The beef between the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel Gallagher is no secret. The split of Oasis certainly shocked the fans back in the day. In 2009, the band parted ways immediately following a backstage tiff in Paris.
Tension had been brewing in the time building up to their scheduled performance at Rock en Seine festival. The weekend prior, Oasis pulled out of headlining V Festival because Liam Gallagher was suffering from laryngitis, and rumors floated about their tumultuous relationship.
Noel Gallagher opens up on their last concert
After touring non-stop around the world for 12 months during the campaign for Dig Out Your Soul, Oasis self-capitulated and didn’t complete the run. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was the night in Paris, and that was a fight. There’s no hidden darkness,” Noel Gallagher said to Esquire in 2015.
“He goes out the dressing room, for whatever reason, he went to his own dressing room, and he came back with a guitar, and he started wielding it like an axe, and I’m not f***ing kidding,” Noel claimed of the incident in 2011 (via Huff Post). “And I’m making light of it because it’s kind of what I do, but it was a real unnecessary violent act, and he’s swinging this guitar around, he nearly took my face off with it”.
He added:
“And it ended up on the floor, and I put it out of its misery. And then I said, well look, I mean, there were people who were in the band, looking the other way, it wasn’t even a big dressing room. And I was like, you know what? I’m f**king out of here. And at that point, someone came in and said five minutes!… I kind of got in the car and I sat there for five minutes, and I just said f*** it, I can’t do it anymore.”
From that moment, Oasis was dead, and Noel has seldom looked back upon the decision with an ounce of regret. However, he later admitted that part of him wishes the band fulfilled their duties and played in Paris following the blazing row. While the argument sealed Oasis’ fate, Gallagher believes it could have been the perfect way to bow out.
He told the Daily Star’s Wired Column in 2021:
“We were getting pissed and fighting and then me going: Fuck it, I’m going home, fuck off! With the benefit of time, I don’t know whether it would have been better to stay and do the gig, which would have been like a monumental, mad f***ing Oasis gig because the fight would have carried on to the stage, maybe not the physical fighting but the verbals between us.”
Gallagher conceded:
“It would have been a mad gig. Sometimes I think: ‘I wish I had the memory of that gig.’ That would have been the way to go out. But it had to happen.”
