Oasis in '09: "How many cunts were there in Oasis? Here’s a clue – it was more than zero and less than two"

'09:

Slane

While not quite as mega crowd-wise as Knebworth, Oasis’ return trip to Slane Castle in 2009 ranks as one of the band’s favourite ever gigs.

Talking to Hot Press before the big day, Liam noted that: “It’s like a holiday for me playing in Ireland. It’s not like ‘a gig’ – you just go there and get fucking slaughtered with the fans, and then you wake up the next day and get slaughtered again. As soon as you get off the fucking plane, it’s: ‘Do you want a Guinness?’ and before you know it you’re having to belt out a couple of songs that they like. There’s no fucking graft in that.”

Reflecting on it afterwards, Noel said: “The adrenaline rush when you walk out on that stage is fucking incredible. You’ve got this amphitheatre full of people going mental; a river behind you and a Downton Abbey stately home at the top of the hill. How can you not play your heart out when you’re confronted with that?”

The late Lord Henry Mount Charles had some quality intel about the show when we spoke to him recently.

“Everyone knows about their connection to Mayo, but the Gallaghers’ roots are actually from up the road in Duleek,” the Slane head honcho revealed. “A few days before Oasis came back and headlined Slane, we had an event in the castle nightclub, and every Gallagher in Ireland must have been there. I had to go out and when I returned there was a plastic bag hanging off the door, and inside it a bottle of whiskey and a note from one of the family saying, ‘Thank you!’ They were crawling out of the woodwork that night.”

Where did it all go wrong?

There’d been violent fallings out before but what happened on August 28, 2009 in Paris led to both Oasis splitting and, legal letters and barbed comments in the media aside, Noel and Liam barely communicating with each other for fifteen years.

The trouble all stemmed from Liam pulling out of Oasis’ V Festival headliner in Chelmsford a few days earlier.

Our kid insisted that he’d lost his voice but Noel wasn’t buying it and later claimed that Liam had been hungover.

“I’ve never cancelled a gig out of stubbornness, only if I can’t speak,” Liam told Hot Press the following year. “Singers do get sore throats but some people haven’t copped on. If you can’t speak, you can’t fucking sing.”

Asked why the Paris row had proven terminal when they’d previously been able to kiss and make up after clashing, Liam suggested that: “If you’ve got some person who’s already planning his next move it won’t take much, will it? Don’t think for one minute that that argument was what finished it off. Noel Gallagher was planning his get out anyway and was reeling it in. If you go out on tour and act like a fucking dick, and get all your mates to act like dicks, then don’t be surprised when the other people in your band go, ‘We’re not fucking having this anymore!’ It wasn’t really an argument. He just thought, ‘This is my time to jump ship.’ I think Noel had it planned to make this big announcement at the end of the tour, but it didn’t work out that way, did it?”

Asked the same question, Noel told us: “In rock ‘n’ roll you’re going to get drink and drugs and all this fucking, ‘He said this’/‘She said that’ shit. That stuff I can deal with, no problem. In Paris though, there was a level of physical violence that made me think, ‘I’m forty-fucking-three now. There’s no way I can be dealing with this anymore. If it comes to violence, I’m out of here.’ I went and sat in the car for five minutes and ordinarily I’d have gone back in and done the gig, but I just couldn’t. I knew there and then that it was over.”

Hopes that the split might be temporary were dashed in 2011 when Liam issued libel proceedings against his big bro. It never went to court but the damage was done...

Liam, Andy Bell and Gem Archer’s response to Oasis imploding was the formation of Beady Eye, a dirty rock ‘n’ roll combo who were as indebted to the Stones as they were The Beatles. Needless to say, Liam got a few anti-Noel digs in when we flew over to London to interview them in 2009…

“How many cunts were there in Oasis? Here’s a clue – it was more than zero and less than two.”

“Band democracy doesn’t work? I’ve never heard so much fucking bollocks in my entire life! You can’t have four geezers in a room fucking speaking to each other and getting things sorted? I tell you what’s ridiculous – some cunt who thinks he knows fucking everything!”

Read the full 14-page Oasis feature in the current issue of Hot Press, out now: