#waybacked

Liam Gallagher is most emphatically Not 'Avin' It. How can Radiohead's OK Computer be the Greatest Album of All Time? 'No way, I'm not 'avin' it,' he spits as he strides around a north London photographic studio. Then he thinks he has the answer. It was Thom Yorke who cast all the votes, e-mailing them in, bash, bash, bash. 'No wonder his eye's f***in' cabbaged - all that computer voting.' And now Liam is miming someone with a lazy eye typing away like Frankenstein. Oasis laugh like drains.

It is the morning after the night before. Channel 4 has just broadcast the results of its poll to find the 100 Greatest Albums. It's another cheap marketing exercise dressed up as Sunday evening entertainment, a pointlessly subjective ranking of the usual subjects. But it's got Oasis all riled up. 'No Dylan!' Noel Gallagher splutters. 'Alanis Morissette at number 16!' he squawks in visceral outrage. 'I was embarrassed that Definitely Maybe was above [the Beatles'] Revolver.'

At 9.20am the phone had rung in the mews house in Marylebone, west London, that Noel shares with his PR girlfriend, Sara MacDonald. It was Paul Weller. He was, it seems, Not 'Avin' It either. 'How come you got two in there and I only got one?' an incredulous Modfather asked of his old mucker. Oasis had Definitely Maybe at six and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? at 15. The Jam's All Mod Cons limped in at 60. 'No Wildwood!' Weller raged. 'I'm not 'avin' it!' 'Don't blame me!' Noel shouted back. 'It was nothing to do with me!'

Then it was back to OK Computer. 'How,' Noel asks rhetorically of the small group of musicians and band associates gathered in the studio, 'can a record that I don't have, and that no one I know has, be the greatest album ever?' He hangs his mouth open, holds up his hands and furrows his caterpillar eyebrow at the illogicality of it all. He sniffs.

Welcome back, Oasis. Liam and Noel Gallagher, it's good to have you here again. We've missed you. Missed your arrogance, certainty, opinions and abusive verdicts on your contemporaries. The poetry of your hooligan swagger. The haircuts. The sunglasses, indoors, at night. The swearing (from here on, it should be assumed that any quote was originally delivered peppered with umpteen f***in's, many a f*** and the occasional C-word). And we've missed you making good records.

It has been a decade since Oasis released a decent album. After the dizzy days of Britpop and 1995's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? - the band's second - it has been a long helter-skelter decline. In a way, after their epochal 1996 Knebworth shows ('the Woodstock of its generation, although not as socially significant,' Noel adjudges reasonably) the only way was down. They have lost members, wives, weekends, entire American tours on account of bad behaviour (from Liam) or walk-outs (by Noel). For perhaps the most iconic and revered British band of the past 30 years, they have made as many poor albums as they have good ones, three apiece - and that's only if we let them count as an album the tremendous round-up of early B-sides, The Masterplan.

Noel Gallagher, chief songwriter and band leader, is well aware of this, and the reasons why. 'Be Here Now [1998] was made in a blizzard of cocaine and KFC,' he will blithely admit. 'Standing on the Shoulder of Giants [2000] was made in a haze of downers, coming off drugs, downers and alcohol.' By that time Liam and Noel were the only remaining members of the original line-up. Paul 'Bonehead' Arthurs and Paul 'Guigsy' McGuigan had recently left under a cloud; their first drummer, Tony McCarroll, ejected back in 1995, had sued for a share of royalties and secured a £500,000 settlement in 1999 - 'a bargain,' Noel mutters. (McCarroll's replacement, Alan White, lasted until January 2004 before he too was sacked.) Things were so bad that Noel wanted to name Standing… after one of its particularly maudlin tracks: Where Did It All Go Wrong?. Naturally, the record company wasn't so keen.

Liam, in one of his more idiot-savant moments, just didn't get it. 'Where's it all gone wrong?' he asked his elder brother at the time. Noel was gobsmacked. 'What's gone wrong? There was five people in this band last week. How many are there now? Two! That's what's f***in' gone wrong!' (For comedy's sake, that swear-word needed to remain.)

But now, finally, in 2005, Oasis are back with an album that's mostly great. Don't Believe the Truth is everything you want from an Oasis album: short, zippy, singalong rock songs. It clocks in at a pacy 39 minutes. The 'silent' wing of the band - guitarist Gem Archer and bass player Andy Bell - are, five years into their membership, contributing fine songs. And Liam, too, has written three numbers that stand toe-to-toe with those of his once-dominant elder brother.

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…spotlight in 1994 it was the combination of Liam's undiluted essence du rock'n'roll and Noel's golden way with a tune that marked out Oasis as different. They were straight-talking Northern lads with the common touch, exerting a magnetic pull over a generation; little wonder a newly elected Tony Blair was so keen to have them onside. They were football, street fashion, gang culture, hedonism, consumerism, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and the Pistols rolled into one intoxicating whole. This engendered a fanatical following among their (largely male) fans, one that saw them through the fallow years - earlier this year, before anyone had heard a note of new music, they sold 330,000 tickets for their forthcoming UK shows in only three weeks.

Even America has gone mad for the 2005-model Oasis. The US has long taken a dimmer view of the younger Gallagher's wild behaviour. He outraged an entire television nation when he swore, threw a can of lager into the crowd and dribbled on to the stage of the MTV Awards in New York in September 1996; a week later came another 'Oasis split' rumour as Noel abandoned the tour in North Carolina. Most recently, in late 2002, the band had to cancel their last US shows after a cocaine-fuelled Liam lost his two front teeth in a brawl with some estate agents while on tour in Munich (total payments to German prosecutors for Liam's bail and fine: £210,000). And yet, and yet… this year Oasis sold out New York's Madison Square Garden in an hour, and are also playing LA's legendary Hollywood Bowl.

Noel can't quite believe it himself. But he's biding his time. He knows it could all go belly-up. He knows what his brother gets like during the course of Oasis's grinding world tours. 'When it's all going swimmingly, I can see it in his eyes: "Right, this is going too well, it's getting too boring, I'm gonna start shaking this up." So he'll start picking fights, or he'll headbutt a fan, or he won't turn up for a gig, professing to have a sore throat.' Noel, meanwhile, will just be getting on with his thing: 'drilling the band so it's like clockwork to them. Me and Liam are polar opposites.'

Does he perhaps take after your dad (an absent and abusive alcoholic) and you after your mum (a tough matriarch)?

Noel smacks his lips. 'That's exactly right, yeah. Yeah, that's it. Wait till I tell me mum that.'

Oasis have been quietly taking care of business: their own label Big Brother has been buying back from Sony the rights to their back catalogue, a future revenue goldmine. They have wound up Definitely Maybe, the company that looked after their concert activities, and started a new one, the Noise and Confusion Touring Company. 'That sounded a bit more apt.'

Noel reckons the line-up has finally solidified. 'I think if anyone left now, we'd quit.' He's hopeful that Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr's son and the drummer on much of Don't Believe the Truth, will soon join the band permanently. But he's aware that if the familiar Oasis antics start up again, Starkey might think 'sod this' and go back to his 'middle-aged' day-job with the Who.

Meanwhile Noel is keeping a watchful eye on the tabloids, aware of the likelihood of someone trying to stoke up an Oasis vs Coldplay war - as their albums come out on consecutive weeks, it would be easy to bill it as a rematch of the Blur/Oasis battle that made it on to the News at Ten in the silly summer of '95.

'I know Chris Martin quite well,' Noel says. 'The irony is that we're all massive fans - well, not massive fans of Coldplay, and I'm sure they're not massive fans of Oasis. But I buy their records and they buy ours. So I think we should be all right. Chris summed it up properly. He got a message to me: "There's no reason why soft rockers and hard rockers still can't be the best of friends." And I called him up and said, "Well, f***in' ditto." '

Other than that, there's the satisfaction of knowing Oasis have made a career-revivifying album. It couldn't have come at a better time. With their contract now completed, Oasis are the subject of some sort of record company bidding war. In 1994 they signed an initial deal for £47,000 for six albums. Reportedly this time they could get £15 million for three albums.

'It's not something I want to get involved in.

I know we don't need a record deal in England 'cos we've got Big Brother. The only thing a label in England can offer us is money, and we don't need any of that. We've got our own studio so we can finance our own records. For the rest of the world it would be essential. But I leave that to [our manager]. He's got to earn his 20 per cent somehow. But it's liberating to sit here today and know I haven't got a record deal. I like that.

'When people ask why this album took so long, I say, "Because we're lucky," ' he shrugs. 'I would fight anyone in the street to have three years to follow up Morning Glory. We rushed Be Here Now. We went on a huge tour, all fell out, then we came back. Instead of taking a year or two off, and basking in all the glory of all the records we sold and all the money that we made, instead of buying big houses, we went straight back in the studio. I'm definitely taking another three years before the next one.'

Four weeks later, Oasis play their first show since the Glastonbury debacle. It's at the Astoria, a 1,600-capacity venue in central London that is, for Oasis, tiny. The band are in cracking form. Turn Up the Sun and Mucky Fingers already sound like worthy additions to the canon. When they play Champagne Supernova, Rock 'n' Roll Star, Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger the crowd's roar almost takes the roof off. Liam wears daft half-length trousers but, being Liam, he gets away with it.

The finest of Liam's three contributions to the new album is Guess God Thinks I'm Abel. It's about Cain and Abel, with Noel cast in the Cain role; in the Old Testament, Cain kills Abel. The opening line of the song is, 'You could be my lover'. Noel is gobsmacked by how good it is, slightly weirded by that first line, and bewildered by the thought of how Liam might have come up with the song in the first place. 'I can't for the life of me believe he sits down and reads the Bible and thinks, "I'll write a song about that," ' Noel says. Liam, after all, once said he has read only one book in his life, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

In the north London studio, I had asked the singer about Guess God Thinks I'm Abel. Where had the inspiration for it come from?

Liam looked at me with his big-lidded, soulfully belligerent eyes and shrugged. 'Dunno. It just came.' Then his eyes lit on Gem Archer sitting across the table. The guitarist had plucked a kiwi from the fruit bowl and was teaspooning its green flesh into his mouth.

'What's that?' Gallagher junior asked. He had seemingly never seen a kiwi fruit before, and now couldn't believe the hassle involved in eating one. It's hairy? You need a teaspoon? You've got to scoop sticky stuff out?

Liam Gallagher snorted. He didn't care how much vitamin C there was in a kiwi fruit. 'I'm not 'avin' that,' he said, and reached for a good old-fashioned banana.