Archive - Liam Gallagher / Oasis / Beady Eye

Liam Gallagher & Bonehead - Scotland Today July 1995

Interviewer: Liam? There always seems to be this little knife edge that you and your darling brother walk along. Um, yeah, you seem to sort of have quite a sort of volatile relationship. Why? Why is that?

Liam: We're brothers. It's just, you know, don't know. I'm totally different from him and he's different from me and that is it. And I've got my views on things and he's got his on his. But that's, you know what I mean? It wouldn't be right if we just both going about that. I mean, it's good to just let them out. Don't fight. We argued.

Bonehead: Good.

Liam: He say worse than me. Everyone makes out me.

Bonehead: No, here we go. Here we go.

Liam: They do it, don't they?

Interviewer: Final question then. There was a few things in the papers recently saying that, you know, maybe Oasis will release three albums, do another few tours, and then, you know, they would get out while they were ahead. Is that the plan?

Bonehead: There is no the plan really. There's no plan with this band. That's something that Noel's probably is saying. I mean, he's a songwriter, so suppose he's entitled to say what he wants about his songwriting, but I want it to go on forever. You know what I mean? Six albums, I want to do 10 as long as it keeps going.

Liam: I think what he meant was like we should have a break and if people think that's a split up then whatever. I mean, just have a break, 'cause we have been grafting for two years non-stop playing what it is. And I mean you come back home for two days, you sit there, actually mom's like an alien these days. Six months off, six months at home for each of us just to go like that and do what you want to do and just come back to work again 'cause two days at home ain’t enough out of a year. D’ you know what I mean?

Chris Helme (The Seahorses frontman) talking about meeting Liam and Noel in the 90s

"I remember the dynamics between Noel and Liam, where Liam was actually really lovely, for what I remember, a really nice lad. And his brother will bullied him, and winding up and doing kinda this coercive control bullshit, which is probably a bit of a trendy buzz word but that's what exactly pretty much what it was."

As the plate of pasta flew across the room Liam finally exploded.

Prodded and provoked, he had been in a genial mood until a guest at the ad hoc gathering at Rockfield Studios in South Wales pushed their luck. The party had initially been laid back, but as the drink flowed and the music got louder, it had got more and more out of control.

It was Saturday, 13 May 1995, and I was there with an excellent up-and-coming post-punk band from Derby called Cable, who I had been producing at Monnow Valley Studios half a mile down the road.

We had heard that Oasis were recording nearby and that there had been all kinds of exploits with air rifles and scooters in their downtime but that they had recorded several tracks for their second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and the sessions were going well.

The first time Cable met Oasis was in 1994 when they supported them on the first Oasis UK tour, and the second meeting on that long lost night in the quiet Welsh countryside has become one of the legendary rock 'n' roll yarns; it started as a chance encounter and an invite back to the studio and ended up with an inter-band brawl and then an explosive argument between Noel and Liam.

Up the road at Monnow Valley, the Cable album was finished, and we had gone to the village of Rockfield to celebrate in the Green Dragon Inn. Booking the only taxi in the village to return, we climbed in, squeezing in with a couple of women who were in very high spirits. In the gloom of the taxi's interior, I noticed a figure slumped over the front seat. There was a lot of shouting and laughing as the minibus bounced along the country roads back to the studios.

Just out of town, it bumped around a corner and the figure at the front turned round and from under his fringe grinned, 'Fucking hell, it's John Robb... what are you doing here?'

It was Liam Gallagher and he invited us to up to Rockfield to hang out. He was returning from the pub after taking a break while Noel was working on the track 'Champagne Supernova' with producer Owen Morris in an epic, fast-moving session.

When we arrived at the studio, Liam got the drinks out while I made a cup of tea. There were some tunes getting played and the women from the taxi were getting crazier and dancing and shouting. For some peace, Cable drummer Neil Cooper went for a jam with Noel in the studio and a couple of us sat in Guigsy's room for a bit, where the bass player was cheerfully getting stoned. 

Meanwhile Liam was the generous host handing out the drinks to his guests while being affable and hilarious and the congenial rock 'n' roll party host. But a few drinks in and Cable were starting to get a bit, er, giddy.

At about one in the morning, Liam popped out to get a cassette of the newly recorded songs. It would be the first time anyone had heard them outside the tight small circle of the band and producer. He stuck the tape into the stereo in the front room and 'Hello' burst out of the speakers, cranked up to full blast.

It sounded great - full of explosive life - and surged like the best of glam rock/Sex Pistols/punk rock and every other British street music cranked up to the max. Liam's vocals really caught the 100 per cent confident rush of the times as it poured into the room like liquid noise. The song captured the thrill of youth and the swagger of turning up at life's party uninvited and owning it. This was sheer, unapologetic rock 'n' roll at its best. The song sounded monstrous - like all the good times rolled into one with that world-beating cool that British youth are always so good at.

As 'Hello' surged out of the speakers, Liam was nodding his head and singing along and I was glowing with the power of the music.

As the song crackled to a halt, Liam was beaming - of course he was, when your band gets it right in the studio it's one of the best feelings in the world. He then modestly asked Cable what they thought of it. There was none of the tabloid arrogance about him, just a genuine buzzing enthusiasm.

It was at this point that Cable's young guitar player, Darius Hinks, who had been swigging whisky from a bottle he had been given by the singer, decided to tell Liam that it sounded like the Beatles. It wasn't meant as a compliment. The drink was talking louder than the normally timid Darius who hadn't noticed that the track was more glam anthem than the Beatles.

The room briefly fell silent, and everyone looked up. Luckily, Liam laughed it off - he just wanted a good time - but Darius, now poisoned with the demon whisky he was slurping, pushed his point and his luck and kept going on about the Beatles.

Liam put on the next track, 'Roll With It', and as the song ended Darius staggered across the room and told Liam that this next track was also shit and started prodding him in the chest to make his point.

Oddly, Liam still didn't seem to care and was quite charming, putting up with the slurred observations, and put on another track which was possibly an unmixed version of the freshly recorded 'Champagne Supernova'.

The new song was filling the room with its elixir of sound and was anthemic. Being the only sober person in the room, I told Darius to cool it, and for a few minutes, it calmed down. Cable drummer Neil Cooper had popped in just in time to see Darius jokingly mount Liam from behind. Liam, with a totally straight face, said, 'You better get rid of your mate.'

A minute later a plate of pasta flew across the room thrown by a delirious-looking Darius. 

The tray crashed on the floor and the pasta flew through the air in slow motion, resulting in something between handbags and a scuffle between Liam and Bonehead and the Cable guitar player. Somehow, I managed to defuse this, being put in the odd position of having to play dad on a school trip gone wrong, before trying to gather the band together to get them back to Monnow Valley before it was too late. Someone then decided there was going to be a kangaroo court trial of the offending pasta thrower, that was to take place outside in the courtyard.

I decided that this was not going to happen and shoved Cable down the drive, which took 10 long minutes and then what seemed like forever to get the drunken band back to Monnow Valley walking along the dark country lanes. Meanwhile, back up the drive at Rockfield, things were escalating. Noel and the new drummer Alan White popped out of the studio and asked where the guests had gone before telling the remaining people that they had to leave. Angry about his brother's attempts to break up the party, Liam exploded and minutes later tried to kick the door of Noel's room in; the elder brother then grabbed a cricket bat and there was a proper fight before Noel locked himself in his room, climbed out the back window and got Alan to drive him back to London. 

Meanwhile, Liam trashed the communal area.

Back at Monnow Valley the next morning a hungover Cable emerged to be told about all the chaos at Rockfield and how they were going to be charged for it! There were stories of cricket bats, fighting and a lot of trashed fixtures and fittings, with every light switch smashed, a door off its hinges, the main table in the living area trashed, a smashed TV and drinks machine, and a room full of bits of cold pasta crunched into the carpet. 

Guigsy then did a good job cleaning up, and the band had paid for all the damages and bought flowers for all the women who worked at the studio. On hearing the news, Kingsley Ward, the legendary studio boss, just laughed. After all, this was a studio that Lemmy-era Hawkwind, Iggy Pop and Black Sabbath had all used, with all manner of high jinks and madness being part and parcel of its legendary story.

Back in London Noel took some time out. He may have mulled on the volatile nature of the band. He may have wondered if it was worth the hassle, but these would have been, at the most, fleeting thoughts.

A week or so later, the band were back in Rockfield. 'Liam and Noel hugged each other and we carried on with the work,' producer Owen Morris told Sound on Sound. 'After all, they'd been breaking up regularly, so to them it was just another argument. There was no way they weren't going to come back and finish the record!

A few weeks later I bumped into Liam at Glastonbury and he was laughing about the whole incident: "That was a proper laugh that night. Rocking!'

Later that year, in October, Cable supported Ash at the Astoria. At the aftershow Liam and Bonehead spotted the band's other guitar player Pete Dorrington and came up to him. Recalls Dorrington: I'm thinking, "Fuck, they're still sore after Darius threw pasta all over their kitchen and told them they were shit and now they're gonna kick my head in." So I said, "I'm alright lads, how are you?" Liam: "It is you innit?" Me: "What do you mean?" Liam: "What was cheeky'n' that and knackered our tea and caused me and my brother to have a scrap." Me: " ... er yeh, sorry about that ..." Liam: "Fuck it. It were a top laugh. We nearly split up that night. Our Noel says I was out of order for hittin' your mate, so we had a fight." 

As the years rolled by Liam continued to laugh it off. 'The whole studio got smashed to pieces, everything just got blitzed to bits. It was probably me not giving a fuck, and him trying to write fucking "Bohemian Rhapsody", and me going, "Bollocks, let's have it"

While Noel remembered, 'I ended up having a proper fight with Liam with a cricket bat. It might have been the biggest fight we ever had.'

In 2011, the cricket bat was sold at auction, with a letter of authenticity, and the bust-up has become threaded into rock 'n' roll history. As the engineer on the album, Nick Brine, remembers, 'It's funny because when they do the tours of the studio, it's like "This is Freddie Mercury's piano where he wrote 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and over there is where the battle of 1995 took place!"

This snapshot of the band and their inner explosive nature is the overriding image of Oasis for many. Yet it's a 2D tabloid tip-of-the-iceberg deflection from a much-loved band who created the soundtrack of a generation.

For every punch thrown there was also a remarkable creative symbiosis between the brothers, with Liam's innate understanding of how to sing Noel's songs key to a much-loved complex alchemy of personalities whose attitude, energy, style, honesty and wit made them the key British band of the nineties.

The destructive element of Oasis is a small part of the story, but the constructive side is where the fascination lies. Like everyone else, they were a thousand different people on a hundred different days but who could also somehow articulate this in life and song, as we will discover.