after Creation Records closed in 1999, and has released every Oasis record in Britain since.[1] [2]
• To record Dig Out Your Soul at Abbey Road, Noel bought U2's booked studio time with cash. U2 had reserved the rooms Oasis wanted far in advance, but the studio gave preference to cash over credit, so Noel paid up without U2 knowing.[1]
• Noel bought cars and a swimming pool even though he can neither drive nor swim. He named his London house Supernova Heights after Champagne Supernova, and called his two cats Benson and Hedges after his favourite cigarettes. Liam has also said he never learned to drive or swim.[1] [2]
• Noel is naturally left handed but plays guitar right handed. He has said playing guitar is the only thing he can do with his weaker hand. He also claims to be the best drummer in the band.[1]
• In a 1999 poll Noel was voted the most overrated guitarist of the millennium, and he loved it. He named it the accolade he most enjoyed receiving. He has called himself average at best next to his friends Johnny Marr and Paul Weller.[1]
• Liam says he only became interested in music after being hit on the head with a hammer. As a teenager he preferred sport, until a pupil from a rival school struck him. He credits the blow with changing his attitude, and soon became obsessed with joining a band.[1]
• Gem Archer tried out a fifteen year old Alan White for his own band years before either joined Oasis. White blew Archer's band Whirlpool away, but the others worried about a teenager on the road. Archer told White's father his son would go all the way. Later, White welcomed Archer into Oasis.[1]
• The band nicknamed Alan White Dave, after a character in the TV series Minder. He earned it by serving himself a drink from an unattended bar, like Dave, the barman at the Winchester club in the show.[1]
• One of Noel's early Les Pauls, a gift from Johnny Marr, had previously belonged to Pete Townshend of the Who. Noel used it to write Cigarettes and Alcohol and Slide Away. When it was badly damaged, Marr replaced it with another Les Paul he had used on the Smiths album The Queen Is Dead.[1] [2]
• Noel once played Gaelic football for a Manchester team at Croke Park in Dublin, and scored. He appeared for CLG Oisín in 1983. The son of Irish parents, he has said he considers himself equally Irish and British.[1]
• The sleeve of Live Forever shows John Lennon's childhood home on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool. It was one of several Beatles references in early Oasis artwork, photographed by Michael Spencer Jones, who also shot the Definitely Maybe cover.[1]
• An exploding star, supernova SN 2003fg, was nicknamed Champagne Supernova after the song. Noel admits he does not know what some of the song's lines mean, including the one about walking down the hall faster than a cannonball, which he wrote because nothing else rhymed with hall.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.