Guitarist and chief songwriter Noel Gallagher has quit Britpop survivor Oasis, reportedly due to an “altercation” just before the group was set to take the stage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, France, on Friday night. According to a statement he posted on the band’s website, Gallagher said he “could not go on” working with vocalist/younger brother Liam Gallagher a single day longer. Despite the suddenness of the split, the news would carry a far greater impact if Gallagher hadn’t done the same thing several times before, only to rejoin soon thereafter.
Gallagher has exited Oasis over disagreements with his brother so often it has become a running joke. The first such incident occurred following a September 1994 concert in Los Angeles, California, where Noel took exception to Liam’s drug-fueled stage antics and subsequently fought his kin backstage. The siblings made up shortly thereafter; meanwhile, Noel was inspired by his post-breakup exodus to Las Vegas to write the strong Oasis b-side “Talk Tonight”. Noel left the group again in May 1995 during the production of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?; this incident involved an in-studio showdown between cricket bat-wielding Noel and a furniture-tossing Liam. The elder Gallagher’s next exit came in 1996 at the height of his band’s popularity, when he opted to return home to the UK in the midst of an increasingly disappointing American tour. Despite brief talk of continuing the tour without their leader, Liam and the rest of the band shortly returned to Britain, where the Gallaghers duly patched things up amid a media panic. In the new millennium, Noel made another mid-tour exit in 2000, allegedly precipitated by his brother’s rude comments about his wife.
It is possible that Noel Gallagher has finally had it with his brother’s behavior and could not longer carry on in Oasis In interviews in recent years, Noel has painted a picture of Liam as a stubborn, inconsiderate loudmouth who calls at four in the morning just to berate him (in contrast, Liam is not above chastising his brother in the press as well). Still, given the elder Gallagher’s past behavior, post-mortems on the life of Oasis are premature. If Noel Gallagher has not returned to the group in six months’ time, then readers can surely expect an Oasis career retrospective by this author here at Sound Affects. Until then, wait and see if he cools off a bit.