Oasis is back, but in some senses it never left.
The Manchester band, whose anthemic songs and sharp-tongued antics helped define the 1990s Britpop era, will return to the stage Friday in Cardiff, Wales, kicking off a global stadium tour. These will be the first Oasis shows since 2009, when the guitarist and primary songwriter Noel Gallagher quit the group, proclaiming that he could no longer stand to work with Liam Gallagher, the lead singer. The brothers, long known for their brawling, have not performed together since, yet they’ve rarely ceded the spotlight.
“They definitely successfully kept themselves in the public eye during the whole breakup period,” said Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor.
The key to their continued relevance hasn’t just been enduring songs like “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova,” but an uncanny ability to keep their famous bickering top of mind using modern tools that didn’t exist when the band’s 1994 debut arrived: social media and blogs.
In the absence of Oasis, the Gallaghers released solo music, but also a barrage of insults and barbs via Liam’s eccentric social media posts and Noel’s dryly provocative interviews, all of it breathlessly documented, aggregated and amplified by British tabloids and the online music press. For listeners who discovered the band after it broke up, this constant hum of comedy and conflict has been a glimpse of the Oasis experience — a more potent distillation of the group’s essence than musical offshoots like Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.
“The only little bits you could get of Oasis — it was their Twitter presence, it was their viral silliness, just their boneheaded attacks at each other online,” said Aidan O’Connell, 26, drummer for the Chicago indie-rock band Smut.
O’Connell became infatuated with the band as an undergraduate in 2017, watching old performances on YouTube and studying its heavily publicized squabbles with other acts, including its Britpop rivals Blur. The two bands’ clashes doubled as symbolic English class warfare — Oasis the uncouth Northerners versus Blur the pretentious Southerners — including on the charts, when Blur’s “Country House” topped Oasis’s “Roll With It” in a much-hyped 1995 battle.
“They figured out that they could be in the news cycle and it not just have to be about their music,” O’Connell said. “Their viral high jinks, it seems like a pretty direct continuation of their Britpop feuding.”
Vozick-Levinson said the Britpop wars were “like social media before social media,” so it’s unsurprising that Liam gravitates toward X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. He’s a master of the form, mesmerizing his 3.8 million followers with unfiltered takes and perplexing, context-free outbursts.
On X, Liam replies to fan questions with garbled candor. Sometimes he offers commentary on soccer (“Pep is God,” he often writes of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola) or describes the vibe at his own concerts as “biblical” in all caps. His timeline is full of extremely British profanity and recurring one-word mantras — often Jamaican terms like “Rastas,” for reasons unexplained. In 2016, he began sharing photos of Noel’s head, captioned “potato.”
“He just blurts out anything,” said Annie Black, a social media manager for the travel website the Points Guy. “He’ll do selfies, he’ll reply to fans that are asking him very specific questions.”
Black, who formerly worked for the music sites Consequence and Paste, said Liam is a throwback to a more accessible era of celebrity social media. “I don’t think he gets into trouble, but if he got into trouble, I don’t know that he would necessarily care,” she said.
Indeed, as Liam told the talk show host Graham Norton of his social media strategy in 2017, “I like winding people up.”
Liam’s surreal online art project has even attracted fans who don’t like his music, such as the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, herself a Twitter virtuoso before leaving the app. In a 2019 interview with Dazed, Bridgers called @LiamGallagher her favorite account even though Oasis “hasn’t really clicked for me.”
Meanwhile, Noel’s X feed is “maintained by his label Sour Mash.” He’s mostly reserved his frank remarks for interviews, naming his price for an Oasis reunion or doling out insults off the cuff.
“It was always so fun interviewing Noel,” said Vozick-Levinson, who has chatted with the guitarist several times. He recalled getting him on the phone to discuss a new solo project, and “after a few minutes of talking about that, I could name almost any other musician or thing that was happening in the world, and he’d instantly come back with this cranky, mean, vividly phrased quote.”
Noel appeared to catch on to one of the internet’s simplest tricks: Talk smack about another artist and it will spread around the globe. In 2013, he had strong words for Arcade Fire’s double album “Reflektor.” (“This is not the ’70s, OK? Go and ask Billy Corgan about a double album,” he said, tossing a stray at the Smashing Pumpkins leader.) Two years later, after describing modern pop as “bland nonsense,” he rejected Vozick-Levinson’s premise that people praise Taylor Swift’s songwriting: “Who says that? Her parents?”
The brothers saved many of their rudest, funniest put-downs for each other. When Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds released a trippy experimental album in 2017, Liam tweeted, “Psychedelic music by a beige drip is like a vegetarian trying to sell you a kebab.”
Noel’s use of a scissors player onstage that year sparked Liam to joke that his own concerts now involved peeling a banana, sharpening a pencil and sticking stickers in a book, all of which “sounds mega with a bit of reverb on.”
In a 2019 Wired feature, Noel shut down reunion talk by directing fans to Liam’s solo shows: “If they want to hear old Oasis songs, they’re being played by a fat man in an anorak somewhere.” That year, complaining to The Guardian that interviewers sometimes ask about his mother, Noel quipped, “I liked her until she gave birth to Liam.”
Sometimes other artists have inserted themselves into the family feud. In 2023, the 1975 frontman Matty Healy, a fellow Mancunian and a spiritual descendant of the Gallaghers, urged them to “stop marding” (a slang term for a petulant tantrum) on CBC Radio One. When Noel responded with name-calling, Healy told a Dublin audience, “The difference between me and Noel is that I do a series of interviews to promote an album, whereas he does an album to promote a series of interviews.”
Hudson Menzel, a 17-year-old Oasis fan from Long Island, used to closely monitor each Liam tweet and Noel interview for intel about a potential reunion. He compared it to the way Swift fans examine her every public action seeking clues about upcoming projects.
Menzel does not doubt the brothers’ apparent hatred for each other was genuine: “If it was a bit, they did a very good job keeping up the bit for 15 years,” he said. However, he conceded, “They might have exaggerated things online just to keep the controversy.”
Daisy Palmer, 19, a fan who lives outside London, said if the mard was a long-form publicity stunt, she does not begrudge Oasis for it.
“I think it’s a good way to keep yourself in the public eye without actually doing a lot,” she said. “It’s a very subtle way of saying, ‘We’re still here, don’t forget about us.’”
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