Liam Gallagher on celebrity, fatherhood and hating Coldplay

Liam Gallagher prefers being a stay-at-home dad these days, but he’s not lost his rock’n’roll swagger

Liam Gallagher says he and his brother “are two totally different people and the sooner people realise that the less we can go on about it”. Fair enough, but, having interviewed Noel several years ago, I can report the Gallagher boys have more in common than being in the same band and having the same mum and dad: extreme candour, for one thing. You asked Noel a question, you got a straight answer. If anything, his kid brother is even more straight-talking. Also (and I didn’t think this could be possible), Liam swears even more.

When I ask Liam what he thinks the public thinks of him, for instance, he says: “Loudmouth blagging gobshite from Manchester…and they’d be totally correct.” Or here he is on the subject of Wayne Rooney’s wedding to Coleen McLoughlin, which had taken place, and subsequently appeared in OK! magazine, not long before we met. “You’ve got this kid who’s fucking 19 [22] or whatever the fuck he is, who 20 minutes ago was playing for Everton, having a five million pound wedding! How do you fucking grasp that?”

“All right,” Liam continues, “he earned his fucking money, do what you want, but I couldn’t live with meself. That to me is just fucking ridiculous. There’s ways of doing it. In fact, what did mine cost? I got married at Marylebone station, er, Marylebone registry office. In and out, no fucking about, it cost £18. Reception over the road, it was nice, we drank champagne, but I’ve still got a lid on it.”

Would anything have induced him to sell the photographs? “Absolutely fucking nothing. It smells funny, it doesn’t sit right. I’d have to be well and truly fucking desperate. I’d have to be homeless. It’s like, haven’t you got e-fucking-nough, you little ****? I find that hard to fucking take. But that’s famous people for yer. When they’re not on the fucking telly they want to be in a fucking magazine and when they’re not in a magazine they want to be on a fucking bottle of water. It’s like, fucking chill the fuck out, you can’t do one fucking job right let alone fucking trying to do fucking five, you *****!”

It’s not just footballers “spending 100 grand on fucking Rolexes” that Liam objects to; he doesn’t have much time, any time, for celebrities per se. “I’m not one of them that walks around town like I’m the king of London. If I need to get milk I go out and get milk, but most of the time I’m indoors.” Noel, he says, “loves being famous. He adores it. I don’t think about it. I don’t do what famous people do. I don’t go to famous-y events. As long as I’m in a band and making music and playing gigs, I couldn’t give a fuck.”

Oasis are soon to release their seventh studio album. “We should have made more, we should be on our tenth or summat,” thinks Liam. “We don’t struggle for songs.” Besides Noel’s output, Liam now writes as well, contributing three (one good, one bad, one indifferent, in my opinion) of 11 tracks on the new album. What’s I’m Outta Time (the good one) about, I ask. “Ain’t got a clue, man. Didn’t sit down to write about being out of time, in time, on fucking time, it wrote itself.” He finds melodies easy, he says, but “I find it hard with words”.

He can be inarticulate in person, too, yet he is one of those people, like John Prescott, whose meaning is crystal clear despite verbal infelicity. Oasis’s publicists are nervous at letting Liam loose in a full-blown one-on-one. He is uncompromising. He doesn’t try to be your friend. His conversational style is combative. He gives an answer, then juts his chin up and stares you out with those unblinking blue eyes. Liam doesn’t trouble with the usual niceties of shifting product either. “Buy it [the new record] or don’t fucking buy it, I’m not mithered either way.”

We’re in a photographic studio in East London, sitting on facing sofas, the publicity team out of sight behind a wall but in earshot. The biggest surprise comes right at the outset. Liam, now 35, is off the fags, off the booze, off “the other stuff” (cocaine) as well. He’s been off them for nine days at any rate. And he has taken up jogging. “Not jogging, man, running. Get up early, live right on the heath [Hampstead], pair of trainers on and away I go. Beautiful.” (I’m going to edit out most of the expletives from here on, I’m sure you’ve got the general idea.)

He covers ten miles in an hour and a half. (That’s a shade over 6.5mph which, sorry Liam, is jogging, not running, speed. But well done anyway.) He comes home, walks his kids to school, has a bath, chills out, watches TV, does “whatever’s on the menu for the day”. When we met, that meant rehearsals for the new tour (now under way in Canada), hence his abstemiousness.

“Last week me voice was a bag o’shite, I had to have a word with meself. I want this to be a success, I want this to be great, I thought I’m going to have to tone it down a bit. Load of big fat lines, load of cigarettes, staying up late talking the same shit you talked the night before and the night before that, that’s not good for it [his voice]. It’s not a big deal. I’ve got willpower.” When his voice is good, he says, “no one can touch me”. (Many would agree.) “And when it’s bad, it’s a bit better than Pete Doherty’s.”

When he does drink, he says, he might “do a bottle of tequila in a couple of hours, no problem. The good stuff, Patrón.” Doesn’t that make him ill? “No, I feel all right. Red wine I can’t handle, just want to batter everyone. On tequila, I’m Bob Monkhouse. I’m a good drinker, but it’s dominos, isn’t it? Get pissed, smoke, do the other…”

I ask if he’s mellowed with age. “I can still go pound for pound with any clown at any time,” he says. “I’m not on about fighting, I can still have it drinking or whatever. But yeah, I’ve mellowed, but not in the sense of liking Radiohead or Coldplay. I don’t hate them. I don’t wish they had accidents. I think their fans are boring and ugly and they don’t look like they’re having a good time.” Liam doesn’t like any contemporary bands. “Not interested. I play the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, Neil Young, the Pistols. Maybe a bit of the Roses. Don’t like modern bands. Topman music, innit?”

These days, he says, “Family’s the most important thing. The kids are just the bollocks, I enjoy their company more than some idiot in a band or some actor. That’s how I’ve changed. Years ago I was in the pub.” Did he always want to be a dad? “No, not really. Just wanted to get off me tits and do music, but once you get your missus pregnant, you’ve got to step up to the plate.”

He has two boys, Lennon, almost 9, who lives with his mum, Liam’s ex-wife Patsy Kensit, and Gene, just 7, who lives with Liam and his second wife, Nicole Appleton of All Saints. The boys attend the same school. Private or state? “Private.” Was that an issue for him? “Not at all. Not a-fucking tall. They’ve got every right to be there as much as some banker’s son. When I pick me kid up, I feel amazing.” Liam left his own school, Catholic, all-boys, at 15. “Had no time for it. Got a job creosoting fences. Fifty quid a week.”

I mention that when I had interviewed Noel, he said he worried he wasn’t a good dad to Anais, then 2, his daughter by Meg Mathews. “He shouldn’t get hung up about it,” says Uncle Liam. “She’s only 8. If any bad days have gone down you make it up to her, don’t you?” As for his own paternal ability: “I’m the bollocks at being a dad. I’m top. We have a lot of fun.” Who’s stricter, him or Nicole? “Me. I’m the bad cop, she’s the good cop. I’m not Hitler, but they’re getting older, they make a mess, they tidy it up.” What if they swear? “I give ’em a medal! Nah, they don’t swear.”

He and his wife don’t go out much, he says. “Done all that, seen it, didn’t like it.” Did you get anything out of it? “Might have had a couple of lines out of it, couple of scraps, lot of earache.” If he and his wife do venture forth, they usually take Gene with them. “Go out at 6, out of there by 7.” Babysitters are not an issue. “Nicole’s mam is round the corner.” The Gallaghers do not employ a nanny. “Don’t need one.”

Liam’s own mother is still in Burnage, the suburb of Manchester where the Gallaghers grew up. He phones her every day. “I enjoy speaking to her.” He offered to buy her a new house. “She said, ‘What would I move for? You can get us a new gate.’ Noel bought her a little cottage in Ireland. She goes there a bit.” Despite his Irish roots, Liam considers himself typically English. “I hate that plastic Paddy thing. I’m into the English thing, music, football, clothes.”

The brothers’ estranged father lives in the house they grew up in. Liam was closer to his dad than were Noel or the eldest boy Paul (“He never beat me up, he beat the other two up”) but even so, he has no contact. “Not interested. Not angry, not sad, just nish.” Have his father’s shortcomings made him try harder as a dad himself? “Nah. I think you’ve got to do it right, not because he didn’t, but because they deserve it. I don’t dwell on it.”

Liam and Nicole have a second home in Henley-on-Thames. “Try to get there every weekend. Watch TV, play with the kids, sit in the garden, get in the pool, get out of the pool, go for a run, normal stuff.” How have the good people of Henley reacted to his arrival? “This lady walked past, she said, ‘You’re the coolest person I’ve seen in Henley since George Harrison.’ They’re pretty much the same as us really, they get a bad rap.” His house in Henley has its own bar, but he only stocks it with booze for special occasions.

I ask Liam if he still feels working class. He pauses. “I’m not one of them that harp on about it like Billy Bragg. I was born on a council estate, we had no money, me mam and dad split up. Now I live in a nice area, kids go to private school, few quid in me pocket, so what? I am what I am. I’m just me. I’m not a flash **** if that’s what you’re saying. And I’m not the other one, whatever that is.” Middle class? “Right. The kids are middle class though, I suppose.”

I say when I asked Steven Gerrard the same question last year, about class, he got shirty. Liam’s interest picks up. “Oh aye, Gerrard got shirty, did he? Did I get shirty then?” Not especially, I reply, and, dropping another name, tell him how Paul Weller described resisting his partner’s attempts to lure him to middle-class dinner parties. “Well, he should have a working-class party, shouldn’t he?” says Liam. “Invite all of them, they won’t come again, will they? ’Cos apparently we’re scum.”

Kids and clothing aside, a lot of our conversation is about what Liam doesn’t like or doesn’t do. He has a Mini and a Range Rover but doesn’t drive, has never learnt. He doesn’t read, apart from to his children. “It’s Grizzly Dad today, about a dad that turns into a bear. Don’t like Dr Seuss, too smart.” He hasn’t got the patience for other books, “and it’s a form of people telling you how it is, isn’t it? I like to make my own mind up.” He doesn’t want to make new friends. “Quite happy with what I’ve got.”

He tends to go to the same pub. “Read the paper, have a beer, someone says ‘Mind if I join you?’, I might shoot the breeze, depends what mood I’m in.” He doesn’t go back to Manchester much, has stopped going to Man City, “just get mithered. Noel goes. He likes signing autographs.” He doesn’t socialise with his brother. “All we need to do is make music together.”

He’s tried golf a few times – “Bit of exercise, spliff, whack fuck out of the balls, beer afterwards, it’s good” – but doesn’t sound as if he’ll be taking it up regularly. Still, if he hadn’t made it as a rock star, he’d have fancied a job “cutting grass on a golf course. Nice and chilled. Outdoors, not inside, walls and that.”

He isn’t interested in politics, although he’ll watch Prime Minister’s Questions. “I like the noises they make.” When his brother went to Downing Street to meet Blair in 1997, he isn’t sure whether he was invited or not, but “I wouldn’t have gone.” He’s lost interest in feuding with other bands. “I’m cool with Damon [Albarn]. That was only a bit of a laugh.” How about Robbie Williams? “Funny how he says a couple of things then moves to LA, know what I mean? Gives it all that and packs his bags.”

He insists he is “a passionate man”, however, and there are three other subjects he becomes passionate about. One is the paparazzi. “See me coming out of a pub with five million birds, charlied out me head, they’ve every right to take a picture. Get in my way when I’m going about me business, freak my kid out, then they get a slap.”

Another is being in Oasis. “We’ve no competition, none at all.” He knows many people, including all critics and his own brother, think the band’s form dipped after the first two electrifying albums, but he isn’t having it. “Just ’cos Noel and a couple of divvy journalists think that doesn’t mean it’s right. I think all our records are great.”

And the other subject is religion. “I don’t pray and I don’t go to church but I’m intrigued by it, I dig it. I’m into the idea that there could be a God and aliens and reincarnation and some geezer years ago turning water into wine. I don’t believe when you die, you die. All the beautiful people who have been and gone, Lennon, Hendrix, they’re somewhere else, man. Whether it’s here or whether it’s there, they’re doing some musical thingummyjig. They got to be somewhere else, haven’t they? I’d like it if everyone were all right at the end of it.”

And shortly after that, Liam, by now a little late to pick his son up, bounces to his feet. He’s taking his lad to the cinema, or, as he puts it, “I’m off to fucking ’ave it with Kung Fu Panda.” Does it feel strange, I ask, to do a big interview for The Times? “No,” he says, staring coolly back, “it’s about fucking time.”

The new Oasis single The Shock of the Lightning is released on September 29, and the album Dig Out Your Soul a week later on October 6, both on their Big Brother label .

via L4e / source: The Times magazine

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