Liam Gallagher On Oasis, Style And Changing His Habits

Today, the singer is something of a reformed character. It’s over two years since Oasis acrimoniously split.

The man I’m talking with lives with his second wife and their ten-year-old son on the edge of London’s Hampstead Heath.

We’ve been happily discussing the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, nappy-changing and school runs, curious conversation topics for someone who torpedoed Oasis’s first American tour by insulting the audience and hitting his brother, who was banned from Cathay Pacific after an argument and whose part in a brawl in a German hotel cost his management £170,000 in fines. But all that was a decade ago.

Today, Liam Gallagher is something of a reformed character. It’s over two years since Oasis acrimoniously split – or, to be more accurate, since squabbling Noel and Liam finally decided they could no longer work together or even see each other.

Their final falling-out took place before the group’s scheduled performance at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris and resulted in Liam smashing his brother’s prized guitar.

Since then, Liam has formed Beady Eye with Oasis bandmates Andy Bell, Gem Archer and Chris Sharrock, released a top-five album (Different Gear, Still Speeding) and devoted time to his own fashion label, Pretty Green.

I did all sorts for 20-odd years.

When you sit up in a bar and drink 20 pints and smoke and it’s four, five o’clock in the morning and then you can’t sing, it’s rubbish. I’ve done my time with all that, the lack of sleep and the hangovers. Now it’s time for a change. It’s great to have a drink with your mates, but when it’s banging out two or three days of your life, it doesn’t make sense any more. I just got bored of it. I’ve got a lot going on. I want to keep this Beady Eye thing going and focus.

I gave up drinking for three years – I loved it.

The kids seemed to like me a lot more. They said, ‘Your eyes aren’t red and you don’t mumble so much.’

I’m still a young man and I want to get stuff done.

I love running. I’ve got a shed, but there’s not much in it – just a Flymo. Get back to me in a year and you might see some mad gardening going on.

It takes more than blood to be my brother.

I’ve still got the right hump and now the gloves are off. We’re still not talking. If people think I’m going to be happy about the Oasis split, then they’re wrong. Even though I love Beady Eye, I’d prefer to still be in Oasis, because that was my thing. Oasis was my life.

I live and breathe rock ’n’ roll.

This isn’t a hobby for me. It’s been great doing all these little shows, going back to square one. It’s good to see the crowd and hear them. Long may that continue. Big gigs are soulless masses of people – I’m glad I’ve done them, but I don’t miss them. I’ve got nothing to prove anyway.

I’d rather people looked like me than Ronan Keating.

I don’t mind it at all. The more of me in the world the better, I say. I’m down with it. I’ve just got to keep ahead of the pack.

How can you be stylish if you never wash?

Look at these grungers – they just walk around filthy with matted hair and smelly T-shirts, looking like tramps – where’s the park bench and the Special Brew? And I despise this new disease of indie student music – Bloc Party and all that nonsense.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

I always thought Brian Jones looked the b*******. George Harrison was cool and Paul Weller always looked good. Those are the three most stylish men in history for me, and the most overrated is my brother. He dresses like Val Doonican. But it’s the usual stuff, Sixties rock ’n’ roll – the Kinks, the Who, the Stones – that’s the vibe for me. It’s fine as it is, so let it be.

If it doesn’t look good on me then I’m not having it.

I keep an eye on things. I want to make the best clothes for the lad on the street or the next rock star in the making. The way I go about it is that I go through the wardrobe and think, ‘I’d like that new, in a nicer cloth’, and get it made. Or I delve into the past and make the clothes I always wanted. I see my label, Pretty Green, going everywhere.

Quadrophenia – the music, the clothes – is the height of British style.

Better than the Madchester scene or Britpop or anything else. The clothes were cool. A lot of people had nothing in those days – just a scooter and a house party to go to in Brighton. But it was good. There’s too much going on these days. There’s too much choice and not enough quality.

There are more hardcore mods than me.

I definitely go for the mod more than the rocker business, but I like Neil Young, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, a lot of really out-there and psychedelic stuff. To be honest, I’ve got my own thing going on. My style comes from football and all that casual thing.

Everyone had a certain look in the Eighties.

Music and football collided then. Meanwhile, a lot round my way used to wear dinner jackets and flares and walk about with walking sticks, and they looked cool.

I never sold drugs, but to get the odd thing I was a bit of a blagger.

I had honest work in a garden factory creosoting fences, until the boss told me to clean the toilet out. I cleared off, then I worked with my dad on his building firm, went out labouring. I’d go to church with my mum and then go home and see her get proper battered by my dad. She left him when I was ten.

Starting out with Oasis didn’t freak me out at all.

I’d been digging holes in Manchester for the previous four years, so I was ready for it. I was like: here’s your spade, you can have it! It all felt good to me. I didn’t take five years off to sit down and talk about how great I am. We went straight into the studio after the fight in Paris and we haven’t stopped since. You only get one crack at it, so you might as well get on with it, do it well and do it right. The busier the better.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk