Noon, 26 May: Côte Brasserie, Highgate, London
Liam Gallagher is sitting on the deck of a polite brasserie in North London, expressionless in the midday sun. He's wearing graduated shades, a patchwork brown-and-grey leather bomber, a dark-navy T-shirt, knee-length shorts and Adidas trainers.
You can't mistake Liam Gallagher. He looks like no one else. A man whose gait and aspect is so cartoonish, so familiarly him - legs wide, feet almost parallel to the plane of his chest, knees half bent, arms swinging like The Jungle Book's King Louie, lips in full pout - that his is a physicality, a silhouette, as recognisable as Alfred Hitchcock's. Or Batman's. Or Mickey Mouse.
It's something that seems to represent everything you think you know about the singer - lairy, self-confident, confrontational, iconic. More than anyone I've ever interviewed you can tell Gallagher's mood by the way he moves. Or doesn't move. His physical tells don't so much hide in plain sight as hit you smack between the eyes and as such can change the temperature of a bar, car, rehearsal studio, dressing room or stadium, in an instant.
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Yet he is a man who very rarely smiles. Even when he's content. Like he is today. Sitting next to Gallagher is a pretty, petite brunette, while in front of him is a large glass of blushing rosé, beads of condensation forming like small pearls against the cold, clear surface. In his hands are the keys to his new house, on which he completed only an hour earlier. Much later on this afternoon, Gallagher will ask me if I want to go and see his latest acquisition. The suggestion is quickly nixed by the woman to his immediate left.
The women's name is Debbie Gwyther, Liam's girlfriend since his divorce from his second wife, Nicole Appleton, in 2014. Together with her twin sister, Katie Gwyther, Debbie has taken charge of Gallagher's day-to-day management and diary, not least after he embarked on a solo career, the beginning of which took root over 16 months ago. The Gwyther sisters are, as I will learn during the next three weeks, something of a force to be reckoned with. At times, it's not so much a question of whether the Gwyther sisters can keep up with Liam Gallagher, as can Liam Gallagher, now 44, keep up with the Gwyther sisters.
Manchester Poetry 1: Tambourine Dreams"I don't think I've ever gone to the cashpoint and pressed 'Balance on screen'. For 20 f*ing years I've put my card in, pressed for £100, crossed my fingers, said a little prayer and money's come out. I've no idea how much money I've had or lost. I didn't have a guitar habit because I could never play; I had a tambourine habit once, though. But, to be honest, you play one tambourine, you've played them all, mate..."
Once fist bumps are dispensed with, Liam and I move to a table away from the main party. I start by telling him why I am here. I tell him I want his side of the story. To get past the clipped one-liners about his brother Noel. About why his previous band Beady Eye soured. About the fight in Paris. About the three-and-a-half years he spent in the wilderness, going through a messy divorce and ready to give it all up. To flee. To sit under a foreign sun, drink himself to death and forget about everything he'd ever done.
About songwriting, his and his brother's. About singing, his and his brother's. About regrets. About his confrontational behaviour. About the two ex-wives and the four kids. About the rumoured all-day drinking sessions. About digging his brother out "for sport". About being the physical embodiment of everything that many feel is wrong with British men born of a certain time and certain era. About being "laddism's" patient zero. About being an antihero. About what he's thinking when he runs at 5am on Hampstead Heath. About why he feels this is his last chance. About rebirth. About redemption. About God, the creation of the universe, angels and, why not, about those astonishing eyebrows too.
"I was born in Longsight, which is on Stockport Road. We moved to Burnage and then moved further up when Mum and Dad split." Liam was the youngest of three sons - Paul was born first, followed by Noel. Liam came six years later. Their father, Tommy, was violent. Liam saw the abuse but escaped some of the roughest treatment. In a bid to protect her children, their mother, Peggy, packed their bags one night and left.
Gallagher has only spoken to his father a couple of times since, mainly to tell him never to contact his family again. "People think that we lived on council estates in a box of flats, but they were decent houses. It weren't a zoo. It was all right, to be fair. I've been to worse places. There are worse places down the road..."
Education, however, had nothing the youngest Gallagher cared for. He wasn't a bad kid. Mischievous, errant, yes, but not bad. He was simply absent, uninterested and, for the most part, high. "I didn't go to school to learn, did I? I just went because my mum was the dinner lady. She'd go, 'What have you got next, Liam?' 'Oh, it's double religion.' And I'd cross over the railway tracks to my mate's to smoke weed. Didn't learn a thing. Left with no exams." Manchester Poetry 2: Where Was He While He Was Getting High?"Never been to rehab. I had my drug hell when I was about 15, going around like Pac-Man, eating hundreds of mushrooms. Me and my mate got a bit eager and munched on a load sitting in this shed. I could see he was losing the plot so I decided we should go for a walk. A storm was coming; it was thunder and lightning - biblical. You know when you see puddles of petrol on the road? They looked like angry rainbows. We are tripping our tits off. We decide to walk to hospital. We turn to this nurse and say, 'Excuse me, love, we've been taking a load of mushrooms and it's not going well. Is there any chance we could just stay here until it's over?' I figured they were going to syringe the shit out of us, but she took us to a white room and told us to sit down. A totally white room, which if you're as high as Elton John in '77 is not ideal. People are coming into the A&E with their fing heads and arms hanging off, having been in car crashes. We're like, 'For f*'s sake...' Anything after that, a few lines of coke with a supermodel? Piece of piss, mate."*
Gallagher couldn't see the point of music until he turned 16. While his older brother picked up an acoustic guitar and spent long days and nights noodling away at the beginnings of rock'n'roll history, getting seriously stoned while becoming a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, Liam was out "scallywaging". There's a story, retold in Supersonic, the Oasis documentary, about Gallagher being hit on the head with a hammer aged 16. As Oasis mythology has it, he then "heard" music. The truth, as always, is a little more prosaic.
"I just thought music was for losers. If I ever saw anyone with a guitar I was like, 'Go and kick a football, you weirdo.' The Manchester music scene was so grim in the Eighties, soppy bands like The Smiths. I was like, 'F*** that.' I wanted to be a footballer, but I wasn't disciplined enough. Growing up I just wanted to do as little as possible. That's why, eventually, the rock'n'roll thing clicked. Sitting about drinking, looking good, taking drugs, wearing nice clothes, shouting into a microphone with your mates... I'll do a bit of that."
Acid house, The Haçienda, ecstasy - the Madchester scene was in full bloom in the late-Eighties. "I went to The Haçienda. I liked some of the music, but even then I knew I needed a bit more substance. I remember coming out of the club one night and going home and upstairs and putting on The Stone Roses. The main thing about it I liked? It had an end. Not like dance tracks that go on for three f***ing days. It started, it took you somewhere and then it stopped."
In 1991, however, the youngest Gallagher walked into an opportunity. A Mancunian band called The Rain were looking for a new singer. Gallagher got wind of the opening and thought, "Well, why not?" Aside from, "putting a record on and humming along", Gallagher had yet to stand in front of anything other than a mirror and try to sing. "I kind of just knew I could do it. I went to see The Rain in Yates's Wine Bar in Didsbury; it left me buzzing. I knew Guigsy [Paul McGuigan, bass] and Bonehead [Paul Arthurs, guitar]. They lived up the road. I mean, the music wasn't any good, but they asked me to audition. I was like, 'Audition?' Like they were the f***ing Rolling Stones or something. So I went and had a little singsong."
Gallagher approached being a singer like everything he's taken on before and since: with an arrogant sense of nonchalance. "I guess I was nervous, but you have to deal with it. I had f*** all else. I saw it as a stepping stone. In the back of my head that day I knew that if I could get in here, I could go back to our kid [Noel], who'd been writing a shit load of songs and he could join as well and then we'd be a top band." How did he know Noel's songs were any good? "I'd been sharing a room with him for God knows how many years so I'd heard what he was writing. I knew how good he was, how good we could be. And we were. It happened. It began."
The end of Oasis happened on 28 August 2009, backstage in Paris. The band had been going for nearly two decades yet the relationship between the Gallaghers had been steadily deteriorating for two years. What happened on that warm night in the French capital proved too much for the elder Gallagher. He quit. At a press conference sometime after, Noel explained his side of the story - you can find the full transcript online. Needless to say, guitars were wielded, plums were thrown.
What it came down to was this: working with Liam Gallagher is bad for your mental health and, quite possibly, bad for your physical wellbeing too. Noel had, quite simply, had enough: enough of Liam's recklessness, enough of his mercurial unpredictability and enough of his verbal and physical eruptions. "It's a shame. I was comfortable in that band," Noel said at the time. "At the end of the day, he doesn't like me. He doesn't like me in a violent way."
Back in Highgate, Gallagher asks the waitress for another bottle of rosé - our second, possibly our third, certainly not our last of the afternoon - and I ask him to tell me precisely what went down that night. This is your chance, I tell him, to document your side of the story. "I've heard Noel's version a million f***ing times. I'll happily tell you mine. I'm not shy of it and, no, I'm not bitter either. I like to get to the bottom of things. I'm like Columbo.
"Now, I realise I'm not the easiest person to work with, but when you join a rock'n'roll band, for me, there are no limits - you drink, you take drugs, you party, you mess up, you stop. And then you think about it and move on. That all seemed to go out of the window with Noel. He was the sensible one, I get it, but you can be too sensible. As far as I'm concerned, a big rule book came out and he started ticking people off one by one."
When did this start? "F*** knows. Maybe a year before. Beforehand, we had our scraps and then we'd get back together and have a breather. All of a sudden Noel was Eamonn fing Andrews from This Is Your Life, with a big red book going, 'What time do you call this? It says here that I am in charge and you can't be turning up late like that.' I'm like, 'F off, man.' Oasis were never professional. That wasn't what we were about. He wandered off sometimes and all..." Noel wouldn't show for up gigs? "No, his ego is too big not to turn up."
In past interviews, Noel has indicated that his relationship with some members of the press was treated with suspicion by his brother. Is this true? "Well, to cut a long story short, for years the band prided itself on not having tabloid fing journalists in the dressing room. All of a sudden I saw Dominic Mohan and some other fing clown from the Sun waltzing around backstage, necking our champagne. Not having it."
To be fair to Liam, having endured years of being doorstepped and the nation's editors muckracking to sell papers, you can see why he might loathe journalists. "I was seeing the Sun around all the time. I was thinking, 'What the f*** is this about?' That caused a lot of fing aggro, in Paris and in the build-up to Paris. I was going, 'What you fing doing having them here?' I knew that if I stepped out of line they were going to write a story about me. Or write a story about my other brother [Paul], saying he's on benefits. That was going down. Yet the geezer who was writing it was in the corner of my f***ing dressing room getting pissed on my ticket. And Noel, was like, 'He's my mate.' Oh, he's your mate now, is he? And Noel knows how I am. I don't have any of that."
I ask Gallagher if, as is documented, he swung at his brother with a guitar. "What, I wielded it 'like an axe'? Leave it out, mate. He's been watching too many episodes of Hollyoaks. I'm not inclined like that and I never fing hit my brother because I fing love him. Not that night anyway. There was a guitar being booted, yes, but because he booted mine across the room first. But he set booby traps for me, stuff he knew I hated, all that last year, and me being me I walked straight into them. He knew he wanted to go solo. He knew we weren't selling records. He knew we were on the descent and, yes, we all knew we'd probably peaked at Knebworth in '96. He just didn't have the balls to say he wanted to leave. So he set me up to look like the bad guy."
You genuinely believe that? "Without a doubt. I'll tell it to my grave. I heard one record company executive in LA asking Noel to go solo ten years before the scrap. But there you go. The rest is history. But one thing that I will fing say, I will never, ever be fing Noel Gallagher's muppet. I started that band with Bonehead and Guigsy, he wrote the songs and I sang them and gave them a bit of spirit and we are both equal as far as I'm concerned. So you want to go fing solo, go for it, but you take your stupid little fans with you, because I don't want them. They're the ones that ruined fing Oasis, the cheeky cs. If it weren't for me there would be no fing Oasis. He knows he f***ing stitched that band up for his own benefits."
But you're not bitter?
"No."
6.15pm, 10 June: Backstage, Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Two weeks is a long time if you're Liam Gallagher. After the Manchester Arena bombing at the Ariana Grande concert on 22 May killed 22 people, the Oasis song "Don't Look Back In Anger" became the unofficial anthem sung at vigils throughout the city and beyond.
This is week two of Gallagher's two-week soft tour to promote his first single, "Wall Of Glass", and his first ever solo album, As You Were, released in October. There seems to be genuine good feeling for the youngest Gallagher - both from the journalists he loathes and from the fans that adore him - and the wave of emotion flooding the nation, whether anger or fear or both, seems to be propelling these early gigs into cathartic moments of collective ecstasy. The crowd, both the young and the older, roar for the new songs and the old favourites.
Manchester Poetry 3: WhatsApp Ricky"My kids fing love grime music. Stormzy, Skepta - he seems pretty mad. I like him. They also like that bloke, WhatsApp Ricky. You know, the American geezer, stylish, funny gold teeth..." You mean A$AP Rocky? "Oh, yeah, that's the fella. WhatsApp Ricky. That's a better fing name anyway."
Sitting down in the dressing room a couple of hours before stage time, Gallagher is buoyant. We talk about how the tour is panning out, about how his slot at Rock Am Ring festival in Germany was cancelled due to a terror alert - "some mental case with a backpack and a dodgy pass" - about singing "Live Forever" with old foe Chris Martin at the One Love Manchester gig and his subsequent tweet barbing his brother Noel for not showing up. "It was never about Oasis reforming," Gallagher insists. "He should have shown up. It was embarrassing."
It had been Noel's 50th birthday the weekend before last, three days, in fact, after our first meeting, and although Noel couldn't make it to the gig - he was on a long-planned family holiday in Italy - he apparently gave Martin his blessing to sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" with Ariana Grande while also donating all proceeds from the single to the fund created for the victims. Liam followed suit with his earnings. Whether or not Noel had given his blessing for Martin to sing the other Oasis hit with his younger brother is, however, another question, although sources tell me that "Chris and Noel's relationship is finished."
The conversation settles on family, immediate, present and absent. I ask him if he thinks his estranged Irish father might be in the crowd tonight. "He won't be fing getting in anyway. Or if he does he'll be fing leaving with a black eye." Does Gallagher ever think he'll patch it up with his father? "I doubt it. He lives round the corner from my mum still, in Manchester. My mum sees him and my auntie sees him, but, no, I doubt it. It's far too long, far too gone."
I ask Gallagher about the tweets from Lisa Moorish, the mother of one of his four children, all of them conceived by different mothers: Lennon Gallagher, 17, with first wife, Patsy Kensit; Gene Gallagher, 16, with Nicole Appleton, his second wife; Gemma Gallagher, four, with Liza Ghorbani, a journalist from the New York Times, who had a brief relationship with Gallagher in 2013; and Molly Moorish, 20, his first daughter, born in 1998, the result of a relationship Gallagher had with her mother while still married to Kensit. As Liam needled Noel on social media about his no-show at the charity concert, Moorish very publicly rushed to Noel's defence via Twitter: "Maybe he's too busy looking after his kids and the daughter you've never met! As you were x LM." The tweet has since been deleted.
When this subject comes up, Gallagher hesitates. He is a man who, on the whole, works on immediate instinct. Mostly he speaks before he thinks and, as such, refreshingly, his answers always come from the heart. And, in truth, his is a big heart, if a little misguided at times. "Don't speak about that, mate. She's had her day in the sun." What about your daughter? "The kid I haven't seen. We'll see one day, but, no, not seen her. But if I met her, she'd be cool. She's welcome in my world and that, you know what I mean? Without a doubt. But I just ain't met her because her mam's... Listen, we don't work. We don't get on."
Has Molly ever tried to contact you? "No." Would you be open to that though? "I would be, yes. I mean I'm open to everything. But at the moment it ain't happening. Got no problem with the girl whatsoever. The girl's been looked after and clothed and fed and sent to lovely schools. I bought them a house and all that tack. I just think she's best off with her mum." Do you not think she'd like to get to know her father? "Yeah, I'm sure she would. They aren't good when they are forced, these things. I think we leave it be. See what happens. If it happens it happens. Certainly, wouldn't turn her away, man.
"Let it be."
8pm, 11 June: Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow
"I'll sell you my mam's car for a ticket?"
The girl outside Barrowlands, pleading for a pass to watch Gallagher sing, can't be more than 12, a beautiful, brown-eyed Glaswegian girl in a dirty white singlet and black denim miniskirt. The crowd is rowdier, more menacing than Dublin. Maybe it's the venue - an old ballroom fallen into a state of disrepair that makes it appear like something from Banksy's Dismaland, a ruin of its former Thirties glory, broken fluorescent lights and chipped pebble dash - or maybe it's the rain that's been hammering down like sheet metal ever since we flew in from Dublin on a prop plane early this morning. Manchester Poetry 4: Frontmanliness Is Next To GodlinessMick Jagger? "Fair play to ol' dinosaur hips, but I'm not that man. I'm anti-entertainment. Poor sod, he's got to dance until he's 108." Dave Grohl? "Ruined it for all of us. He broke his leg and still toured. Who does that? Now if I have a 'cold' I can't cancel because I'll look like a wuss." Roger Daltrey? "Top frontman. Hard as f*ing metal. I reckon he was the first lad in a band." Bono? "I had the Bono chat, yeah. Wish I'd had an out-of-body experience instead. Not in my top 50." For anyone who fails to believe the continuing appeal the youngest Gallagher has to the national consciousness I would suggest walking through a busy international hub with the man while he's wearing a parka the colour of a traffic cone. Heads turn like falling dominos, while Gallagher, with his Little Tramp legs, parts the crowds like some sort of rock'n'roll Moses. Behind him he leaves a whispering chorus of "Was that...?"
Yet despite Gallagher heading to bed about an hour after the gig last night - unlike the rest of the band and management, some of whom are nursing heavy hangovers - there's a different atmosphere in the dressing room this evening. Yesterday, Gallagher was firing on all cylinders (Debbie: "You've got to do Carpool Karaoke, Liam." Gallagher: "No thank you very much. No f***ing chance, mate. With that fat bloke from Kevin & Perry?" Debbie: "It's called Gavin & Stacey and you've never watched it." Gallagher: "I don't need to watch it to know I won't like it. James Corden is a knob head."), but tonight he's strutting around in a much darker mood.
After a performance with a voice noticeably better for the care he's been taking of it - a "regime" that seems to consist of "No fags before showtime" - we head back to the dressing room where Gallagher settles down on a sofa with a bottle of red wine. Amid the post-show melee is the band, Debbie and Katie, Amy the tour manager, Charlie Lightening (a filmmaker and photographer who is shooting material for a potential documentary), plus a few old friends, such as Oasis' Paul Arthurs, who performed guitar duties on "Be Here Now" this evening, and members of Scottish indie tearaways The View.
All of a sudden I am told, "Liam wants to clear the dressing room." I'm unceremoniously kicked out. One minute I'm sharing touring war stories with band mates and management, next I'm stood outside the venue in the drizzle with half a warm Corona, an AAA laminate stuck to my jeans and no phone signal. No one else is asked to leave.
Prior to Dublin I was told that Liam "would be wanting to party" in Glasgow. Perhaps, I wonder in the cab back to the hotel, it's a case - as he told his brother ceaselessly - that he simply cannot abide journalists around. Nonetheless, the swiftness of my exit throws me. I sit at the hotel bar until 3am, talking to the handful of fans waiting. I want to try and speak to Gallagher again. Eventually he and the wide-eyed rabble reappear. Up the stairs he struts and straight to a cordoned-off area out of sight. He looks straight through me.
"No," I am told, when I ask about joining. "He doesn't want you here." I finish my drink. I go to bed.
11am, 30 June: Côte Brasserie, Highgate, London
"Sorry about Glasgow. Just needed some space without you lot being in my face. It happens. Don't take it personally."
As we were then. Gallagher and I are back at the brasserie in Highgate round the corner from his flat. Since we last met, he's played Glastonbury to more than 100,000 people, including Johnny Depp. Allegedly, I tell him, Gallagher and "Jack Sparrow" went on an all-night rave up and down the Rabbit Hole? "Where's that? The Ocado Tent? Not exactly, no. We had a chat. I had a bit of that" - he indicates the international sign language for using narcotics - "and he met my kids. We were in a fing teepee. For fing ages."
Halcyon days, indeed. But back in 2015, Liam Gallagher was leaving on a jet plane and never coming back. He'd had enough. Enough of the court cases, ex-wives and battles over his child-support payments. And enough, astonishingly, of music, calling to an end his post-Oasis band, Beady Eye, in mid-2014. "I've never done therapy, although they tried to get me to see someone back in the Nineties because they told me I was taking too many drugs. But two years ago, I was depressed and just really fing bored. All my money was going on lawyers. I had to take the punches. No band, no gigs, no tour, just lawyers with their fing black eyes and their massive bills - first time in my life since I was 17, I had nothing to do, no escape.
"It was time to get real. I knew that whatever happened with the money I would be left with I wouldn't be able to live where I wanted to live in London, so I might have to f*** off for a bit and get a nice place abroad. Get a bit of sun, eat some nice food and try and come up with a plan. Just start again." How did Debbie take this news? "Not the best. But I said it wouldn't be far, a couple of hours on the plane. I got this close to going by myself. Googling properties. It weren't fing Magaluf, I'm not that broke, but not far off. My kids weren't bothered. They were just asking if it would have a pool or not, the cheeky fs."
So what happened? "I don't actually know. The music came. I started getting up at 3am and going to a little spot in our flat, picking up a guitar and tinkering away. It was my witching hour. And then I'd go back the next night. I'd never been interested in songwriting before."
It seems not writing with a close family member has helped Gallagher's confidence - perhaps he finally feels he's allowed to make mistakes, experiment a little. "I wasn't insecure, but I definitely know that I can't do the big choruses. With Noel it was different, it was his thing, not mine. And he's f***ing good at it, so there was no need. But maybe working with someone you don't know at all is easier, for me, anyway. There are no boundaries, no one saying, 'No, not like that, like this.' It's like when you have a problem, it's sometimes easier to talk to a stranger than your best mate. Or a mother. Or a brother. You can let it all out."
One song on Gallagher's new record is quite clearly coming from a place of vengeance. It's called "Greedy Soul" and although he won't admit to it fully, it's hard to separate his personal woes - the divorces, the court cases - from such venomous lyrics:
"I'm going toe-to-toe, With a greedy soul, He's going down tonight, Gonna be out a while, She's got a six six six, I've got a crucifix, She's got a spinning head, Like seeing Grateful Dead."
"It's about her. It's about them, all of 'em," he admits. "All that court money could have gone to my kids."
Was Gallagher ever bothered that he never wrote any of the Oasis songs? Was just singing them enough? "Always. Honestly. I knew the score. That was Noel's thing. My thing was the whole cliché: the sex, the drugs, the rock'n'roll. I lived it, mate. I was it. And that's why Oasis worked. We couldn't have both been boring fs and neither could we have both been headcases like me. And I know how much it annoyed him. He did the graft while I went out and undid the graft. But Oasis wouldn't have worked with two Liams or two Noels. The Rolling Stones wouldn't have worked if they were nuns, would they? Listen, I'm sorry he got dealt the card he did to write the songs, but who's the one with eight houses now? As he says himself, he might have the rock-star life, but who is the real rock star here?" Manchester Poetry 5: The Upside Down"I believe in paralleled dimensions, mate. People always say there's two sides of the coin, but what about the third side? The bit in the middle? That's what I'm into. The width. I believe in angels. God? I do and I don't believe in Him. Or Her. I dig science, too. But the big-bang theory? Not really a theory, is it? What, one explosion and that was it? Bit fing boring, if you ask me." So Liam didn't go to Spain. He didn't leg it. He didn't drown his sorrows on the Costa Del Sol. He stayed. He fought. Yet despite the success of his solo record thus far keeping him fizzed, it's clear to see there is some anger still in there. There is rage behind those eyes that burn like pilot lights in the dark. And that's always been the difference between the two Gallagher brothers: Noel made peace with the world a long time ago, while Liam is still fighting against some great conspiracy. An injustice. The world is still full of soup. And Liam Gallagher is still holding a fork. But perhaps he wouldn't have it any other way. After all, what does a fighter do when there's nothing left to fight against?
I go on to tell him I don't think Noel would wish his solo record to fail. "Yeah, I know. We talk via my mum. I ask her how the little one is. He asks when my record is coming out. But, listen, it's not really just Noel that I have the hump with. It's all of them. The entire Oasis fing team. That's all I'd known since 18 years old and in 2009 I was cast out into the wilderness. Noel pulled the plug and [then] silence. I don't need them to feel sorry for me, or go, 'I hope you're all right,' and all that, but you know what? I fing would. I'd have gone, 'Listen, I heard about that, man. I'm sorry about that. If you need help, give us a shout.' Not one of them cs, none of 'em. Now, do you not think that is a bit fing off?
By this point, Gallagher is more or less standing on the table. "I'm fing glad I'm back, mate, because I know for a fact they're sitting there - and you say they might be happy - but they're sitting there going, "F me, mate. He's come again, man. Two divorces, fing illegitimate kids, fing two failed bands behind him, three bad haircuts and he's still fing coming. Oh, and I'm gonna fing come even more, mate, do you know what I mean? Because that's the way it is. That's who I am. That's what I do. I'm not gonna sit back and let them win. So they should be f***ing scared. They should be afraid. Without a doubt. This is the third coming." Manchester Poetry 6: Reflection"I am a conspiracy."
My time with Liam Gallagher is up, which I must say is a shame. He's got to go and get his son a 16th-birthday present. "He wants some complicated BMX bike thing. What's wrong with a stripper?"
Gallagher is a surrealist. He's also genuine. Yes, he's a bit destructive. He's combative. And I'd never want go on a world tour with him. But he's also incredibly funny and, when not in a sulk, good company. When he's on, he's on. Which is what you can imagine Noel, if anything, probably misses. The laughs. Not the fights. Nor the bad blood or the things that can never be unsaid. But the world through the kaleidoscopic, messed-up mind of his younger brother, Liam. Because you know between 1991 and 1996 no one had more fun than those two. Not even Kate Moss' accountant.
On my way back to the office, I take a look back in my notebook, scanning the scribbles from that first meeting with Gallagher over a month ago. There's a page with something scrawled across it, covering the entirety of one side. The handwriting isn't mine - it's actually far better. And a bit girly. I hazily remember Gallagher taking my pad from me at one point and asking to borrow a pen.
And there it is in his own words, all you really need ever say about the man, myth and mystery to understand him:
"Imagine a world without Liam Gallagher?"
Signed: "Elvis."
As You Were is out on 6 October Photographs by: Gavin Bond Grooming by: Natalya Chew Hair by: Nathan Jasztal Photography Assistants: Reece Pickering; Bran Symondson Digital technician: Alex Cornes Styling assistant: Chris Tang With special thanks to Sara Crepaldi GQ shot on location in The Musician's Penthouse at Corinthia Hotel London
Like this? Now read:
The George Michael documentary 'Freedom' is like 'Amy' – if Amy had directed it
All the winners and speeches of the GQ Men of the Year Awards 2017
Dele Alli is the homegrown hope of English football
Oasis: Supersonic - Noel and Liam Gallagher speak exclusively to GQ