#live forever

NG (recounting a conversation with Liam): Shouldn't it be baby?

No no no, NO! It shouldn't be baby, you know.

Maybe? That sounds fucking stupid.

I'm like right, well I'm not writing any tunes baby in it, baby.

LG: It's actually one of me favorites, don't know what it means to me.

nghfb at luna park in 2016

Noel + "Live Forever" During the Split

On 8 September 2021, during an interview with BBC 2, Noel played them a recent studio recording he'd done of "Live Forever." While introducing the song, he stressed what a big fucking deal it was for him to be singing it at all, getting so carried away that he even claimed erroneously that he never sang it in the '90s. (He did. A few times. And in 2005.) And the reason he says he never sang it was because, as he says of Liam, "It was always his song, and he sang it amazingly well."

This is in keeping with what he said in a 2015 interview--that he wouldn't do certain songs solo, including "Live Forever," that he felt were better sung by Liam.

If you look at setlist.fm, though, "Live Forever" does appear on the setlists for at least ten different NGHFB gigs from 2016 to 2019.

But that's not because Noel sang it then. Those are times he let the crowd sing it. He never did anything more than sing the first line to start them off, and sometimes he didn't even do that much. He just stepped back and listened as the crowd sang Liam's lines and his own back to him.

It's similar, actually, to how Liam handled Noel's lines in "Acquiesce" during the split--because he didn't want to sing them himself, he gave them to the crowd to sing.

But not quite the same, because, to my knowledge anyway, Liam never sang Noel's lines when they were in Oasis, but, as you can see from the links above, Noel did have a history of singing "Live Forever" acoustically when Oasis was together, including a really memorable performance on The Late Late Show. So he could easily have performed "Live Forever" with the HFB, just as he did NGHFB/acoustic versions of "Wonderwall" and "Supersonic" and other songs that Liam's voice made famous.

He just...didn't want to sing "Live Forever." Not Liam's favorite song. Not during the breakup.

Anyway, per setlist.fm, Noel started having the crowd sing it with the gig giffed at the top, and then he did it a few more times that year, then fewer times in 2018. The last time he let the crowd sing it was in Seoul in May 2019, where he told the audience that they were the only ones he was letting do the song.

He did a bunch more gigs during summer 2019, but it appears, at least per setlist.fm, that he was finished letting the crowd sing it. (Draw your own conclusions as to why he may not have been in the mood.)

So that means that all during the split he didn't sing "Live Forever" properly until 2021, which was, coincidentally or not, on the heels of his having worked on Knebworth "Liam Was At His Absolute Peak 😊" 1996. When trying to explain what made him decide to record it, he simply says that "for some reason, it suited my voice that day."

Noel's performance also ended up being a precursor for his officially adding "Live Forever" to his 2023 touring setlist for Council Skies.

As a bonus, here's Noel finally getting to perform "Live Forever" with Liam again, at the first night of Cardiff. It's impossible not to get chills at the opening notes--at Liam bathed in shadow, at Noel's hands moving over his guitar while he watches Liam take the mic.