The Night Oasis Died: What Really Happened in Paris
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This is the story of two brothers who built one of the biggest bands in Britain and then could not stand to share a dressing room. On the twenty-eighth of August, two thousand and nine, that finally caught up with them, backstage at a festival in Paris, minutes before they were due on stage.
Oasis were the headliners at Rock en Seine that night. The crowd was waiting, the tour was rolling, and then Noel and Liam Gallagher started arguing in the dressing room. Noel would later say the row ended with Liam swinging one of his guitars around like an axe. The guitar was a red Gibson, and it did not come out of it in one piece. Noel left the venue. A festival official walked out and told the crowd that Liam and Noel had fought, and that the band no longer existed. Later that night, Noel put a statement on the band’s website. He had quit Oasis, he said, because he could not go on working with Liam a day longer.
Here’s the thing, though. Nobody who had been paying attention was really surprised. The fighting between these two had been going on for fifteen years, and almost all of it had happened in public. To understand how it ended in a Paris dressing room, you have to go back to where it started.
Oasis formed in Manchester in nineteen ninety-one. Liam had the band first. Noel, five years older, joined after a few rehearsals, and he became the songwriter. He wrote the songs, Liam sang them, and that split became the engine of the whole thing. It also became the source of the feud, because from the first day one brother controlled the music and the other controlled the stage.
In nineteen ninety-four their debut album, Definitely Maybe, went to number one in the United Kingdom, and suddenly everyone wanted to know what the brothers were really like. They found out quickly. That year the two sat down with John Harris of the NME, and the interview turned into a screaming match over which of them was more rock and roll. Liam called Noel a priest. Noel gave as good as he got. Both of them told each other, more than once, exactly where to go. The tape was so good that it came out as a single the following year, fourteen minutes of two brothers arguing, called Wibbling Rivalry.
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Then the fighting moved onto the stage. In September nineteen ninety-four, at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, Liam hit Noel over the head with a tambourine in the middle of the set, and insulted the audience and his own band on top of it. Noel walked off and quit. He was back within days, but the American tour was cancelled within two weeks anyway.
That became the pattern. Something would blow up, one of them would walk away, the band would carry on, and the press would take every word. On another American tour, Liam refused to board the flight in London minutes before departure, and Noel had to fill in at the opening show in Chicago. At the nineteen ninety-six taping of MTV Unplugged, the band walked out to be introduced and Liam was not there. He had decided he was not doing it. Noel was left standing on that stage, and he has said his reaction was simply, thanks a lot.
In May two thousand, after another round of insults, Noel quit a tour and left Liam and the rest of the band to finish the dates without him. He came back. He always came back, until two thousand and nine. By his own later account, handling his brother had by then turned into a matter of psychological tactics.
And through all of it, the band kept selling. Oasis moved an estimated seventy-five million records worldwide. The feud was not hurting them, it had become part of the product. Fans and the press waited for the next explosion almost as eagerly as the next single. But a feud that works as publicity is still a feud, and the two men living inside it were the ones paying for it.
That brings us back to August two thousand and nine. A week before Paris, the band had pulled out of the V Festival in England, with the official reason being that Liam had laryngitis. Noel later claimed it was a hangover, and Liam denied it so strongly that he ended up suing over it. After Paris, each brother had his own version of why it ended. Noel said he could not carry on. Liam said Noel could not handle the pressure of the rock and roll life.
Then the brothers went their separate ways, loudly. Liam formed Beady Eye with Oasis veterans Andy Bell, Gem Archer and Chris Sharrock. Noel launched Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. In two thousand and twelve, Liam sang Wonderwall at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, and Noel, who wrote it, was not on stage. Liam had found Twitter the same year Noel quit, and the insults kept coming for years.
Reunion offers kept coming too. In twenty thirteen, Noel reportedly turned down twenty million pounds to reunite for an anniversary tour. In twenty twenty, Liam claimed the number was a hundred million, and Noel denied it. As for the guitar at the center of it all, it was restored in London and sold at auction in twenty twenty-two for three hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds. It has been described as a symbol of the breakup.
Then, on the twenty-sixth of August, two thousand and twenty-four, both brothers posted the same cryptic eleven-second video, with a date and a time. The next morning it was official. In a joint statement, Oasis said the guns have fallen silent. A reunion tour was announced for the summer of twenty twenty-five, with stadium shows across the United Kingdom and Ireland, starting in Cardiff. It would be the first time the brothers had shared a stage since Oasis broke up.
So the two men who could not share a dressing room are going to share a stage again. Whether the guns stay silent, nobody can say. But look at the whole story and one thing stands out. The thing that made Oasis and the thing that broke it were the same thing. Two brothers who could not leave each other alone, and who, after fifteen years apart, still could not stay away.
