BURSTThe former Oasis singer is up for a Brit this week and riding high with a hit solo album. He may be ‘very zen’ at the moment, but he’s still got plenty to say about everything – including an infamous 2002 bar brawl and, of course, his brother Noel. Photograph by Richard Saker
In the middle of the Highgate branch of Café Rouge on a Monday lunchtime, Liam Gallagher is re-enacting what he calls “the ding-dong”: the infamous 2002 brawl in a Munich hotel bar that led to the loss of his front teeth. We are talking about his apparently impregnable self-confidence, something that seems to mystify even him. “I dunno where it comes from,” he shrugs, “but I’ve always been a bit of an arrogant cunt, even when I was digging holes for a living in Manchester, sitting there going, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Even the way I dressed to go to work digging holes was fucking cool.” I ask him whether there was ever a moment in his career where he felt startled or overawed by a situation he found himself in.
I was rather expecting some kind of celebrity-related anecdote, perhaps involving one of Gallagher’s pantheon of 60s rock idols, but no: he’s up out of his seat, miming the events that led to the cancellation of Oasis’s German tour, his arrest for bodily harm, trespassing and material damage, and a €50,000 fine. It’s quite a saga, that, in his telling at least, begins with one of Oasis’s roadies “giving some bird the fucking eye and that”, and said lady’s inamorato expressing his displeasure in no uncertain terms.
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