The ‘Paris altercation’ which led to Noel Gallagher leaving Oasis
When Oasis split up on August 28th, 2009, it was the infamous ‘Paris altercation’ that ultimately proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for Noel Gallagher. The band’s principal songwriter finally quit the group he had been a part of for nearly two decades and didn’t look back.
The news sent shockwaves through the music world. Despite the famously volatile relationship between the Gallagher brothers, who had weathered some of the most turbulent times together, there was always a sense that their vitriol was laced with a certain playfulness. But this time, Noel wasn’t joking. The musician had previously quit the group 15 years earlier during an American tour, only to return a few days later with the now-classic track ‘Talk Tonight’. However, in 2009, it was clear that Noel’s departure was different—there would be no quick reconciliation this time.
The legendary band, who had been on a mammoth world tour in 2009 and only had two shows left to go, planned to finish their cycle before one night in Paris put a stop to that. Oasis were set to headline the Rock En Seine festival in the French capital when all the issues that had been building finally reached a climax, a night when it all got too much for the older Gallagher brother.
At this point, the relationship between both brothers had deteriorated badly that they were now travelling separately and it had become a lucrative job rather than a vocation, with Noel putting himself through personal turmoil in exchange for a more than handsome pay packet.
“All that being said, we had two gigs left and I reckon if I’d had got to the end of that tour and I’d had six months off I would have just forgotten about it, got on with it,” Noel said to Esquire in 2015. “But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the night in Paris and that was a fight. There’s no hidden darkness.”
The week before the Paris altercation, Oasis had abruptly pulled out of their second headline slot at V Festival, citing Liam’s bout of laryngitis—though Noel dismissed it as merely a “hangover”. It was evident to everyone that tensions within the band were at an all-time high. Noel, in no uncertain terms, made it clear to his younger brother that he disapproved of Liam’s attempts to aggressively promote his clothing brand, Pretty Green, to Oasis fans. This disagreement only served to escalate the already simmering conflict between the brothers, bringing them to a breaking point.
So, what actually happened in Paris?
“He goes out the dressing room, for whatever reason, he went to his own dressing room, and he came back with a guitar, and he started wielding it like an axe, and I’m not fucking kidding,” Noel claimed of the incident. “And I’m making light of it because it’s kind of what I do, but it was a real unnecessary violent act, and he’s swinging this guitar around; he nearly took my face off with it”.
He added: “And it ended up on the floor, and I put it out of its misery. And then I said, well look, I mean, there were people who were in the band, looking the other way; it wasn’t even a big dressing room. And I was like, you know what? I’m fucking out of here. And at that point, someone came in and said five minutes!… I kind of got in the car, and I sat there for five minutes, and I just said fuck it, I can’t do it anymore”.
News of the incident soon spread around the festival, and Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke took great pleasure in informing the crowd about Oasis’s decision to pull out. “Oasis have cancelled,” Okereke said with a smile the size of the Seine. “So I’d like to take this moment to say, ‘That’s a shame, isn’t it guys?’”
“So I guess by default, we are headlining,” he added before playing ‘Mercury’ after guitarist Russell Lissack jokingly the opening riff from Oasis track ‘Supersonic’. “I’d like to dedicate this next song to anyone who really wanted to see those inbred twins.”
Okereke’s hatred of Oasis goes back to when Liam Gallagher dismissed them as looking like “students off University Challenge” in 2005, which was a light and playful insult that had obviously been playing on the Bloc Party man’s mind for the last four years.
Watch the moment he informed the crowd of Oasis pulling out below.
