The history of Oasis, through five iconic Big Issue interviews: 'Liam's an idiot… But he's my idiot'

In August 1991, Oasis played their debut gig at the Boardwalk club in Manchester – Noel Gallagher was in attendance to see his younger brother’s band, which he would subsequently join, assuming control over the songwriting with immediate effect. The following month Big Issue launched on the streets of London – a publishing revolution and a smart solution for people experiencing homelessness.

These were tough times. New voices were needed. And what followed, after weeks and months of grafting to find that voice, were millions of sales, some memorable fights, constant chaos, too many drugs, huge headlines, a level of infamy and a permanent place in the public consciousness. But enough about Big Issue, because Oasis also kicked up quite a storm.

These two cultural institutions that began their journey together are forever linked through the debut Oasis single. Millions of young people first heard about this magazine when singer Liam Gallagher proclaimed, ‘She’s sniffin’ in a tissue, selling the Big Issue’ in the second verse of Supersonic, released on 11 April 1994.

Our first major interview with Noel Gallagher came out in early 1999 – after Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory established Oasis as the biggest band in the country. After gigs at Maine Road, Loch Lomond and Knebworth, and losing the so-called battle of Britpop to Blur (but arguably winning the war, such as it was), had added to their legend. And after the comedown cringe of Cool Britannia, drinks at Downing Street with Tony Blair and 1997’s difficult third album Be Here Now.

4 January 1999

This interview was bagged by Rupa Huq, future Labour Party MP for Ealing Central and Acton, as part of her PhD thesis on youth culture. Huq and Gallagher reflected on Labour’s early years in government, the state of the nation’s youth culture, and the songwriter’s recent lifestyle change in giving up drugs.

Noel was typically quotable. Here are the highlights:

Rupa Huq: When the history of youth culture is written, what will be said about the 90s, and what place will Oasis have in it?

Noel Gallagher: In the 90s it won’t just be one defining thing really. Music’s always at the forefront of culture, but I don’t think that it has as big an impact now, because we’ve got computer games and drugs and that. You’d like to think that you’d come at the top of a list of youth culture icons of the decade and I suppose we have shaped some of the defining moments of youth culture: Knebworth, Maine Road, some of the gigs in Scotland, but Oasis shouldn’t be everybody’s life.

Is dance music the new rock’n’roll?

Is brown the new architecture? Music’s just music. People think that dance music’s the most modern, forward-looking music but look at The Prodigy. They haven’t changed the way that they make music in the last 10 years.

But you’ve dabbled…

I’ve dabbled on my own, but Oasis haven’t as a group.

Would you? Can we look forward to a new jungle direction on the new album?

Unless I visit a jungle I don’t think so. I think it’d be hard to get Liam to sing like a Rastafarian.

What do you make of all the Oasis copy bands?

Well, it keeps the old back catalogue going.

No, I meant Ocean Colour Scene and Cast.

Oh… [laughs]. I’d better not slag them off because some of them are me mates. It’s nice to think that you’ve inspired somebody. Critics like to criticise ‘Noel-rock’ but I’d like to think that the ones that come after you can only do better once loads of people get off on it.

Have you seen any of those Oasis cover groups? What did you think? Amused? Flattered?

Both. The only one I saw was No Way Sis. It was at the Forum. It was sold out. It’s just kids trying to make a fucking living. At least they’re not burgling houses. They’re not stuck in a gutter, they’re travelling the country and playing universities. They’ll look back in 20 years and will have made a lot of money. Some people say Oasis is a Beatles copy band but that’s another story…

Are you turning respectable now you’ve hit your 30s?

I’ll always be 16 and want to be in a band. You might get old but you don’t grow old, if you know what I mean.

The future MP also quizzed Noel about the recent election of a Labour government after years of Tory rule.  

“I’d rather Blair any day than the Tories. But then you see how he’s giving money to the NHS and schools with one hand and taking it away from single parents with the other and you think: ‘Hang on, what’s going on here?’ Going to Number 10 was part of my ‘education, education, education’ I suppose.”

When Huq looked back 25 years on from her call with Noel Gallagher, she was struck by the echoes in the present day.

“Noel’s observations and the context have uncanny parallels with now,” she wrote.

“The first Labour government in aeons had been elected, drawing into sharp focus the reality of the party in power after the hypotheticals of campaigning. My questions on Blair were posed as a card-carrying Labour Party member. Today I’m one of their MPs. I have ‘gone legit’, harnessing my expertise serving on parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.”

Read more:

• Oasis songs speak to people in a way other artists only dream of
• Noel Gallagher: Oasis wouldn’t be anything if Liam hadn’t asked me to join
• Pulp! Oasis! Robbie Williams! Why it feels like we’re back in 1995

17 April 2000

The following year, Noel was back with a bit of self-reflection. “See, the image about me now, it’s all, ‘Oh, Noel Gallagher’s a changed man,’ but I was always a generally calm rational person anyway. It’s just that when people ask you stupid questions about shitty indie bands I used to get annoyed and get into rants and they’d sit there and go, ‘This is brilliant! There’s a quote, there’s another one… What do you think about Lady Diana?’ So people obviously just think I’m an obnoxious twat,” he said. “And I’m not. But I am an opinionated little twat.”

He also reflected again on his Downing Street trip.

“I actually thought in my mind at that point, on that night, I actually thought I was doing something worthwhile because I’d been through the 1980s with Thatcher, and I’d seen the desolation in Manchester. And I was convinced it was going to be a proper Labour Party.

He recounted the whirlwind tour of Downing Street.

“‘Hey, show me the Queen’s toilet, has she really got her own bog? So where did that IRA bomb land? Was it in the garden? How much did it miss John Major by? Jammy bastard! Well where did that bitch sit?’ It’s such an unassuming room with just this big long table with about 20 chairs. It’s like nothing, really. And you think of all the pain and hardship them bastards brought out of this room. They all just sat there and went, ‘Shut ’em down.’ What about the jobless? ‘Sod ’em. Tell them to get on their bikes. Tell them to move to London and live in a shop doorway.’ And I though ‘Christ. It’s all been changed now, and I’m part of this.’ And then I said to Blair, like, ‘Well done mate, nice one, we’re really gonna change this, and what about the Liverpool dockers?’ ‘Oh yes, I’ll look into it…’

20 November 2006

By 2006, when Noel spoke with Sylvia Patterson for another Big Issue cover story at a rural studio retreat, the world was changing.

Social media was emerging and Gallagher shared his thoughts on the big site of the moment: MySpace:

“The new generation is bound, a lot, by illusion. The MySpace thing, ‘I’ve got 642,000 friends,’ when you actually haven’t got any. That’s why you’re on MySpace. You haven’t got any fucking friends because if you had any fucking friends you’d be down the pub chatting about starting a band or what’s been on telly, not sat at your computer counting how many fucking friends you haven’t got.”

Gallagher was ready to cast a critical eye over his back catalogue and the band’s legacy. And he didn’t hold back.

“Definitely Maybe is as important as Never Mind the Bollocks,” he said. “Both were the absolutely expression of youth culture in their time. And I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing at the time. No one ever does. You think ‘fucking brilliant, this is never gonna stop’ until, of course, it does.

“From Be Here Now right up until Don’t Believe the Truth, it was making music for the sake of it. I see those years as just going round and round and round the plughole and we just never went down the plughole. We lost half a band in one day, once, y’know? That was a phenomenal achievement! It would have killed off lesser bands.”

Classic Noel. Confident, spoken with his usual swagger, but also with a sharp aficionado’s eye for the truth about pop culture. It’s there in his best lyrics as it is in his brutally honest appraisal of Oasis and their place in history. He knew what their good albums are – he still does, which is why the reunion shows will be heavily stacked with the early songs – and he knew where it all went wrong.

By this point in the bands career, they were as famous for their sibling rivalry as their songs. If it was tiring for fans to keep up, it was proving the same for the Gallaghers. But Noel had a new tactic – rising above it all. He’d found a new way to infuriate Liam by walking away from conflict (then brazenly calling him out in the press).

“Liam is still a fucking idiot,” Noel told us.

“Rucking all the time is fine when you’re 24, but now I fight against all my Mancunian instincts to put a chair over his fucking head.

“What’s his problem? Everything he fucking says and everything he fucking does. And I think, deep down, Liam wants to be a great songwriter.”

But Noel also knows what Liam brings to the band. That presence. That voice. And that charisma – or rizz, as we call it these days. But also a surprising degree of insecurity.

“I can’t be him either,” Noel admitted.

“I’ve seen him on tour, drinking for days and days and days and you’ll see him in the hotel lobby and he looks like he just got back from holiday. I’d be in fucking tears. He’s got that force of nature thing…

“Oasis wouldn’t be Oasis without him. If he wasn’t the singer I’d have written all those songs regardless. I might have even been a singer in a band. But it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as exciting or as big without him – but he doesn’t see that.

“He constantly needs to reassure himself that he’s vital to what Oasis is. When we’re doing these big stadium gigs and there’s 60,0000 people chanting ‘Lee-um! Lee-um!’ I’m like, ‘Is that not enough for you?’ So I just put it down to… he’s a fucking idiot. But he’s my idiot, I guess.”

Two years later, Oasis released their final album, Dig Your Soul Out. It received mixed reviews. The glory days were in the past. Noel’s songwriting had not fully returned to that golden era where he seemed to have a secret magic chord, an extra gear, an exhilarating uplift he could bring to every song.

Solo careers, new bands, births and marriages, more family fights – Oasis were still making headlines. But there was to be no new music.

And on 28 August 2009, Noel announced: “It is with some sadness and great relief… I quit Oasis tonight. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”

At the time, few believed the split would last this long. It felt like the latest downward swoop in the roller coaster of the complex relationship between the brothers at the heart of the band.

2 October 2017

Almost 10 years later, when Liam spoke to Big Issue’s Jane Graham in 2017, there was no sign of a thaw in relations or a return to making music together.

As You Were, Liam’s debut solo record, was coming out. It would surprise everyone by being more critically acclaimed and selling better than Noel’s releases with High Flying Birds – although the first two LPs had both topped the album charts. And Liam was in fighting form.

“I have nothing to apologise for when it comes to Oasis ending,” he insisted. “That was not my doing. That was all Noel. I just got dealt those cards, so I moved on. Yeah, I miss the band. I miss having the lads about.

“But the only regret I have is that our kid became a dickhead. I regret his head got turned and he brought The Sun into our dressing rooms. Other than that, I don’t regret one bit. People know we meant it and we didn’t kiss arse to get where we got. It’s all been amazing.”

He also spoke about his stage presence.

“When I go on there and I sing… I ain’t an entertainer. I don’t jump around or give it, ‘How are you all doing out there, are you having a good time? Blah blah blah,’” he explained.

“But I hope people see that I’m singing from the depths of my fucking soul. And it’s the real deal. That’s all I can really do.”

Noel Gallagher tends to get the last word. And so it goes with Big Issue.

18 November 2019

In 2019, he met Sam Delaney to talk about his regular dips into electronica, hold forth on Jeremy Corbyn (“a fucking disgrace”) and Boris Johnson (“fuck that cunt”), before giving his latest views on Brexit.

“A border in the Irish sea? How’s that gonna work? A little bloke in a fucking rowing boat?”

An agreement was in place not to talk about Liam. As if…

“He’s selling more records and way more tickets than me so good luck to him, ride it until the wheels come off,” he said, prompting questions about whether they might finally make up one day.

“I just wish he’d fucking calm down with insulting my family,” Noel began.

“There’s a lot of misogyny towards both my wife and daughter on the internet from his fans. And [it’s because] he likes to purport this myth that Oasis would be getting back together but my wife won’t let me…

 “It’s strange behaviour for someone who is gagging for me to pick up the phone and say let’s do it. He’d put his whole life on hold to get Oasis back together. But every tweet he sends out its another nail in the coffin of that idea. If you think for one minute I am going to share a stage with you after what you’ve said you are fucking more of a moron than you look.” 

But could it happen?

“Well it could. Of course it could. But there would have to be an extraordinary set of circumstances… I left the band 10 years ago. I think I’ve seen him twice in 10 years and both times we nearly ended up in a fight for no reason.

“I can’t envisage the morning I wake up and think I’d like to spend two years on the road, arguing all around the world with Liam.”

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