GALLAGHER: THE FALL AND RISE OF OASIS by PJ HARRISON

Author, musician and Oasis uber-fan Harrison had his Beatles/Sullivan Show-like epiphany when hearing Rock'n'Roll Star as a teenager on a school trip.

“Oasis changed my life. The first time I heard them it felt like someone had fired a starting gun in my brain and real life had begun”. And later he writes “the impact Oasis had on people my age, especially in the northwest of England, was profound. Their music instilled a sense of belief and possibility”.

Harrison never lost that feeling, even as he circled the band, became friendly with some in the inner sanctum, dropped by to watch the recording of their final album Dig Out Your Soul in LA and got to know them a little.

So you can imagine his delight when last year – after about a decade and half of feuding and bad mouthing each and their families – Liam and Noel Gallagher announced Oasis would be touring again, starting in Cardiff on July 4 2025.

Harrison was perhaps more than just excited but relieved, because he began writing this book about the brothers' solo careers and now he had an end point and something approximating a conclusion.

Given his proximity to the band emotionally and through access – “I grew up in the same class and geographical space as the Gallaghers” – you'd wish this book was more insightful about those solo careers, especially when it comes to their solo albums.

Harrison's default position is repetition: Noel is more introvert, Liam is more extrovert; Noel pulls back, Liam comes out swinging; their background of having a violent father contributed to their personalities and swaggering confidence; Noel is the creative force; Liam has the charisma to sell the songs; Noel who wants to explore new musical ideas becomes a prisoner of Oasis' success, Liam is just lovin' it and largin' it as rock star so wants things to remain the same . . .

All this is no doubt true but Harrison falls back on such things at any opportunity, sometimes repeating the same point in different words in a subsequent paragraph. It's annoying (and the football references might go past many).

If this were edited down the book might be only half the 300 pages it is.

But there is also the sin of omission: while Harrison writes about the brothers' solo albums in terms of the music (not much to say about Liam's early stuff, Noel going a bit psychedelic) he is also repetitious and fails to address the lyrics which – especially in Liam's case – became extremely personal and autobiographical (even if they were written by others for him).

The structure of the book is simple but hardly useful for anyone coming to Oasis cold. He writes in the first chapter after his introduction “this book assumes the reader is coming to it as a fairly knowledgeable fan of the band and it's history”.

In four pages he skims over their career then goes headlong into the solo albums after the break-up following an incident in Paris in 2009 (which is also mentioned repeatedly, and sounds faintly absurd and funny).

But Harrison is also aware that a new generation of young fans has been pulled into Oasis' music and world since then. If they read on they may glean the combustible relationships within the band which are woven through.

At the end after going through the solo albums – in much less detail than you would hope given that was the premise – he wraps things up by asking the “why now?” question (“loadsamoney”) and offers some ideas on how the delicate balance of income streams (as the songwriter Noel was coining it in, Liam was envious) will be handled.

Liam has written some of his own songs so they will need to be included in a live set which will juggle solo career material with their classics, some of which Noel had said over the years he couldn't be bothered playing anymore.

So this is an oddly disappointing book in many ways which often seems more interested in the personality clashes and skirmishes (newspaper and magazine interview are quoted, tweets and social media jibes reported) than the music in their solo careers, which -- against the odds -- saw Liam eventually become a bigger selling act than his more creative older brother.

Seems Oasis fans of then and now wanted the mouthy rock'n'roll star with the simian swagger and attitude than the smarter guy who wrote the hits and then got into more exploratory material.

“In my mind my dreams are real, now you're concerned about the way I feel. Tonight, I'm a rock 'n' roll star . . . You're not down with who I am, look at you now, you're all in my hands. Tonight, I'm a rock 'n' roll star. It's just rock 'n' roll.
It's just rock 'n' roll . . .”

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GALLAGHER: THE FALL AND RISE OF OASIS by PJ HARRISON Sphere $40

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There are interview Noel Gallagher, reviews of some of the solo albums and more about Oasis at Elsewhere starting here