This Friday, July 25, the Oasis Live ’25 juggernaut arrives in London for the initial run of five nights at Wembley Stadium. London, as much as their native Manchester, is entwined with Oasis, the city and band a symbiotic double-helix of opportunity and opportunism, of hedonism and heartbreak, of inevitable comedowns and unexpected comebacks. No wonder so many of those early Oasis songs were about dreams, romance and yearning for escape — it’s what defines Noel Gallagher’s spirit.
⦿ Oasis at Wembley: Excitement builds as Liam and Noel Gallagher to play first London show of reunion tour
“When I first met Noel around the Supersonic single release (April 1994) he said he wanted to move to London,” says music journalist Ted Kessler, co-author of the fascinating new book, A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Recorded. “He said, ‘I wanna live in a big flat on Abbey Road and live like The Beatles.’ He’d been travelling around the world with the Inspiral Carpets, came back, was living in Manchester with his girlfriend and they split up. Maybe when you end a big relationship and become a pop star it’s ‘let’s leave this city now’. Manchester is quite small. Every time he goes out in London he has a good time. With his pop star friends and the Creation [Records] crew.”
Noel was the first of the Gallaghers to arrive, settling in Camden in ’94, the place he deemed “the centre of the universe for music”. Liam finally arrived in ’96, the year Oasis were so enormous they played Manchester’s Maine Road Stadium, twice, and the landmark Knebworth mega gigs. Staggeringly, that Maine Road weekend the 23-year-old Liam was still living at home in Burnage, sleeping in the bedroom he and Noel grew up in.
“I remember doing the first Maine Road gig,” Liam told me in 2007. “Come back home, sitting on me bed. That same bed. F***ing hell, man, just played that gig, insane. The next day, I moved in with Patsy Kensit. Moved out of me mam’s house into a f***ing million-pound house in St John’s Wood. That was good. I haven’t been back since. Why would you go back there man? F*** that.”
Oasis, born in Burnage, made in their imaginations, could not be more Mancunian and brought their inherent northern swagger to a willing, adoptive city. It was London where they thrived, where they toiled one-louder in studios, played their first industry-packed shows and forged their mythological reputation. Favouring the north, they caroused in the Pembroke Castle pub in Primrose Hill, close to Creation Records, and Camden’s Good Mixer, fabled boozer of the emerging Britpop massive and a thrilled music press. Paul Moody, music journalist, 1990s reveller and frontman/guitarist with psych-rock troupe The Studio 68, remembers his first sighting, in The Good Mixer.
“This was still the early days when it was Blur’s centre of operations — Graham Coxon and [Food Records label boss] Andy Ross practically lived in there,” he recalls. “Oasis were in the back bar hanging out and playing pool, almost willing something to happen. Liam was in his element, winking at girls and chatting people up. It was an audacious move — a land grab, it was Oasis saying, ‘London is ours now … take us on if you dare.’”
Famously, Liam once jostled Coxon at the urinals in the Mixer, mid-flow, causing the hypersensitive guitarist to piss on his own trousers. A Coxon complaint saw Oasis kicked out. The party reconvened at Camden’s Underworld where an altercation erupted between the Gallaghers, record label employees and the unwashed hobos we once called crusties. Once again, Oasis were ousted. That night Kessler was there “working” for NME.
“I didn’t foresee them becoming the size they are now. But I did think, ‘this band’s gonna be as big as the Happy Mondays’”
“Liam was only 21 and I think he was trying to meet people and be friendly!” he laughs. “It was 1.30 in the morning, everyone was extraordinarily pissed. It was like Carry on Bundle, with crusties. I didn’t foresee them becoming the size they are now, or even at Knebworth. But I did think, ‘this band’s gonna be as big as the Happy Mondays’. I did think there was gonna be a couple of years’ japes! And maybe good tunes.”
The London-based media encouraged the tomfoolery, gleefully reporting every booze-berserk bender, bust-up and romantic dalliance. Soon, Liam was living with fiancé Patsy Kensit in Primrose Hill, also home to north London carousers Kate Moss, Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Ewan McGregor, Sienna Miller and Rhys Ifans. Simultaneously, Noel was in nearby Belsize Park with first wife Meg Matthews, in a £2.5 million property he named Supernova Heights, party epicentre to the newly dubbed Primrose Hill Set and anyone else who knew the address.
“I operated an open-door policy,” Noel told the Guardian in 2008. “I’d spent so long on the dole it was like, this is it, I’m living the dream, man. I invited a full awards ceremony back to mine once, George Best included. I won the last award of the day, gave out my address and said, ‘Everybody back to mine’. Loads came. It was a great day. The police were called and all sorts.”
By now he’d befriended fellow Londoner Paul Weller, deeming the Modfather “a nutter”. During a Bonfire Night party round Supernova Heights, Weller flailed around the garden, last man standing, playing guitar with his shirt off, shouting “Well-ah! Well-ah!”
“Only according to him!” Weller told me, incredulously, in 2012, long sober by then. “I had a piss in his garden, which he wasn’t very happy about. I only went to his house once. But I stayed for three days. Possibly outstayed my welcome. We were doing gear [cocaine] and I’ll do it until it runs out. The Who’s Who of Britpop was there, but it’s all a bit murky. [ruefully] The good old days.”
“The cabbie said he’d just dropped Noel off. Instead of the fare, he’d asked for a line of coke as payment, and Noel duly obliged
“Noel knew his rock history,” says Moody. “Like The Beatles before him, he knew moving to the capital signified that Oasis were more than the latest big provincial band. Calling his house Supernova Heights was a stroke of genius — it gave Britpop a focal point and an address as iconic as the flat in Montagu Square where Hendrix and John Lennon lived.”
The hedonistic high jinks were a gift to London, sprinkling the city in the magic dust of glamour, excess, economic buoyancy and youthful invincibility. Even the cabbies joined in.
“I remember getting into a black taxi in Islington around the time of Knebworth,” says Moody. “The cabbie told me he’d just dropped Noel off. Instead of the fare, he’d asked for a line of coke as payment, and Noel duly obliged before going on his way. I’m not sure if it was true but it summed up the ‘anything goes’ mood of the times. London was a blizzard kingdom and the Gallaghers were its emperors. Not so much Caligula as Kagoul-ia.”
By ’96 London was the centre of so-called Cool Britannia as the Spice Girls emerged alongside peak years for the Young British Artists and fashion maverick Alexander McQueen. By ’97 America had joined in, Vanity Fair publishing its “Cool Britannia” edition, Liam and Patsy on the cover with the words: “London Swings Again!” The Oasis bubble was now so Hindenburg balloon gigantic it could only burst. In ’98, Noel found himself waking up in sweats at 3pm wondering who these people were in his living room. It couldn’t go on. In ’98 he simply stopped taking cocaine and left London altogether, for the Buckinghamshire countryside where, in 2001, his marriage ended. He never considered rehab.
I don’t need to pay some geezer four grand an hour to tell me things I already know about myself,” Noel told me in Wheeler End Studios, Buckinghamshire, in 2006, not far from where he now lived with second wife Sara McDonald. “People just get swept up with being in London and talk a lot of fanny.”
Liam’s marriage had also broken down, its aftermath played out in the infamous Wembley Stadium show of July 2000 where a wasted Liam called Wembley “a shithole”, called Kensit “a bitch” who’d left him without “a teabag” and asked women in the crowd to bare their breasts. Thankfully, for this year’s Wembley dates, Liam hasn’t touched booze on stage since.
Oasis at Wembley in numbers
630,000 - number of people Oasis will play to at Wembley over seven gigs this Summer
2009 - the last year Oasis played Wembley, with a run of three gigs that July, on their Dig Out Your Soul tour
2 - fingers Liam held up as he walked onstage drunk at Wembley in 2000. Noel later called it Oasis’ “lowest point”
900,000 - litres of beer projected to be consumer during Oasis’ seven nights at Wembley
23 - number of songs in the Oasis ‘25 setlist (with no changes in it so far)
£940m - estimated boost to the UK economy from the Oasis ‘25 tour
Today, both Gallaghers live in the city which shaped their adult lives. Noel, after his divorce from McDonald in 2023 moved back to London from his £8 million Hampshire mansion, into a Maida Vale apartment. While builders were in renovating, he lived in Claridge’s in Mayfair up to four nights a week, in a £2,500 a night suite. Liam, a Hampstead resident and Heath runner for years, who split with second wife Nicole Appleton in 2013, has lived in a £4 million Highgate mansion since 2020 with his fiancée/manager Debbie Gwyther. Kessler, who’s interviewed solo Liam many times in the past decade, sees a settled man, at last.
“Liam really likes Highgate, understandably,” he tells us. “He really likes his house. I’m not sure he was quite as comfortable in any other place as he is right now. That’s a lot to do with his relationship. And Debbie’s brought in good friends around them, they have a very good social life that’s fairly contained and trustworthy. And it’s just a nice part of the world.”
Kessler, who saw the opening Oasis reunion show in Cardiff, sees nothing but continued brotherly harmony, and cosmopolitan crowd euphoria, for Wembley.
“They’re in such a zone right now I can’t see how they can derail this — having seen the show, it was so good.” He laughs. “But, as a football manager would say, one game at a time.”
