“He was the best”: the gig Noel Gallagher called the peak of Liam Gallagher
Every band has that moment where they can do no wrong. Either there are bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin tat have periods when every single one of their albums is one of the greatest of their generation, or there are acts like Guns N’ Roses that have one perfect album and spend the rest of their careers trying to either make something new or run away from what they had done previously. Oasis have always fit somewhere in the middle, but every one of their greatest moments always stemmed from the star power of Liam and Noel Gallagher.
While Noel was the brains of the organisation half the time, who wrote most of the songs, he was never the kind of frontman that his brother was going to be. Liam had the natural sense of charisma that no one could take their eyes off of when he started singing, and when he opened his mouth, that mix of punk attitude and Beatlesque melodicism made him one of the most in-demand frontmen at the beginning of Britpop.
But there were always going to be limits on where Liam’s voice could go. Part of his appeal has always been the way he sings hunched under the microphone, but when looking at what that does to someone’s vocal cords, it was bound to cause irreputable damage to his voice, especially since he had to carry on singing while also casually drinking and smoking anything he could get his hands on.
That’s no way to preserve a voice, and looking at the vocal trouble that he was having during the 2000s, it was clear that he needed to make a change if he was going to produce a note again. He had already had trouble laying down the vocals on What’s the Story Morning Glory after more than a few takes, so it was only natural for him to rest his voice a little bit so he wouldn’t burn out.
“At his best, he was the best. But I think maybe after Knebworth he thought, ‘You’ve done it now.’”
Noel Gallagher
If there was one gig they were determined not to miss, it was Knebworth. The whole point of them playing there was a statement that a band that had been birthed from the indie scene could sell out a massive festival all on their own, and when they hit the stage for those handful of nights, Liam did everything he could to make sure that he gave everything to the audience on songs like ‘Slide Away’ and ‘Live Forever’.
But if you ask Noel, this was the real peak before things started to go awry for Liam in the latter half of the band’s career, saying, “Liam was a great singer in a great band. At his best, he was the best. But I think maybe after Knebworth he thought, ‘You’ve done it now.’ It didn’t last long, you know?” Then again, his voice wasn’t the only thing that started to give out around this time, either.
By the time they began working on Be Here Now, many of the brightest moments from the band’s early years ended up getting buried slightly, with the songs going on a bit longer than they should or eventually getting reworked to the point where they started to bleed towards background static on some of the lead guitar tracks.
Liam was far from the only one to start going through some changes after 1997, but that signature snarl in his voice at Knebworth is still a one-off for the band’s career. Most singers might try to preserve their vocal cords like a delicate instrument, but there was something raw and real about hearing Liam channel John Lennon perfectly in 1996.
