by Paolo Hewitt
For the media, it’s a classic story; the beautiful well-heeled actress taming the man they have imaginatively dubbed ‘the wild man of rock’. In reality, what bugs him the most is that everyone forgets that he is first and foremost a singer, one of the best in the land. He is also totally dedicated to his band and his craft.
‘When it comes to Oasis, Liam is a musical purist,’ Marcus Russell, band manager, says of him. Creation boss Alan McGee’s comment is just as succinct, ‘Liam Gallagher is one of the great soul singers of our time.’
Tonight, Liam is dressed in sandals, light green trousers and a pale striped T-shirt. On the shelf behind him is a picture of him that Patsy took on their recent holiday in Antigua. It shows Liam gazing out to sea. On the kitchen table to his right is an estate agent’s catalogue describing in pictures and words the house he plans to buy. It is totally isolated, a huge building set amidst beautiful English countryside.
For many people, it is hard to imagine the man living in such sedate palatial surroundings. They are used to seeing him in clubs, dishevelled, eyes rolling. They know him for throwing punches or outrageous comments at the media. But over the last three months, Liam passionately insists, he has undergone huge personal changes. The reason he says is his relationship with Patsy.
‘I’m growing older,’ he states firmly, ‘I’m surrounded by kids, a beautiful woman that I love, I’m getting money and I want to do my stuff. See, I’ve changed so much since we’ve been off.
‘I’m not a monkey any more. I’m not into being in a scene where I don’t respect anyone. I want to sharpen myself up. I don’t want a heart attack. I don’t want to get off my tits all the time.
‘I want to get a nice gaff and come home to a beautiful woman, and that is Patsy. I want to be with her forever. She’s got a kid [James, from her marriage to the Simple Minds vocalist Jim Kerr] and I love the kid and I love her. That’s it.’
For many people who have known Liam down the years, those words are unrecognisable, because, frankly, from a very early age, Liam Gallagher has been kicking up an almighty fuss.
He was born on 21 September 1972 in St. Mary’s hospital, Manchester. Surprisingly, his father Thomas doted on him. Unlike Noel or Paul, Liam can only remember his dad hitting him once.
‘He liked me,’ Liam states, ‘because I was the youngest. But I didn’t like him. He shouldn’t have got married and had kids if he wasn’t ready for it.’
Their father’s obvious preference for Liam hurt Noel, and is a major reason as to why their relationship is one of the most complex ever to have been placed under the white heat of public scrutiny.
Noel, and Paul to a lesser extent, took the bruises, the punches, the cuts. Liam was left physically unscathed, but emotionally scarred.
Growing up, Liam was also, by Peggy’s own admission, ‘spoilt’. Therefore, his natural human confidence and spirit was never dented as badly as his brothers’.
At the age of six, and he looked so innocent then, he was hugely disruptive in his primary school, St. Roberts. His teacher one day confessed to Peggy that her youngest son’s daily antics drove her to a nightly intake of Valium. That was Liam at six.
In secondary school, it was no better. He started fights, ran with bad boys, took drugs and alcohol, caused chaos in class and bunked off as much as he could.
It placed Peggy, as one of the school’s dinner ladies, in an impossible situation. After every incident, a teacher would come to remonstrate with her: please control your son. But for Liam, attack is the best form of defence.
‘He was a swine at school,’ Peggy recalls with a smile, ‘and he shamed me, oh, he shamed me. I’d say to him, “You bloody shame me,” and he’d say, “You’re too nice to those teachers, stop sucking up to them.” I’d say to him, “That Mr. Foley [Headmaster], he’s a nice man.” But Liam wouldn’t have it. “You don’t know him, Mum,” he’d say.
‘I think in the end they felt more sorry for me than anything else.’
Liam had undoubtedly inherited large doses of that wildhearted spirit which sustains and propels all Irish rebels. He simply didn’t give a fuck. Ironically, later on in life, the more exposed that attitude became to the public, the more successful he became.
‘I was a cunt,’ he says of his primary school days. ‘I was a cunt,’ he says of his secondary school. No subject interested him. He hated reading, hated studying. It all seemed so fake to him. What does it really matter if you can’t spell mar-ije-uana? You smoke marijuana, you don’t fucking write about it.
Plus, Liam was no fool. He instinctively knew that for him there would be no interesting job to wake up for, no nice house to come home. to. He would join the rest of Manchester on the dole queue and on the make. So that’s what he prepared himself for, not some old nerd’s idea about how best to live your life, but how best to live on your wits.
Liam quickly learnt the art of fronting it. That is, you never betray your inner feelings in front of anyone. Someone offers you a fight and they’re ten stone heavier than you? Show no nerves. Accept the challenge. Because, believe, nine times out of ten the dickhead will back off.
Liam also absolutely refused to bow down to anyone. No one. Teachers, policemen, whoever, he didn’t care. And that included his brother Noel.
Yet, as both brothers confirm, their relationship wasn’t that frictional until Noel joined Oasis. That’s when the locking of heads, like antelopes in a fury, started. Previous to that they shared a bedroom together and, to be honest, didn’t really see that much of each other.
There is a five-year age gap between them, which for children is simply too enormous to breach. By the time Liam started secondary school, St. Marks, Noel was embroiled in glue sniffing and burglary.
The only things that really interested Liam at this point were music, clothes, girls, sport and singing. It was a teacher who took him first to Maine Road to see City play. He became a City fan, though never as committed as his brother or Guigsy.
As a young boy he sang in the school choir and he often pestered his mother to buy him instruments. So she did. Peggy bought him a violin. But Liam’s temperament wasn’t suited to self discipline. After a day of trying, he discarded it. Then it was a guitar. Again, the same result. He was always restless, always looking for some action.
Singing was a different matter. There were no books to learn from, no lessons to carefully absorb. You just opened your mouth and that was it.
‘I often sang around the house,’ Liam says. Yet his first musical passion was hip-hop. He regularly played, much to Noel’s annoyance, Mantronix records such as ‘Bass Line’, and he later learnt how to breakdance and body-pop.
He bought many of Streetsounds’ Electro records, compilations of beat-box music, and he also fell in with a girl graffiti writer called Gina. The pair of them would go round town, spraying various walls. Liam’s tag-name, the signature you leave on your murals, was Galli.
He also knew how attractive he was to girls. It’s hard to believe but he had once gone through a period of carrying a lot of puppy fat. But the weight came off and Liam shot up in height. With his magnetic brooding eyes, tall body and seeming lack of inhibition, he had no problem in persuading girls to do his bidding.
Indeed, in the flush of Oasis’s initial success, Liam was easily the most sexually active of the band. Much to his early delight, his rock-star fantasies all came true. The girls would come to his room and there they would disrobe and he would eagerly take his pleasure.
But once he was physically spent, he instantly felt nothing but emptiness inside. So he would send them away, despite all the promises he had previously made to them about holidays, even marriage on a few occasions. He felt they were shagging Liam Gallagher, the pop star. They would never have gone to bed with him so easily if he hadn’t been famous. They weren’t there for William John Paul Gallagher.
But his mum always was, and that’s why she was the only person he could reveal his dreams to.
‘I remember
Liam getting into music when he left school,’ she recalls, ‘and he sat out there in the kitchen and he said, “I know I’m not much of a singer but I’m as good as anything out there and that’s what I’m going to do.”’
Liam had a point: Manchester has a history of throwing up ‘individual’ vocalists. Morrissey, Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Shaun Ryder are three prime examples.
‘I said, “If that’s what you want to do, Liam, and you’re happy doing it, then you do it.” Then he’d be upstairs, shouting and bawling and he’d have the music on full-blast. I used to go up there and say, “Turn that bloody music down, Liam.” He’d be singing at the top of his voice.’
Liam was expelled from St. Marks at the age of fifteen. His big problem was that of being born in September. Under the law, he would have to attend school for a few more months. Meanwhile, all his mates, people such as Syd, Daryl and Stef, were now out in the big world. So he refused to attend classes.
Peggy was worried sick. She knew that sooner or later the education board would come round and demand he join a school, any school. If he didn’t, a court appearance would be the next step.
‘I kept saying to Liam, you have to go to school because they will take me to court and I haven’t got the money to pay them. Eventually, I went back to the headmaster and I begged him to take Liam back. He said, “Well only because I know you, Mrs. Gallagher, but if he puts one foot out of step until he’s allowed to leave, he’s off the premises.”’
Liam saw the distress he was causing Peggy and that he simply couldn’t handle. Suddenly, he changed, calmed down. He became, by his standards, a model pupil. No trouble, no cheekiness, no fighting. In fact, just before he left, the school even went so far as to find him his first job. He was employed making fences.
He started at eight in the morning and finished at four in the afternoon. He travelled to work by bike and was paid £60 a week.
‘Everything was going nice,’ Peggy recalls, ‘until they told him to clean the toilets. See, everybody had to take their turn cleaning the toilets but Liam said, “I don’t care what they do, I’m not cleaning no toilet for anybody.” So he got on his bike, came home and that was that job done.’
His next job was as a sign-writer, but the company he joined hit bad times and were forced to lay off staff. The unwritten law in such cases is that the last person employed is the first person asked to leave. Liam was made redundant.
He then worked as a car valet before taking over Noel’s old job at Kennedy’s, an Irish building firm who did a lot of work for British Gas.
‘He was in the office answering phones,’ Peggy says, ‘taking orders for different things. I think Liam and Paul worked there at the same time, but Paul was in a different gang. And then they finished with Paul because the building was finished, and Liam decided that no way was he going to go and dig holes for anyone.’
So Liam quit and then signed on. As Les, Noel’s driver, once pointed out, it is the Department of Social Security that is the real Arts Council in Great Britain. They are the ones who support musicians financially.
To supplement his meagre benefit money, Liam and his friends would steal mountain bikes and sell them off. But he never involved himself in bona fide criminal activity. He had the temperament but the thought of distressing Peggy stopped him.
Another facet to Liam’s character was that many of his friends tended to be a couple of years older than him. One example is Guigsy, who Liam met when he was about thirteen through playing football over at the Bluebell pub.
They saw each other regularly for about a year and then, as all teenagers do, they drifted apart. Later on, when Liam was about sixteen, they met up again. Guigsy was now hanging with this guy people called Bonehead. He sported a pencil-thin moustache and was a real character. He too didn’t seem to give a fuck about anything and his individual sense of humour soon won Liam over. Bonehead had been in the band Pleasure In Pain, playing keyboards. Now he, Guigsy and a singer named Hutton and a drummer called Tony McCarroll had formed a group, named Rain.
They invited Liam down to see them play at a pub called Times Square. Unknown to them, Liam was now desperate to join a band.
His desire had been ignited on the night of Noel’s twenty-first birthday when both brothers, separately, had gone to see James, supported by The Stone Roses at the International Two, play an anti-clause-28 benefit gig.
This was the latest bit of vicious Tory law which directly attacked the gay community through censorship. The Gallaghers weren’t arsed about the cause. Live and let live was their motto. But The Roses were playing and that was enough for both of them.
The Stone Roses had been around Manchester for years. They tended to play obscure little gigs but their melodic sound, combined with Ian Brown’s semi-druggy vocals had won them a sizeable local following. At the time of this gig the band were just months from breaking big time.
While Noel stayed upstairs, speeding off his head, jabbering to Graham Lambert of The Inspiral Carpets, Liam was downstairs and in a trance. For one of the very few times in his life, Liam was speechless. Ian Brown of The Stone Roses was on-stage and he was, to quote Liam, ‘doing my head in’.
Brown’s performance that night taught Liam two things. You didn’t have to be a conventional singer to succeed and you didn’t have to make a prat of yourself by trying to work at pleasing the audience. Just be yourself. Look at Ian Brown. He would amble on-stage, sing his words and then just aimlessly patrol the stage, or, if he felt like it, sit down and stare at the audience. It was this performance, allied with The Stone Roses’s individual and melodic sound, which decided two things for Liam. First, he started exploring more guitar-based music, but, of far more importance, he now knew his future: he was going to sing and become famous. All his energies would go to achieving that goal. That was that. Liam came home and told Peggy of his ambitions. Then he did absolutely nothing about it. Actually, that’s not quite correct.
He asked Noel three times to form a duo with him. The Gallagher Brothers. Liam knew enough to see that his brother was now deadly serious about music. Up in their bedroom, there were scraps of paper everywhere with Noel’s doodlings on them.
But each time, Noel refused Liam. So Liam sat at home dreaming. Peggy recalls, ‘He’d sit there in the kitchen for days saying, “I’m going to be famous, Mum.” I’d say, “Are you, Liam? I hope you will be because I’m sick and tired of listening to you.”
‘“Oh yeah,” he’d say, “but you just wait and see, I’m going to be famous and you’re going to be the proudest mum in the world.” I’d say, “Would you ever get off your bloody arse, Liam, and get out and get yourself a proper job, ’cos I can’t keep you.”
‘My friend used to be out there in the kitchen and she’d say, “Well, really, he is determined and you’ve got to be positive.”
‘I’d say, “He’s talking a load of old shite.” She’s always said since, “Do you remember when you used to say that?”’
When Liam went to see Rain, he had two major thoughts. The first one concerned their musical prowess: ‘They were shite,’ he sneers. The second was that he would have loved to have been up there himself.
‘The singer was a dick and I knew they were shite,’ he recalls, ‘but I just thought it was top that they were in a band as I wanted to be in one myself.’
Unknown to Liam, the day after this gig, Guigsy had gone to see Bonehead at the house the guitarist was working on as a plasterer. Guigsy demanded that Hutton be thrown out.
‘We were supposed to be doing “Wild Thing” by The Troggs,’ Guigsy explains, ‘and the fucking dick who was the singer started making up his own words, singing “Wild Thing, you smoke a draw”. I mean the geezer didn’t even smoke,’ Guigsy points out with real affront in his voice.
‘So I told Bonehead, I never wanted to see this guy again. He said he was thinking the same thing. So after we got rid of him, we didn’t do anything for a while.’
It was during this period
of inactivity that Liam and a mutual friend called Baz popped round to the house Bonehead shared with Kate.
As they spoke, Bonehead played a tape of some of the songs they had written. Liam sat in a chair and started singing along. As he did so it quickly became apparent that he had something.
‘Kate was in the bath,’ Bonehead says. ‘I went in and said, “Did you hear Liam singing?” She said, “Like a nightingale.”’
Liam didn’t just have the voice. He had the personality as well, an urgent need to be the centre of attention. Everywhere he went, he would take over. He made sure he was noticed. His qualifications to become a rock ‘n’ roll singer were impeachable.
The first major contribution Liam Gallagher made to the band was to change the name. The boys had named the band Rain after The Beatles’ song (a Lennon composition) which had appeared as the B-side to ‘Paperback Writer’.
Liam had a better idea. Studying the huge Inspiral Carpets poster that Noel had hung in their bedroom, Liam noted the tour dates that were run under the band’s picture. The group were scheduled to play the Swindon Oasis Leisure Centre. For some reason, the name kicked a spark off in his head. ‘Here are,’ he told them, ‘Oasis, it’s a better name than fucking Rain.’
And he was right.
It was May of 1991, summer was approaching and Liam was constantly short of money. As soon as he’d get his benefit cheque, he would go straight to his dope dealer, order more gear and part pay off what he already owned. That was most of the money gone. What little was left would go to his mum.
Liam signed on every two weeks. Every now and then, he would be called in for an interview and asked what kind of job he intended taking.
Before, when they enquired, he never had an answer for them.
This time he did.
‘A singer,’ he told them, ‘I’m going to be a singer.’
‘Mr. Gallagher,’ the interviewer would say, ‘I’m talking about a proper job.’
‘That is a proper job,’ Liam replied. ‘In fact, it’s a right proper job. See, I’m in a band now.’
