News, Manchester
John RobbThe Gallagher brothers are no strangers to making headlines across the globe – their unpredictable relationship often at the centre of stories gracing the front pages of newspapers.
But music journalist John Robb – and a close friend of Noel Gallagher – said there was so much more to the siblings than simply two feuding brothers who “got lucky”.
“Both Noel and Liam are way smarter and way funnier than the tabloid image,” he says.
“There’s this idea of Oasis that these two blokes just fight all the time and got lucky but that’s not actually the truth.”
“They’re both really talented, they’re both really smart and they’re both really funny as well,” he adds.
John met Noel back in the 1980s on the Manchester music scene, sharing a mutual love of the “minutiae of music”.
“He was just a kid that started turning up at all these gigs around town,” he recalls.
PA MediaJohn later went on to form post-punk band The Membranes and used to bump into Oasis during rehearsals at the infamous music mecca The Boardwalk in the city.
“Probably where they wrote most and rehearsed most of the Definitely Maybe album was actually in this building,” he says.
“It was like the epicentre of the Manchester scene then – quite a few bands were in here like the Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio, we were rehearsing here.”
The Membranes would rehearse in the room next door to Oasis, although John says that term should be used loosely.
“When I say rehearse, we’d rehearse about once every two weeks and [Oasis would] rehearse every single day,” he says.
“In fact, we thought, ‘wow, they actually do rehearse every day’.
“Then I realised years later that’s how you’re meant to do it properly.”
John has since released a book on Oasis which chronicles their journey from the streets of Burnage to global acclaim.
It also features an exclusive interview with Noel ahead of the Oasis Live ’25 Tour.
“A typical Noel Gallagher interview is about six-hours long and 20,000 words,” he says.
“You can’t miss any of it out. It’s all really good stuff because he knows his pop culture.
“There are a certain bunch of people who you enjoy to interview.
“You’re a massive music head. It’s great to interview somebody else who’s a massive music head and is into all the minutiae of music and also a fan as well.”
Oasis’ highly-anticipated comeback tour kicked off on Friday at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium to a crowd of about 74,500 fans.
Now the wait is almost over for the lucky fans who managed to get their hands on tickets for the Gallagher brothers’ hometown shows at Heaton Park, which begin on Friday.
But will history repeat itself with another sibling fallout on the cards?
“I’m sure as soon as they walk into rehearsals and just start having a laugh and it’s just like the old days again,” he says.
For John, the hometown shows will be sentimental for so many people – a nostalgic trip down memory lane for those who would listen to their songs on repeat while growing up.
But, he says, the band has also attracted a much younger fanbase, Oasis’ music surviving the test of time and spanning across generations.
“What’s really interesting about it is probably 30-40% of the audience are actually teenagers,” he says.
“What could be really interesting is how many of them are going to go home and go ‘that was the best night of my life and I’m going to start a band’.
“Is this going to have a kick-on effect in the next four or five years of a whole new wave of bands that nobody expected playing in a form of music that people think is kind of from the past?
“That’s the power of something that has really good song writing.”
