#about fandom

(Yes, Noel no longer lives in Little Venice, but Maida Vale is directly adjacent. It’s all basically the same part of residential very bougie west London; you can walk end-to-end of both areas combined in about 20 minutes. Nowhere near Liam’s house in London, for sure. Although Liam and Debbie could have been seeing other friends or simply enjoying this very pretty area of canalside London as featured in Paddington 2, who knows!)

Otherwise, this is what’s currently in my head about it:

I’m sure you’re right that there’s more way more texting (and maybe calling) than face-to-face time. They live in different places and are often doing different things. This is normal! I feel in my heart of hearts that their texting (particularly on Liam’s part) is relatively prolific, since they are both always on their phones (Noel just doesn’t have as much public online activity as Liam, but he does have that brightness up very high and he was literally scrolling at the Brits); even Noel doesn’t actually have that super a packed work and life schedule most of the time (he's rich), and they’re both very funny. You bet they are sending random shit to each other just like you and everyone else you know does with their loved 1s.

Even back in peak Oasis days, Noel went to afterparties, stayed out late, yapped nineteen to the dozen to some random people, whereas Liam did often stay out late (and/or go missing) but he was not enjoying the social aspect. His sole goal was to get pissed (primarily as a way to cope with the attention and social aspect). They’ve always been different in this sense and as someone now with a high amount of both wealth and freedom, it’s basically always going to be the case that Liam having a large one is Liam maybe enjoying a drink and hanging out with some combination of Debbie (and Debbie’s twin sister, of course lol), his clonesons, and Buttons, and Noel having a large one – whilst he also seems to greatly enjoy and make the effort to spend time with his kids! – is getting drunk and staying up chatting for 19 hours to a large gangs of lads holding him aloft on their shoulders like a trophy and/or a crowd of female friends he has no interest in having sex with that he can bitch to.

They have genuinely calmed down a bit. They’re imbuing far fewer substances (relatively speaking), they’ve multiple grown-up children, and they’re in their 50s. Liam was 21 in 1994! It’s a completely different stage of life, even for rocknroll stars who never change and also live forever.

Bear in mind that practically everything we consume and revisit from the 90s and 00s of them together is them working: gigs, magazine interviews, tv appearances, photoshoots. At the moment, they are not working! (As far as we know.) Short of childhood photos and the odd trip or technically-not-work appearance they did together, I’m not sure there’s much we have of them hanging out back then and not working. One exception would be the rkidnapping and hey, guess what, that was about getting Liam in private away from anyone else, including his wife, to patch Noel and Liam’s relationship back up (albeit executed in the most unhinged way possible). When they were touring or recording, they were both working and living in each other’s pockets – no need for additional hangouts and probably not much time for them anyway. When Oasis were ‘off’, presumably they did occasionally see each other in an undocumented manner, who knows, but they seemed to primarily view that time as a much-needed break from each other. However, because of their work (Oasis), they spent waaay more time with each other as a baseline than many adult siblings do.

The incestuous feelings, including (let’s say for the purposes of this post) lust and physical consummation, was not a healthy relationship(!) and likely contributed to the exhausting extremes of their love-hate existence – alongside the fights, the adoration, the sibling bickering, the drink and drugs, the adrenaline of performing and the nothing aftewards, etc. Now: they are getting on great and they’re Old and they’re elated to be back together! The fact is that they fundamentally know each other so well, perhaps better than anyone else in the world does, and they seem to have slipped right back into hanging out without needing to, like, formally sit down and rebuild their relationship (not their style anyway - although caveat a) Live 25 obviously required actual formal business negotations b) we don't know what happened behind the scenes to reinitate their personal relationship). They can have a great relationship without serious time investment because it’s all already there. In that sense I don’t think they’re ‘careful’ with each other (i.e. they’ll still be lovingly ripping the piss out of each other or whatever), but they will of course be aware of the past. Is it a valid interpretation to say they could be being careful that their relationship as is doesn’t slip into anything else (something too close), especially because they don't want that to happen at the expense of things going bad later because of the inherent tension in attempting to maintaining that kind of deeply forbidden relationship? It’s possible!

When I say ‘being careful with each other’ I do mean in a relative sense to the tour, as in not as much as they were on the tour (just because there was so much riding on their relationship not breaking down – but we know they got some meals together and stuff even though they weren’t ‘supposed to’ be hanging out outside of the shows and we know Noel was surprised by how amazing it was and how great a time they had during the shows!).

Actually, I primarily mean ‘in terms of how their relationship is played out in front of others, about how their relationship appears to others and how it’s seen’. I’m really, really fascinated by and drawn to just how aware they are of how their personas and relationship is seen, how they manipulate the press and are manipulated by it, and that slightly now old-fashioned view of being a famous entertainer public figure. They have long exploited their sibling relationship, or at least a slightly exaggerated version of it, to the press, and therefore must be on at least some level aware of how their relationship is affected by being in the public eye in turn. Oasis (Noel) always had one eye on their mythology before they’d barely even got started. They knew being brothers and their chemistry was a selling point early on, they did early photoshoots that played it up, and they knew the fights got them in the papers and therefore selling records. Now, what is super fascinating about all this (to me) is to what extend exaggerating the falling out, fighting side of things was to obscure both genuine ordinary (but softer, less laddish) commonplace sibling affection and also potentially also scandalous relations (the incest) – that’s just speculation though, of course.

Even something like that Sun article has a few photos of Liam all glow-y outside the pub before the match, but other than that is entirely second-hand – they feel this way, they ordered this, they did this. It comes from a particular perspective. It’s a statement for the narrative, it’s tell not show. I don’t mean to say it’s either some kind of huge PR masterstroke or some dastardly scheme or completely unfounded in fact or something, it’s just how these things work.

A central premise to gcest as a ship is the idea – and not unreasonable nor unfounded theory – that there is a genuine incestuous relationship of some description hidden in plain sight, both flaunted to entertain attention and scandal and chemistry and obscured by the overexaggerated reports of fighting. All of that exists in context of their image in the media, and since the 90s that has broadened significantly to include things like social media as well. (It's weird because they were under crazy amounts of media hounding (especially Liam) in the 90s, and yet it's still not the same impact as social media and endlessly circulating info has now. I wonder how they feel about this, besides the obvious Noel-in-Knebworth-doc perspective of 'people used to live in the moment without phones' - there were camera phones in later original Oasis times, and indeed there were camcorders in 1994, but the way information is shared and dissected online has totally changed even since 2009, and the Live 25 tour happened in this new environment).

Liam (with Debbie’s heavy steer) has very consciously rebuilt his image; Noel has a reputation for speaking off the cuff, even sometimes speaking without thinking, and yet is very aware of how he is seen in the context of his background, his long history in the media eye, and of course his music. (Also, he doesn't speak as off the cuff now as when there wasn't social media and he was in his late 20s and he was usually high! He just doesn't! I know he'd probably dispite this.) How does this translate to now? They know their reunion – something routed in absolutely real and genuine emotions, private as well as public – is a fundamental part of the narrative, is interesting to people, is going to presumably be central in the Live 25 documentary. They’ve not yet talked about it very much publicly. They don’t really take (publicly) photos of just the two of them together. They know if they want to genuinely hang out on their own they can’t really just pop to a bar without attracting serious attention, far more so than if it was the one of them on their own. Their relationship is a commodity, but it’s also their lives. If they genuinely absolutely just want to hang out, they are not going to want to do under the analytical lens of people who don't actually know them (I should imagine). Again, not that they’re sitting down discussing all of this at a planning meeting, more just. They know it. They’ve been famous and famous brothers for such a very long time.

Fandom past vs fandom present

I need to develop this thought more, but I also think there's something in the difference between experiencing historical 'canon'/content, and what we experience in the present in real time.

The past is a rich text. By which I mean: we can see everything that happened all at once, god-like. Stretches of 20, 30, longer years can be condensed into a timeline of key events. We have the context to say: okay, on x date in 1995 this was said, but a few years later this account or these photos came out showing that's probably not true. But on x date in 1995, that statement would have been probably been taken at its word.

Fandom developments in the present are very exciting: it's happening now! They are currently gazing into each other's eyes! They are no longer estranged! But time is not condensed, and events are linear. We have nothing to disprove that recent Sun article - why would it be untrue? I've no idea, I'm just using it as an example. There is no alternative account because there hasn't had time to be. In fact, even in the several days since you sent this ask – apologies, anon – there’s been conflicting suggestions of to what degree they did or did not celebrate together. Practically every narrative within Oasis history has conflicting accounts, whether separated by a lengthy amount of time from when the events occurred or not(!), because the truth is way too emotive and emotions-led. (Also the drugs and so on.)

We of course can draw parallels with the past and be informed by the past - for example, the posts people have been making putting similar facial expressions in similar photos side by side from the Live 25 Opus book and from older photos from the 90s - but there's also a recency bias. We're more likely to take what they say now to be true and be what they mean (because we remember it because we can see it because there no hindsight to contradict it), whereas if there’s a comment available ten years later that says ‘well, actually that wasn't true’, this can complicate things. But there hasn’t been time for that to happen to the present yet.

So: looking through historical stuff (and squishing it together and making comparisons and connections in a way that wouldn’t have been possible at the time events were happening) vs thinking about stuff happening now, in any fandom, will always feel different. I think.

Indeed, even noticing The Incest, is really only made possible by modern fandom – and I mean obviously this condensing has massively ignited the speed and reach of fandom as a whole, all fandoms, not just Oasis – but as well as the folly and horniness of youth and drugs (the drugs that make you want to make out with your brother), etc, vs how Noel and Liam might feel now, and (crucially) looking at e.g. the onstage groping as a pattern of behaviour (that continues through to today, sober!) vs reoccurring “one-off” events that would be easy to write off, if they were even noticed. Now we are able to easily via tumblr see a lengthy period of media (e.g. magazine interviews, video interviews) from across the world that would have been straight up inaccessible outside the country the interview was undertaken in, and photos that would have been in a paper then forgotten a few days later, and look at them all together and go: woah this isn't very normal is it. We have so much more information available to us now! We can actually track back and cross-reference and locate a lot of obscure radio audio and watch hundreds of fan recordings of Live 25 gigs made with their phones! (Cf. with me making several factual mistakes in my summary post on The Battle play, because it was one live event I couldn't record, there wasn't much information online about it, and I couldn't cross-check my account with anyone. I just had to rely on my brain.)

We are enjoying the present (they love each other!) but we have a present-day view of it. Think about how many things changed the context of quotes uttered in retrospect: how Noel’s relationships with Meg and Sara were viewed and reported on when he was in those relationships versus when those relationships had ended, for example.