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https://www.qthemusic.com/articles/liam-gallagher-is-on-the-cover-of-the-new-issue
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByHxQfXHH6W/
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByQEXG3Hbk_/
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https://twitter.com/tedkessler1/status/1134393297890369537
I had a Nespresso in London, plus ten vodka/tonics, one lager and four espresso martinis in Budapest with Liam Gallagher and lived to tell this tale... https://t.co/ojNsBdAT4L
— Ted Kessler (@TedKessler1) May 31, 2019
https://twitter.com/QMagazine/status/1135486329628893184
Ahead of his new single, new film and forthcoming second solo album, there's a world exclusive interview with @liamgallagher in the new issue. Out tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/vxcb7BjHI6
— Q Magazine (@QMagazine) 2019년 6월 3일
https://twitter.com/QMagazine/status/1135504748914860033
Have a peek at what's in the new Q, featuring @liamgallagher, @katetempest, @KasabianHQ's Serge on his solo project, @stormzy, @Hot_Chip, @perryfarrell, @carlyraejepsen, @thecure, @TDCinemaClub, @CHAIofficialJPN, @thestrokes, @Interpol, @RealKiefer & much more! Out tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/8kV5h5PbQt
— Q Magazine (@QMagazine) 2019년 6월 3일
https://twitter.com/QMagazine/status/1135842205380370432
The new issue is out today, featuring a world exclusive interview with @liamgallagher. On sale now, or order a copy straight to your door from here: https://t.co/IRtGHMSEMn pic.twitter.com/CiHVwHBZwJ
— Q Magazine (@QMagazine) 2019년 6월 4일
https://twitter.com/clementphotos/status/1135903593725345792
My portrait @liamgallagher on the cover of this months @qmagazineuk . A pleasure and privilege meeting Liam and big thanks to all the fine folk at Q. Shot at @shoreditchstudios @canon_photos #liamgallagher #qmagazine #warnermusic #Fear_PR #musicphotogr… https://t.co/AvaPYggfLF pic.twitter.com/cdsDndunHU
— Michael Clement (@clementphotos) 2019년 6월 4일
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LIAM GALLAGHER
Why Always Me?
The heavyweight champion of rock interviews, Liam Gallagher, takes on Ted Kessler for 12 rounds of intense banter and psychedelic drinking ahead of his new single, his new film and his forthcoming second solo album. “Four more espresso Martinis, please, barman!”
Photography: Michael Clement
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As he is: Liam Gallagher re-enters the frame, Shoreditch, London, 13 May, 2019.
It was 1997 and Liam Gallagher was in Munich, on the road with his band Oasis.
Bored during a lull in promotional duties, the singer decided to leave his hotel room and take a stroll through the city.
Upon his return, he noticed there was an exhibition next to the hotel, of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s artwork, so he popped in. One self-portrait of Lennon’s in particular caught his eye: it was a line drawing of the Beatles man from the early-’70s, bearded and shaggy, arms-outstretched, entitled Why Me?.
As the frontman with arguably the biggest band in the world at that time, the focal point for a level of national pop hysteria not really witnessed domestically since The Beatles, it was a question that Gallagher had often asked himself. Why Me? “It triggered something in me, ” he says.
“It was like it was speaking to me.” He bought the drawing.
A few years later, in June, 2005, Gallagher found himself in another hotel, this time The Trump International Hotel & Tower, on Central Park West, in New York, ahead of Oasis’s show at Madison Square Garden.
Calcified by more than a decade of touring with the Oasis juggernaut, it was important that band members found new, safe diversions on the road where possible, to eliminate the sense of Groundhog Day. After all, the backstage catering hall of one arena looks much the same as the next, even with a Manchester City flag hanging from the dressing room wall. This morning in New York, Liam’s security man Steve Allen had an idea: Yoko Ono’s apartment in The Dakota building is also on Central Park West. Why don’t they pay her a visit?
Liam Gallagher looked up from his breakfast. “Give over, we can’t just pop into Yoko Ono’s gaff, ” he said, dismissively. Leave it with me, replied Allen.
Ten minutes later, Allen returned. Sorted, he told Liam. We’re in. Gallagher was sceptical that Allen had that kind of sway with Yoko Ono, but he finished off his eggs, knocked back a large whisky, and they strolled up the road towards her building all the same. On the way, Allen explained what he’d done. “He just told the geezer on the other end of the phone that he was with Liam Gallagher who was such a big John Lennon fan, that he’d called his son Lennon, ” recalls Gallagher. And those, said the voice on the line, are the magic words that will grant you an invitation to see Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow.
Arriving at The Dakota they did indeed negotiate security successfully before climbing into an old, wind-up elevator and ascending. “Her flat’s on the ninth floor, ” says Liam, “which is the month I’m born, and her flat is number 72: the year I’m born. I’m thinking, ‘Things are looking good here.’”
Charmed, we’re sure: onstage in Munich, 1997, the night Liam found the inspirational Lennon artwork.
GETTY
Man in the corner: he’s definitely not feeling mellow yellow.
“It’s all downhill from yoga. It goes yoga, then veganism, then you’re suddenly making crap disco records that sound like Leo Sayer. Acupuncture is alright because at least it’s needles. I can convince myself it’s still a bit rock’n’roll.”
“You talkin’ to me?” Liam – still giving good glare after all these years.
“I see my music as like a Sunday roast. As an idea, it’s been mastered. But I want to make the very best version of it that you can have.”
Waiting by the door was Yoko Ono. Welcome, she told them, come in – but take your shoes off. “What, even these bad boys?” joked Liam, pointing to his box-fresh Clarks. But he took them off anyway. Offering her visitors tea and biscuits, she told Liam she’d heard he’d called his son Lennon. Wasn’t he worried that he’d be bullied at school? He’ll be fine, he told her. He walked over to John Lennon’s famous white piano that lives in the flat and looked at some of the pictures on it. He explained that he’d bought Why Me? a few years earlier. Oh, replied Yoko, there was actually another drawing that he did at the same time. She’d dig it out for him some time. What was it about Why Me? that Liam had liked? It just resonated with me, he told her. Yes, she said. I can see that.
They took a tour of the apartment. Stopping in the kitchen, Liam asked Yoko about the banner in Japanese hanging from the cornicing. It translated as “while I’ve been hibernating, I’ve been gathering my wings”, she told him. John Lennon had asked her parents for it on a trip to Japan when he’d stopped making music for a period in the 1970s. Liam wrote the motto down and promised he’d use it one day. He did so too, a decade later, on I’ve All I Need from his debut solo album, As You Were, after his own period of musical hibernation ended in 2017.
“Anyway, I didn’t want to outstay my welcome, ” he recalls, “so I said, ‘Nice one, Yoko, I’m outta here – cheers for the tea and biscuits.’”
Back home in London some weeks later, Liam Gallagher lay in his garden chair with a can of Stella and his two cats, Mick and Keith, on either arm, soaking up the last of the summer’s sun before he set off on the road again. The doorbell rang. It was DHL with a package for him. He took it into the garden to open, his cats on either arm of the chair pawing at the wrapping.
It was from Yoko Ono: a self-portrait drawing of John Lennon sitting in an armchair in the clouds, with a cat on the arm of the chair and the words Why Not? below. It was the companion piece to the Why Me? drawing.
“Fucking hell, ” thought Liam. “I’m looking at this drawing Yoko Ono sent me, that John Lennon drew in 1972, of him on a chair in the clouds with a cat on his arm, as I sit on a chair with a cat on my arm… and what is going on?”
He already had Why Me?. And now he also had Why Not?.
Why Me? Why Not? That would look good on a T-shirt, thought Liam. Sounds good as an affirmation, too, he decided. Why Me? Why Not. Why Me? Why Not!
“Then, I thought, one day it would look even better on an album cover.”
Years pass. Oasis dissolve. Beady Eye comes and goes.
Old relationships wither, new bonds are forged…
And this September, Liam Gallagher’s second solo album will be released. It’s called Why Me? Why Not, just as John Lennon told him it would be.
Amisty, muggy May morning in 2019 and Liam Gallagher awakes in his old bed in his new house in Highgate, North London, with one name on his mind: Leo Sayer, the diminutive, melancholic, soft-pop singer from the 1970s.
He picks up his phone and tweets it in capital letters to his three million followers. LEO SAYER. That feels better. On with his running shoes and off round the park. But the run is not successful. Liam Gallagher has been suffering from arthritis in his hips which results in particular pain in his calves. He’s been told he should cut down on his running but that is not going to happen, and today has been agony. He shouts up to his girlfriend and manager Debbie Gwyther to see if he can get an appointment this morning with his acupuncturist in St John’s Wood, on the way in to rehearsals in King’s Cross.
“He’s mega, he doesn’t fuck about, ” says Liam, rubbing his hips two hours later in the Renaissance Hotel in St Pancras, around the corner from his band’s rehearsal space. “I went to see another and he was a bit old, a bit tentative. This geezer is proper, gets the needles and whacks them in. He sorts it out, but obviously it keeps coming back.” Gallagher has not considered yoga as a supplementary therapy, nor Pilates.
“No. What’s next?” he asks, rhetorically. “Veganism? It’s all downhill from yoga. It goes yoga, then veganism, then you’re suddenly making crap disco records that sound like Leo Sayer. Acupuncture is alright because at least it’s needles. I can convince myself it’s still a bit rock’n’roll.”
Today Liam Gallagher tweeted LEO SAYER. Yesterday, he tweeted FUCK OFF. And both tweets were prompted by hearing the same thing: his elder, still very-much-estranged brother Noel’s atypical new single Black Star Dancing, a catchy, perky pop-disco number that sounds a bit like INXS playing David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and nothing at all like Oasis, the brutal rock’n’roll band that the brothers commercially dominated two decades with. Liam Gallagher is not a fan of his brother’s new direction.
“Everyone knows I’m bitter and jealous, but it’s a Eurovision song, ” he says, a little sadly. “It’s fucking Leo Sayer. It’s not even a good tune, let’s be honest. I’d love to know what his bit on the side has to say about it…”
His eyes look for recognition. Nothing. Noel’s bit on the side? Please don’t say something awful about Noel’s love life.
“Weller.”
Oh, OK. Paul Weller, who was underwhelming in his praise for As You Were, deeming it a bit “like Beady Eye”, Liam’s less successful band which operated between Oasis and solo vindication. Weller, once firmly in the Oasis clan but now cast in Team Noel, forced to choose sides as so many children of unhappily wretched divorces are.
“Weller’s put out some questionable shit over the years, but I don’t think even he’s gone down the Leo Sayer route, ” he continues, warming to his theme. “You can’t be making disco music when you look like a potato. You’ve got to be sexy for that. He’s in his mid-50s. It’s like me doing opera music. I’d look stupid. I’m sure in his big daft head it sounds amazing, I know he’s trying to do something new, but it’s way off what he thinks it is. It’s embarrassing.” While Liam considers this is a bad move for his brother, he sees it as having at least one positive outcome. “It leaves the way open for me to come steaming in with a load of guitars, so crack on our kid.”
Liam Gallagher has not made a disco album, nor an opera album. That’s not what Why Me? Why Not sounds like. He is not trying to surprise any of the fans, new and old, who made his debut album platinum in the UK – almost unheard-of for a rock album this decade – nor helped sell out arenas wherever he played. He does not want to test their loyalty. He will not be voyaging into uncharted territory.
Liam views making music when you are an established and widely-loved performer as similar to running a popular restaurant that specialises in a certain type of food. Every dish you put out must be reliably perfect. No surprise new ingredients, no adventures into unknown territories. Just give people what they came for every time. Consistency, he thinks, is a lot harder than versatility. Anybody can be adventurous, he says, especially when you can afford session musicians and fancy producers. Doing the same again, but better: that’s hard. Do you like rock’n’roll music with Liam Gallagher singing?
Good. That’s what he’s serving you.
“I see my music as like a Sunday roast, ” he says. “As an idea, it’s been mastered. But I want to make the very best version of it that you can have. People seemed to like As You Were. It’s not curing cancer, but they dug it. And that’s given us the confidence to do more of the same, only better. The songs are better.”
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John Lennon’s sketches, Why Me? and Why Not?; Liam with Yoko Ono at the 2005 Q Awards.
ARTWORK BY JOHN LENNON © YOKO ONO LENNON
Written and recorded largely in Los Angeles with the principal songwriting contributors to As You Were, Greg Kurstin and Andrew Wyatt, as well as at RAK in London, and possibly some other places with some other people that Liam has forgotten about this morning, Why Me? Why Not came together very quickly, but over a frustratingly long period of time. “We did six songs in a week, ” explains Liam, “but then we had to wait months to record the next lot. And then wait again after that. Everyone was busy at different times, the c**ts.” Unlike As You Were, which featured six songs written solely by Liam, this time all the songs are co-written. “I’m alright as a writer, ” he says, “but I want it to be a step up.” Liam is realistic enough to realise that he is not going to write a second album that is better than his first on his own.
“I know my place. There’s a lot to be said for knowing your place: some people don’t, ” he raises his enormous eyebrows, “they want to be everything, the singer, the writer, the dancer, the guitarist, on the nose flute, and end up being nothing very good. I’m a singer. I’m the geezer at the front. So we create these songs together, with Andrew and Kurstin, or whoever. And then when I sing them, they’re my songs.” This is key. No matter who writes his songs, no matter how enormous they may become commercially, they will rarely be covered because once Liam Gallagher sings them, arms behind back, shoulders sloped into what he jokingly refers to as his “signature lean”, they become so intrinsically his that not even buskers touch them. You’ll hear the Noel-helmed Don’t Look Back In Anger belted out in underpasses from Paris to Perth, but no one attempts Live Forever even though its melody and theme is just as universal. Because once Liam Gallagher has sung something, that’s pretty much it.
You’ll perhaps recognise the glam rock riff and Merseybeat shuffle of his forthcoming new single Shockwave from other sources, but the venom in the delivery of a lyric about “being sold right down the river”, the pained sneer… that’s Liam Gallagher alone. None of the four other unmixed songs which wend their way down a stream to the Q office spook the horses stylistically either, but they all agree with Liam’s suggestion that Why Me? Why Not is a more-sleek upgrade on its predecessor.
“Social media is really bad for your head. I know it sounds harsh, but I’d ban young kids from using it. It warps you. They’ll all reject it anyway in the future and it’ll just be us silly old c**ts on it.”
The best of them is Now That I Found You, which has the rich Rickenbacker drive of a mid-’60s George Harrison riff, like The Jam or R.E.M. at their most dynamic and pop. It’s also one of Liam’s best vocals of modern times, a song about meeting his now 21-year-old daughter Molly Moorish, from whom he was estranged until recently. They met after the social circles that his sons Lennon and Gene move in in London started to Venn diagram with hers.
“I gotta credit Debbie [Gwyther] massively too, ” says Liam. “She was like, ‘Come on, man. You’re in a good place, do it – she deserves it.’ Obviously, it should’ve happened years ago… but, it’s great. We’ve been hanging out loads. She fitted in straightaway. The lads love her, Debbie loves her, she’s part of the gang. I mean, she’s moody! She’s got a temper just like me. But it’s all good.”
Molly features in As It Was, the Charlie Lightening documentary shot over the comeback period of As You Were, following Liam on tour, on holiday, back to his mum’s, in the studio and in various palatial hotel suites around the world. It was meant to end with Liam’s enormous 2018 Finsbury Park show and come out that year, but for various reasons it was delayed until this summer. You sense that Liam is a bit tired of it now.
“As much as people think my ego is out of control, I’m not arsed about having a film about me, ” he shrugs. “It was nice to document the comeback, I suppose, but can I really be arsed having a camera in my face when I’m on holiday? There are some good bits in it and I’m sure people will enjoy it, but put it out now and fuck off. I keep telling people not to get too excited. It’s not Star Wars!”
There are no Oasis songs featured in As It Was, even in the segments where Oasis are playing, after Noel refused permission. Liam blames a Twitter spat between their kids that escalated. “Yeah, he wrote them, but he was part of a band, and I was in that band singing them. If I was singing his solo gear, then OK. But these are Oasis songs. They belong to the people. He wrote them, I sang them, we made them.”
He sighs. “Do you think I don’t care if his kids get slagged off on Twitter? My kids get slagged off too. People who are opinionated get slagged off on social media, and his daughter and wife are very opinionated, so some lunatic fans give it back. My kids get it too. It was when I said I don’t care if his kids get slagged off on Twitter that he went, ‘Well, that’s the end of it now.’ Part 900.”
Our kids: with sons Lennon (left) and Gene (right), and daughter Molly.
“Who left the oven on?” Liam – he’s still smokin’.
“I know my place. There’s a lot to be said for knowing your place: some people want to be everything, the singer, the writer, the guitarist, on nose flute, and end up being nothing very good. I’m a singer. I’m the geezer at the front.”
“I don’t know what Brexit is. Does anyone, really? All I do know is that David Cameron wants his bollocks fucking electrocuting for bringing it on in the first place. I like going to Europe! I like that freedom.”
Will it ever end between them? Liam doesn’t think so. “No, because I’ve still got the hump. All I ever give him is love but he slags me off, so I’m gonna bite. Then again, without us there’d be nothing. Music would be dead because everyone is so nice. It needs us to stir it up.”
All this seems a shame. Can this fraternal feud still be going on, really? Both Gallaghers are doing well professionally and seem very happy personally, but imagine Noel and Liam Gallagher back together. Not even necessarily onstage yet, but just around the dinner table with their families. They’re rock’s greatest double act and that world is diminished without it, but so is their family. What joy would it bring if they were making their nieces and nephews laugh as hard as their own children? Still, if Liam can reconcile with his daughter, anything is possible.
Right now, though, Liam has to go and rehearse for the live performance that will accompany the As It Was premiere at Alexandra Palace.
He sets off marching along the first-floor corridor of the labyrinthine Renaissance shouting, “Deborah! Deborah!!” unaware, no doubt, that Gwyther is waiting in the lobby downstairs.
Liam stops and turns around. He leans in conspiratorially. “See you in Budapest, ” he whispers. He taps his nose and swaggers off, shoulders back, toes out, his huge Stone Island parka swishing extravagantly as he strides.
“DEBORAH!”
See you in Budapest
It is always wise, when drinking, to line the stomach. So we meet in Nobu, in the Kempinski Hotel, right by the River Danube in Budapest, Hungary, at 7.30pm for an early dinner. Tomorrow there is a 12-hour video shoot for Shockwave scheduled, and the same is inked in for the day after, but there’s nothing in the diary until then so a round of vodkas and gins please, barman, and plenty of raw fish too. Liam Gallagher is on easy time. “Go on, have the last oyster, ” he says, revealing that he gave them up years ago after a heavy night in Philadelphia when Oasis were staying in a hotel where you could order oysters on room service. “Me, Whitey and Guigs got really stoned and kept ordering trays of them.”
In the morning, he came downstairs to reception to find tour manager Maggie Mouzakitis in a furious row with the man behind the desk. “Some joker charged 150 oysters to your room, ” she told him, enraged. “Er, that was me actually, ” he whispered to her apologetically. Which means they had a stomach-turning 50 room-service oysters each.
“It was really good weed, ” he shrugs. He’ll tell you how good that Philly weed was. “All night we were talking about going to the beach in the morning, I think that’s why we kept ordering oysters. Then Whitey said [crafty Cockney accent], ‘Er, there’s no beach in Philadelphia!’” Liam disagreed. Listen! You could hear the surf from their room. “I went over to the window, pulled back the curtain to show them the sea… it was an air-conditioning unit in a brick wall.” He throws his hands up. “I don’t smoke weed any more.” The last time he did, he found himself having a whitey to Fat White Family. “Lennon’s bang into them and he was playing this tune by them on holiday. I had a bit of weed, because I was on holiday, and it was strong. You know when you have to sneak off because you’re having a mad one? That was me. I had to go and have a word with myself in a cupboard and all I could hear was this song by Fat White Family that sounded like Nightclubbing by Iggy Pop on a loop, for about an hour. It was top.”
Joining Liam for dinner tonight are Debbie and Katie Gwyther, the identical twins with whom Liam spends much of his time. He’s very rarely without Debbie, and Debbie wants Katie around whenever possible, so they are a tight unit of mischief, mockery and low-key mayhem who somehow manage to get everything done daily, often in quite trying circumstances.
Three nights earlier, on 12 May, Debbie suddenly realised that she hadn’t factored Manchester City winning the league title into his week’s schedule as Liam celebrated exuberantly with Gene at full time in their front room, before urgently cracking open a bottle of vodka. There was serious Liam business in the diary all week, starting first thing. She quickly initiated a secret salvage operation. “I had three double vodkas in a row, was completely off my tits and ready to hit the town, ” he says, “but there was nobody to go out with. Even our Paul was busy all of a sudden. Bit fishy, if you ask me. But for the best. I was in bed by 8.30.”
Tonight, then, his tie is slightly loosened, even if next week’s Greek holiday with the entire Gwyther clan, his sons and Molly is when the celebrations will officially kick in. He’s a bit scared. “Debbie’s family can drink like Russians and they never know when to go to bed, so I’ll have to be on my best form.”
He asks for the bill and orders another round of vodkas while we await a cab to take us 500 metres around the corner to their hotel, The Four Seasons. There, in the majestic, marble and otherwise mostly silent bar, vodkas fade into espresso Martinis and back into vodkas, as Liam contemplates his distant future beyond Why Me? Why Not.
“I’d love to make a punk record, like The Stooges, ” he says, standing over the table and miming striking an aggressive power chord on an invisible guitar. “Otherwise, you can fall into that trap too easily of, ‘Oh, here’s another ballad.’ I don’t want to do any ballads next time. I just want to make something fucking raucous. It probably wouldn’t sell, but it would be good. I’d love to do an angry record, no strings, just fucking ag. That’s why I like slowthai. That kid’s got something Pistols about him.”
Gene Gallagher hipped Liam to slowthai. “I love his Doorman tune. We’re going to have him tour with us.” slowthai’s British street-rap forebears Sleaford Mods, on the other hand, do not pass the Liam G taste test. He wrinkles his nose. “I don’t know about Sleaford Mods, man, ” he says. “I know lots of people dig it. I’ve got mates going on about them, but it always reminds me of the old Cillit Bang ad. Do you remember that?”
He stands up again and starts to rap in the style of Sleaford Mods, with a strong hint of the man from the 1990s Cillit Bang adverts.
“I left my bag in the tea/And the c**t got fucking stewed/ putting out me fucking bin bags/Puts me in a fucking mood/CILLIT BANG!/ CILLIT BANG!”
He sits down again. “Do you know what I mean? I like the geezer’s energy, but every record is just a drum machine and him shouting Cillit Bang. Imagine if they added loads of guitars.” Liam swings round on his chair. “Four more espresso Martinis, please, mate!”
We step outside to recalibrate with fresh air and nicotine. The breeze is lovely. Suddenly, we’re veering from hot topic to hot topic. We try to nail Brexit, but nobody is sure exactly what it is any more.
“I don’t know what Brexit is, ” says Liam. “Does anyone, really? All I do know is that David Cameron wants his bollocks fucking electrocuting for bringing it on in the first place. I like going to Europe! I like that freedom. I get everyone is struggling, especially outside of London. But is that to do with Brexit? I don’t know, man. Seems like a load of fucking bollocks to me.”
We talk about social media and mental health, and about the number of people we know who’ve taken their own lives in recent years. “It definitely seems to be on the increase, ” he says. “That could be an illusion because we’re older, but loads of people I know have gone through it.” He wonders if famous people killing themselves loosens the taboo in the mind of others.
“One thing I do know, though, ” he says, “is social media is really bad for your head. I know it sounds harsh, but I’d ban young kids from using it. It warps you. They’ll all reject it anyway in the future and it’ll just be us silly old c**ts on it.”
And, at some point, we discuss the Caribbean island of Mustique and what a nice place it is for a holiday. Have I been? Not yet. “You should come next time with us, ” suggests Debbie, generously, to Liam’s clear surprise. It is only a short flight on a private plane from St Lucia, after all.
We head back inside for one final round, but the ship is listing ever so slightly and the Gwythers are singing and Liam is giving the barman a thumbs-up and I’m hugging Liam Gallagher goodbye, then hailing a cab to my world traveller hotel, desperately trying not to hurl for the 10-minute ride, Liam’s final words echoing all the way into the Mercure Korona, where I fall asleep fully clothed and with the lights on…
“See you back here at 8am!”
All fired up: a still from the Shockwave video, filmed in Budapest footballer Mario Balotelli – almost an LP-title inspiration.
Why Me? Why Not
Liam gives us the inside track on some other highlights from his forthcoming album.
Once: launches with a stately piano motif that could be from John Lennon’s Imagine album, though Liam thinks it sounds closer to “The Faces and Pink Floyd. It’s a fucking tune, one of the best songs I’ve ever sung.”
One Of Us: starts like a distant cousin of Oasis’s D’You Know What I Mean? as Liam rinses someone (“Act like you don’t remember/You said we’d live forever/You were always one of us”) before heading somewhere far more soulful and funky, ending with a gospel choir singing their “it’s a shame” coda with Liam… “No, that’s Andrew Wyatt on his own, ” reveals Liam. “It’s like he’s got five black chicks trying to get out of him. [Puts on whiney American voice] ‘Oh I’m not sure about my voice’. Listen, you’re American, you love the sound of your own voice: get in that booth!” Another surprise contributor making his debut on One Of Us is Gene Gallagher, Liam’s 17-year old son, on bongos. “First time he’s ever done it, ” says Liam, proudly. “Cans on, tap tap tap. He got the groove in one take.”
Be Still: a classic Oasis-style rocker to get the first 10 rows of a hall bouncing before they’ve even learnt the lyrics.
Why Me? Why Not: “I was going to call the album Omnipresent, which I loved. Then I wrote a song called Why Me? Why Not. It goes: ‘Why me/Why not/This time, I’m coming ready or not/I’m so low/I’m so high/ I’m tight-lipped/I’m Jedi…’ I had thought of calling the album Why Always Me, after Mario Balotelli, but this is better. It’s got a Come Together vibe – it’s all been done before. I’m not down on myself! I just want to be humble because I always want to be better.”
WITH THANKS TO RIFF RAFF AND FRANÇOIS ROUSSELET. PICTURE: GETTY.
Liam Gallagher is a morning person. Even this morning, when his three drinking companions are still drunk, and Katie Gwyther is in the lobby looking at a camera-phone photo of her sister from last night lying on the carpet outside her hotel room and nobody can remember the circumstances, much less taking a photo of it.
He is up with the lark, no matter how heavy the night. “As long as there are no drugs involved, ” he says, “I am happy. If I wake up and there’s been no snifferoo I am overjoyed with a booze hangover. I have to clear the whole week otherwise and I can’t be doing that.”
Today, he rose at 6.30, looked through the window at the freezing, sodden springtime Budapest morning and decided against a run. He crossed the corridor and ducked into the empty spa for a spruce and a paddle. It was gorgeous.
“I woke up to him saying, ‘Babe, I was like a baby frog!’” says Debbie, climbing into our super-sized cab. “I am not a morning person.”
Liam kindly hands over a coffee and settles in for what turns out to be an hourlong drive, beyond the Budapest suburbs to an outside film set on an industrial estate. The journey allows plenty of silent internal debate about whether a journalist violently throwing up on Liam Gallagher during a long car ride with him would be good, or bad, for a story.
Arriving on site, we are greeted by a crew and team of extras the size of a domestic TV soap. Everyone is ready for Liam Gallagher. They’ve been ready since 7am, two hours ago. Can Liam have a little powder on his face first, please? Certainly. A Hungarian man in too-short jeans and a mullet comes into Liam’s dressing room, takes out a pair of scissors, a comb and starts fluffing Liam’s hair…
Woahwoahwoahwoah! Woah!
Mullet-man is dispatched very quickly. Make-up, not hair, people. “Nobody with a mullet is touching my barnet, ” Liam says when the dude has left.
Word arrives that the shoot’s French director, François Rousselet, is unhappy with Liam’s parka. Too blue. Would he mind terribly trying on his green parka instead? Liam does so but something is wrong, it doesn’t hang right, and no. Liam won’t wear it. He puts his blue Stone Island back on, takes off the arm tag and says, “I’m alright in this, thanks. It’s always at the airport that they tell you what to bring. It’s not as if I don’t have a green parka at home, I’ve hundreds of the fuckers.”
Be seeing you: rock’s finest frontman leads the way once more.
“I’ve got so many parkas I can’t hang them all up. I’d rather throw the house out than the parkas.”
This is not an exaggeration. Liam has so many parkas that he and Debbie are seriously considering moving from the house they recently bought to a new one with more wardrobe space. “I’ve got so many parkas I can’t hang them all up and I’d rather throw the house out than the parkas, ” he says.
A runner arrives with a short, tan cowboy jacket for Liam to try on and is dispatched with a very firm glare. No fucking way. Can Liam have a large coffee please? Of course. A cup is delivered with two Nespressos in it. Liam winces as he sips it. “It’ll have to do, ” he says, “as I’m sure Bono has never said.” Conditions on set are testing: the rain arrives heavily as soon as Liam does, and is practically horizontal by the time he is on his 20th take of walking down a convincing New York cityscape constructed in the Hungarian countryside, miming the chorus from his brand new single.
One more time, please. Liam complies without complaint, happy as ever to be working, to be at the centre of his universe, spreading joy in song on the closest terms to his own that he can find. A man with a spoon in a world of soup, enjoying every delicious last mouthful.
Ask Liam!
We threw open the interviewing process to an Oasis fans group, Oasis Anonymous, and these are the answers to their best Liam Gallagher questions.
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Acquiesce, soon to be unveiled by Liam live, with the crowd filling in for Noel surprise Oasis fan, Kendrick Lamar.
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The ill-advised “Bon Jovi” sleeveless era; with “legend” Guigsy; John Lennon, whose ghost Liam saw. Possibly.
INSTAGRAM, SHUTTERSTOCK, MATRIX PICTURES, GETTY
1 Are you going to do Acquiesce live with the crowd singing Noel’s lines?
LG: “I would. We’ve not rehearsed it, but it would be mega. I certainly wouldn’t get some other c**t to do Noel’s bits. Look, we’ll do it once and if it falls flat on its face we’ll never do it again.”
2 What do you make of Kendrick Lamar wearing Oasis T-shirts?
LG: “What a fucking dude. I don’t know much about him, but fair play. He wears more Oasis T-shirts than one? Well, he’s got more than I have then. I always thought Marilyn Manson was the most surprising Oasis fan. I might bust out my cut-off Leo Sayer T-shirt for Glastonbury.”
3 When was the last time you saw Guigsy?
LG: “Not seen him since the day he left Oasis [in 1999]. Last I heard of him he went to the cricket at Lords with Whitey [Alan White] and was carried out, smashed, all white hair, looking like David Icke. Legend. I love him.”
4 What was your worst fashion mistake?
LG: “The cut-off sleeves. It wasn’t a stage! Just the once, and I wouldn’t normally comment on it, but that’s the one. The cut-off sleeves and the scarf. I don’t know what I was going for, but it looked a bit Bon Jovi and that wasn’t it. I’d probably lifted one weight and thought, ‘Yeah, you look cool.’”
5 Have you ever seen a ghost?
LG: “Years ago I thought I saw the ghost of John Lennon in Liverpool, in a hotel. I was passed out in my bed, off my box, woke up and – in my head – I saw John Lennon at the window, wearing a denim jacket, long hair, round bins and no beard. He was at the window, waving. To be fair, it couldn’t have been a ghost because ghosts are in black and white. Lennon was colour. They can be colour? We need to look into that. But he would be, wouldn’t he, he was Psychedelic John. He looked very well. He didn’t look dead.”
Paper
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