What occurred the night time Liam Gallagher got here to my flat in 1996

I first met Liam Gallagher in early 1995, at the NME Brat Awards, the supposedly ‘edgy’ alternative to the Brit Awards.

I was standing at the bar with the drummer and keyboard player from the band Pulp when he came bowling towards us in double denim, the very air around him rippling with kinetic energy and I could not resist an exchange: ‘Liam! You don’t know me but . . .’

That year Blur was named Best Band, Kylie Minogue was voted Most Desirable Human Being and Pulp Fiction was Film Of The Year. But Liam was having a go at the also-rans.

‘Fookin’ Shed Seven, fookin’ c****!’ he replied.

‘I just wanted to tell you, you have a very charismatic overbite, not unlike Bruce Springsteen,’ I told him. His legendary V-sign sprung upwards from his knees, arranging two fingers either side of my nose. ‘Fook off!’ he announced and swerved away, leaving the three of us honking with laughter.

Naturally, I was delighted. The Oasis of the mid-1990s were ‘the best soap on the telly’, as Liam once described them, a ­permanently cursing cartoon rock’n’roll caper starring two belligerent brothers locked in verbal one-upmanship, where Liam deemed Noel ‘a potato’ and Noel described his little brother as ‘a man with a fork in a world full of soup’.

I loved them from the moment I first heard them, in April 1994. A freelance music ­journalist in my late 20s then working for NME, I was casually watching ITV’s The Chart Show one Saturday morning when an arresting sound suddenly pealed through the screen, like an urchin trailing a knitting ­needle along an iron railing.

Simultaneously, a head appeared, outrageously attractive, with a Mod-ish haircut, marshmallow lips and ­enormous deep blue eyes, unblinking through tinted circular glasses. Liam began to sing: ‘I need to be myself, I can’t be no one else . . .’

Bolting upright, I was transfixed. By the time the song ended – this thrilling, sneering, ­portentous wash of sound called Supersonic, their debut single – I was in favourite-new-band love, a moment made all the more ­indelible by the news, that very morning, of the violent suicide in America of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Overnight, the searchlight of youth culture swung away from the ­painfully negative towards the ecstatically positive.

And 30 years later, this surge of belief in what a rock’n’roll band can do is happening all over again.

At the weekend, a reported 14million people attempted to buy tickets for the Oasis ­reunion tour 2025 in what’s been described as a ‘Ticketmaster bloodbath’, with crooks attempting to flog resale tickets for up to £10,000.

This did not happen even with the mighty Taylor Swift. As an Oasis believer, with an interest, still, in the shifting plains of popular culture, even I didn’t see this coming.

Up until last Monday, before the comeback announcement triggered a global tsunami of excitement, ­history had not been kind to the Manchester renegades. Routinely dismissed as a retro, monochrome, cultural pastiche, they hadn’t been cool for years, their fanbase seen as blokey beer swiggers forever ­blubbing over their Beatles B-sides.

There was some of that back in the 1990s, certainly, but for me and my friends, mostly 20-something women, Oasis were much more.

They were the very epicentre of the hedonistic hoopla of that decade, all drinking, smoking, dancing and cackling together. Like them, we were forever out, in the pubs, clubs and venues, deemed ‘ladettes’ by the media for behaving, apparently, like blokes, as if blokes have the monopoly on the spirit of the ­party-hard reveller.

We were always singing Oasis songs. Those immortal first two albums, Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? were not written for men. They were written for romantics, for daydream believers, for ordinary young people from ordinary towns, who had little in their lives but their friendships and their hope, who yearned for escape, for a better way of life, maybe even a thrilling lifelong adventure. Young people like me.

Noel would tell me, many years later, that the purpose of Oasis was to ‘celebrate the euphoria of life’. Liam, when asked the same question, had his own take: ‘Oasis,’ he declared, ‘is all about freedom.’

Chaos, back then, was a good thing, all part of the big adventure. One night in 1996 I’d gone out for a meal (unusual for the 1990s) in ­Finsbury Park, North London were I lived, returned with food poisoning and vomited in the upstairs bathroom. I was in the bedroom when I heard a commotion downstairs.

My then housemate, the brother of the co-founder of Creation Records (Oasis’s label at the time), had come home for only the third night in six months. He was with a loud, audibly Mancunian friend who sounded like . . . could it be? . . . Noel Gallagher! Sliding off the bed, I pressed my head to the carpet.

‘And wait ’til they hear who I’m fookin’ shaggin,’ I now clearly heard: ‘Patsy Kensit!’

It was Liam! The planet’s foremost rock’n’roll frontman and talismanic hero was revelling in my living room. And in my condition I was in no state to join him. So I listened some more. After an hour, two words – ‘Robbie Williams!’ – prompted the calling of a cab and the slamming of the front door. In 1996, Robbie ­Williams, in his post-Take That rock’n’roll delirium phase, was just the man to help them carry on with the infinite partying.

I crept downstairs and witnessed exactly what you’d expect to witness had Liam Gallagher just vacated your living room in 1996: six empty cans of lager, one empty packet of Benson & Hedges and a selection of CDs bearing the residue of several lines of doubtless top-quality cocaine. A year later Liam would marry Patsy Kensit and Noel would marry Meg Mathews, the latter ­couple soon living in Supernova Heights in London’s Belsize Park where the party indeed went champagne supernova, forever populated by the Britpop massive.

A few months after the visitation from Liam, Oasis were playing to 250,000 people over two nights at Knebworth where we invited journalists were not only on the jolly, but outrageously encouraged: there were 7,000 names on the guest list, the enormous backstage area a ­purpose-built village where pristine white-linen marquees were named Gin Bar and Champagne Bar, where tantalising barbecues sizzled (and no one bothered to eat), where ­caricaturists and magicians roamed purely for our entertainment.

And all of it, all night, was free. No wonder, for the actual show itself, I remember very little other than three words bawled by Noel from the lip of the stage, pointing into the cheering crowd: ‘This is history.’

These were the high jinks to be had around Oasis in those far-off, fabled 1990s, and the world is of course unrecognisable now.

It was already unrecognisable in 2001, the year I finally met the ­Gallagher brothers ‘professionally’ in a rare joint interview after years of stand-off argy-bargy. At 11am on September 12, 2001, we’d all been up all night, as Noel observed, ‘watching people falling out the fookin’ sky’. With the 9/11 atrocity as our backdrop, the interview evolved into Noel-led hysteria, decimating the newly prevailing youth culture. Britpop was long over and teen-pop now ruled in a shiny World of Entertainment dominated by Celebrity Culture, talent shows, reality TV, media-trained non-personalities, an aggressively corporate, bean-counting mentality and bands-as-brands.

‘The Man,’ hollered Noel, ‘has taken over the world! The last two great, working-class things, football and music, they’re coaching all the talent out of people. The [record] labels are ‘get me the money, get me it now’. Ten years later it’ll be your Greatest Hits. Ten years later it’ll be your Greatest Hits Remastered and ten years later your Greatest Hits Remastered and ­Repackaged and then when one of you dies your Greatest Hits all over again with sleeve-notes by some geezer who walked your dog once!’

Soon, Noel was sprinting around our sofas hollering to Liam, ‘So you sing louder! There’s a war going on, the world’s gonna fookin’ end!’ Noel then bolted out the door as a cackling Liam announced, ‘our kid’s a cracker again’, his face all lit up (for once) with brotherly love.

Five years later Oasis released their ‘retrospective collection’ Stop The Clocks, which I wrote the sleeve-notes for, I’m told at Noel’s request, despite having never walked his dog once.

Here, in 2024, the 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe, culture has moved beyond the unrecognisable into the unthinkable. Britain’s biggest band, Coldplay, are not inviting 7,000 freeloaders to a free-for-all booze bender; they’re spending their millions, instead, on reducing their carbon footprint.

Today, you’d be lucky to be offered a free can of Rockstar non-alcoholic energy drink.

The young have swapped chaos for control, their mental health tested daily by the digital age which formed them, forever mindful of self-empowerment, safe spaces and wellness in a world where body coach Joe Wicks ‘plays’ Glastonbury.

For 1990s revellers, most of us now in our 50s, like the ­Gallaghers, it all seems so self-conscious, so self-censoring, so serious. ­Especially for young women, the days of the rollicking ‘ladette’ now seemingly a blip in time. We just didn’t have all this pressure: to look good, feel good, be good, do good, no peer-on-peer 24/7 surveillance, living inside our phones, forever instructed to live our ‘best lives’. Back then, we were ­willingly living our worst lives.

The carefree chaos of the 1990s can never return. There isn’t the money or the freedom.

Yet the rush of excitement this tour has unleashed has proved that there’s something millions of us miss. Maybe, in these serious, fearful, overly regulated, overly stressed, psychologically skewed and financially precarious times, we’re forgetting to celebrate the euphoria of life, forgetting what freedom feels like. And maybe the boys from Burnage can temporarily provide it; once again, for those of us who lived it – and for the first time for those who didn’t.

For the truth is, while the scale of this excitement has been staggering, it has also been building for years. Throughout the past decade I’ve heard another hitherto unthink­able statement from a spectrum of young people: ‘Things,’ they say, time and again, ‘were so much better in your day.’

This July I saw some evidence, watching Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds in Alexandra Park, North London.

After the lukewarm first half of ‘Birds’ songs, Noel knew what to do, playing nine Oasis classics in a row and I saw, down the front, who Oasis fans are these days: 70 per cent young people, 50 per cent female, teens, 20s and 30-somethings, roaring every word, those euphoric, life-affirming anthems lifting us off the ground just as they had done 30 years before, the communal sing-along so loud it was heard two miles away.

There was a difference: I saw no booze-related chaos whatsoever. The songs brought the chaos.

But just you wait. Next year, there will be thousands upon thousands of women out there, at the shows, bawling along with our sunken jowls and dodgy knees, some with responsible jobs and grown-up kids. And for one night, we 50-somethings will be ‘mad­fer-it’ once again, showing Oasis’s new fans how women made the most of those boisterous 1990s freedoms. Pint in hand.