Oasis reunion: It felt like it might never happen – now, finally, the Gallagher brothers are back
Listening to Noel Gallagher over the years, for a long time it didn’t feel like this was part of the masterplan.
He has spoken several times of the difficult decision he made to quit Oasis in 2009. The band was his life and the choice not made lightly, but ending things then was the best thing for everyone, he told Sky Arts a few years ago. The fact they didn’t continue was a big part of the reason they are now “up there with all the greats”.
The older Gallagher brother was well aware the years apart – the brothers’ often funny but frustrating feud, the unanswered question of whether they would ever bury the hatchet and the hope that maybe, one day, it might just happen – all amplified their legend.
The Gallagher brothers got together for this picture in July, their first photograph together in years. Pic: Simon Emmett
Rumours have come and gone over the years, propelled in no small part by messages from Liam Gallagher on social media. He often teased, but never made any secret of wanting to bring Oasis back. The sticking point seemed to be Noel.
But in 2022, Liam played gigs at Knebworth – the site of Oasis’s most famous, history-making gigs. Earlier this year, he got in early to mark the anniversary of their debut album Definitely Maybe with his own solo tour, no sign of the man who wrote the songs.
Noel created the music, Liam brings it snarlingly, viscerally alive. Him doing these shows alone felt like it could be a death knell for a reunion. When asked about Liam by a fan during one of his shows with his current band, the High Flying Birds, only a few weeks ago, Noel reportedly said his younger brother should be “thankful for my genius” and told the crowd: “Just remember who wrote all the f***ing songs.”
Pic: Oasis/Michael Spencer Jones
‘They hadn’t spoken in goodness knows how long’
Even the new artwork for Definitely Maybe (pictured above), released for the 30th anniversary this week, shows a reworking of that famous album cover – shot at guitarist Bonehead’s house in Manchester – this time with the band members absent from the room. With no Liam on the floorboards, no Noel staring up at the spinning globe, it felt like a statement: Oasis really have left the building.
Designer Brian Cannon, who worked on the artwork for all of Oasis’s early music and now runs the Microdot memorabilia stores, says he was as surprised as anyone by the reunion announcement.
“A lot of people say to me, it’s all a big marketing ploy,” he says, of the brothers’ fall-out. “No, it isn’t, they genuinely hadn’t spoken to each other for goodness knows how long. And Noel’s got a very successful solo career that he’s very content with and doing very well. I didn’t see this coming, I really didn’t.”
Photographer Michael Spencer Jones, who captured the images for all the Oasis albums and singles in the band’s heyday, says the sibling rivalry was always there. “It’s such a major part of the potion that was Oasis.”
Read more:
Cool Britannia: Life in the UK in the ’90s
A timeline of Britpop’s most successful band
Noel Gallagher has had success with the High Flying Birds. Pic: Reuters/Dylan Martinez
But there have been whispers for months now, reports from industry insiders saying it was only a matter of time. In January 2023, Noel announced his separation from his now ex-wife Sara MacDonald, who did not get on with Liam, leading to speculation he might become more open to making amends.
More recently, following reports of shows booked for Wembley, fans have once again pointed to teases from Liam on social media – “I never did like that word FORMER” he posted on Sunday morning – and a recent interview given by Noel in which he spoke in complimentary terms about his little brother’s voice: “When I’d sing a song it would sound good. When he’d sing it, it would sound great.”
Neither of these things made a reunion a certainty. While Noel may not have liked his brother at times, he never underestimated the shared power their bristling sibling rivalry brought to Oasis. “I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without him, he wouldn’t have got anywhere without me,” he told journalists at an awards ceremony in 2019.
Liam Gallagher has been performing as a solo artist for several years. Pic: PA
‘The stars have aligned’ – but statement gives little away
Oasis in their heyday were like no other live band. The shows were electrifying, the energy raw, in an era of optimism and fun in the 1990s that the Gallagher brothers defined. In later years, Noel may not have been a fan of the Cool Britannia tag, but that’s exactly what it was.
So now, will this reunion just be about the gigs? Will there be new music? Could the Gallagher brothers even be friends again?
The reunion statement gives little away. “The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.” Further details say there was “no great revelatory moment”, but rather “the gradual realisation that the time is right” – but the Gallaghers have not really addressed the fact they haven’t been on speaking terms for years. We want to know who reached out first? How did they finally come to an agreement? And what did their mum, Peggy, say about her sons finally getting their acts together?
Whatever has happened behind the scenes, the frost has definitely thawed. In 2020, Liam said Oasis had been offered £100m to reform – a claim quickly denied by Noel, who suggested the remark was a publicity move to promote a single. The deal they have signed now will undoubtedly be worth megabucks. But even before the announcement was made, Liam was quick to put anyone suggesting this was only about the money in their place.
“Your attitude stinks,” was his reply to anyone questioning the motives. Positivity received a different response. “Your attitude is BIBLICAL.”
You only have to look at the crowds at Liam’s solo shows – full of teenagers, as well as those of us who were there the first time round in the 1990s – to see how the music has filtered through generations. The singer has said several times he would like younger fans to see the full Oasis live experience.
Read more:
‘Everyone was out of control in the ’90s’
The ‘unsolvable conundrum’ of Oasis’s biggest album
Now, they just have to deliver.
“There’s two schools of thoughts on this and at one time I would have fallen into the latter,” says Cannon. “One being: great, yes, fantastic. The second: no, leave it be, let it lie, it’s gone, you might tarnish the past.
“But. We’re living through strange times in this country at the minute, globally as well. There’s a lot of division, recent events have been quite shocking. [A reunion] will undoubtedly bring a lot of happiness to a lot of people and I’m all in favour of a lot of people being happy. So, yeah, it’s got to be a good thing.”
“There should be an album, I think,” says Spencer Jones. “It would be great if there was more music to come.”
Next year marks the 30th anniversary of their second album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? Both Noel and Liam will be well aware of the expectation, how much these shows mean to fans. Get them wrong, and there’s the potential for the legacy, the memories, to be spoiled.
Get them right, and Oasis live forever all over again.
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
Read more:
G7 summit ‘all about the Donald’ – analysis
Scrambled G7 agenda as leaders race to de-escalate Israel-Iran conflict
In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.
Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report
Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.
It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike