A bomber jacket and some trainers shouldn’t cause the break-up of anything. Least of all Oasis — one of the most successful rock and roll bands of all time. But the ticking time bomb that made the first incarnation of Oasis so incendiary and memorable was, by the summer of 2009, attached to the most frayed of aging fuses.

15 years of very public tantrums, bickering, and slanging matches between Liam and Noel Gallagher had become, for the press and, one suspects, many of the brothers’ bandmates, distinctly old and tiresome news by 2009. The group’s albums since their mid-90s imperial phase had seen a series of ever-diminishing returns dating back to the cocaine-fuelled, over-wrought, and under-melodic mess of Be Here Now, released 12 years previously.

Their latest LP, Dig Out Your Soul, was the clearest evidence yet that Oasis didn’t resemble their beloved Beatles. In fact, if they were the modern incarnation of any historic UK guitar band then it was Slade. Touring the pseudo-anthemic, almost constantly dreary slog-a-long tunes from what would be their final studio work to date, it seemed as if the glitter, loon pants and platform shoes of Noddy Holder and co had merely been replaced by leather jackets and a pervasive sense of motion-going, Mancunian meets middle America, plodding guitar gloom.

There was a potent sense among those still interested that this was a group that had long since ceased to enthral either themselves or their listeners. And yet the fans kept coming to the live shows, purely in order to hear Don’t Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall and Live Forever — tunes from the band’s glorious first two albums that had become de facto national anthems for the post-Thatcher generation.

As for the newer Oasis tunes, far from being soundtracks for the nation, singles from Dig Out Your Soul struggled even to be the soundtrack of Manchester record shops. I’m Outta Time stalled at number 12 in the UK singles charts: a previously unthinkably low chart peak for a band who, in the Nineties, were as ubiquitous as Chris Evans, Tony Blair and alcopops combined.

The events that scotched this gradual morphing of Oasis into a classic legacy act began in August when the second night of the band’s 2009 V Festival gig was scrapped after Liam pulled out, claiming he had laryngitis. Noel later told the press that this was, he believed, an excuse for what was actually a monumental hangover his brother was suffering from that day.

The slightly ‘Carry On… Brother’ nature of the siblings’ bickering took on a blunter, more distinctly unpleasant tone during press interviews to support the new album and subsequent tour. Noel told Q magazine, ‘I don’t like Liam’, before going on to claim that he was ‘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.’

Liam retorted by telling NME, ‘It takes more than blood to be my brother…he doesn’t like me and I don’t like him.’ By the time Oasis arrived in Paris to play at the Rock en Seine festival on 28 August, another longer-standing issue erupted; not related to brotherly estrangement or musical direction but, predictably, over money. And clothes.

Now owned by the House of Fraser group, back in 2009, Liam’s clothing range Pretty Green had just launched. His demands to have gratis advertising for the brand in Oasis tour programmes was denied by Noel, who explained in a 2011 press conference:

‘I didn’t feel that it was right for him to be flogging his gear to our fans. There was a massive row about that… In the end, I said, if you want to advertise in the programme then ‘how much’? He couldn’t get his head around that. He hit the roof and it slowly went downhill from there.’

In the dressing room before the concert, the final bust-up between the brothers took place in front of their stunned and, in Noel’s recollection, entirely passive bandmates. ‘He (Liam) was quite violent. It was a bit like WWE wrestling and he thought he was Randy Savage. I’ll never forget looking at Andy [Bell, the band’s bassist] constantly counting how many shoes he’s got on and not saying a word,’ Noel later recalled.

‘He (Liam) storms out of the dressing room and… picks up a plum. He threw it across the dressing room and it smashed against the wall. I kind of wish it had ended like that because it would have made a great headline, ‘plum throws plum and finishes Oasis.’ So then he leaves and goes to his own dressing room and picks up a guitar. He comes back in and he starts throwing it around like an axe.

'I make light of it because that’s what I do but that was a real unnecessary violent act. He’s swinging this guitar around and he nearly took my face off with it. It ended up on the floor and I put it out of its misery. There were people who were in the band, not saying anything. People were looking the other way and it wasn’t even a big dressing room. We were all involved in it and nobody was saying anything. So I thought, ‘I’m f**king out of here.’’

After waiting in the car outside the venue for ten minutes, Noel decided to leave, announcing in a statement issued two hours later that he, ‘simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.’

Yet the break up did not stop the carping between the brothers. As recently as 2019, a nadir was reached when Noel publically posted a message his brother had sent to Anais (Noel’s daughter) which read, ‘Tell your step mum to be very careful.’ This was triggered by a missive from Noel’s then-wife Sara MacDonald, who posted on Instagram that she would be swerving the TV relay of Liam’s Glastonbury set, stating she had no desire to watch ‘the fat t**t doing his tribute act.’

In response to Liam’s threat, Noel wrote a public post to Liam that read, ‘So you’re sending threatening messages via my teenage daughter now are you? You were always good at intimidating women though eh? What you planning on doing anyway? Grabbing my wife by the throat to show her who’s boss… If I wake up to find one of the kids [sic] gerbils upside down on the cheese board with a knife in it I’ll be sure to inform the local care in the community officer. And don’t try and kidnap the cat either we’ve just employed Ross Kemp as his close protection officer.’

So, as news broke this week that the boys are getting the old band back together, what’s changed? Ultimately, much as it was money, with a little help from some soft fruit, that broke Oasis the first time around, it appears that cash (a rumoured £50m split between Liam and Noel) has been the major factor in getting the brothers to put aside their considerable differences for a string of dates around the UK and Ireland next summer.

But will a fifteen-year hiatus be enough to pull the band out of the musical mire they were sinking into before the infamous Parisian blow-up? Noel, a man who, unlike his brother, is not immune to occasional accusations of articulacy, proffered the following admission in a 2021 TV documentary:

‘Oasis back in 2009 were not lauded as one of the greats of all time. There was a kind of undercurrent of, 'Well they should really call it a day'. That's what I felt anyway… I felt that people had stopped listening to the records and were coming to see us trot out the hits, and it's a position I never wanted the band to be in. But now, of course, we're seen as up there with all the greats.’

Clothing labels, plums, smashed guitars and online threats aside, it will only be at the reunion concerts next summer that fans will discover if filthy lucre is enough to stymie Oasis’ musical decline and sibling warfare. If Noel is to be believed, it’s more than possible that we haven’t seen the last of Gallagher-gate.

As the elder brother stated in 2011, in what could be interpreted as a grim portent for the future, ‘Liam always said he was going to bring down Armageddon in the end. That’s how he likes things to be.’

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