Over the years, the Gallagher siblings have earned their fair share of headlines. As they strutted and scrapped their way through the Britpop heyday of the 90s, Oasis became the torchbearers of brazen British lad culture, shocking fans with countless stories of their arrests, brawls, and endless bravado.
The story that tops them all, though, is of the time they played the worst gig of their career whilst out of their little Mancunian minds on crystal meth.
As retold in 2016's Oasis: Supersonic documentary, their first trip to the US in 1994 was an important moment for the band. While they may have had Britain in their grasp, America was unexplored territory for the group, and the US audience were still an unknown quantity. First impressions, then, were paramount, and unfortunately for Oasis' team, the young band arrived into the country on full Gallagher form, snorting cocaine with the tenacity of a couple of turbo hoovers and shocking everyone with their uncontrollable potty-mouths.
Their behaviour was so terrible that Oasis soon found themselves fighting with bouncers at Los Angeles' legendary Viper Room – a venue which is itself hardly shy of a little debauchery – getting thrown out of radio stations for swearing on air, and having run-ins with the LAPD.
Their tumultuous debut US visit finally reached a head on September 29, when the band rolled up at landmark rock venue Whisky A Go Go in a crystalline puff of methamphetamine.
As Liam recalls in the aforementioned documentary, their meth use wasn't actually planned. Originally trying to obtain a baggy of their favourite drug cocaine, the band were instead unknowingly handed meth.
“I don’t know who fucking got it but it was there and we all thought it was coke" he says. "We’re doing big fucking lines of it and it just kept us up for fucking days. The band were not in the right place."
Oasis' drug-addled minds were certainly not "in the right place" to handle playing a live set, never mind in such a prestigious setting. After being introduced as “the best band in the universe", a lone Liam appears and tells the crowd – albeit untruthfully – “The fookin’ band aren’t coming. You’ve just got me tonight". We're not entirely sure whether this was the vocalist playing out a little joke, or whether the band had at one point decided to cop out of the performance to try to ride out the high, but judging by the fact that the band did indeed appear and carry out the worst set of their lives, we imagine it's the latter. Well, at least they got a good story out of it.
The proceeding performance was tainted by a never-ending list of issues, including exploding bass amps, strange behaviour and even threats made against the crowd. To outline just how out of it they were, during one moment, Noel starts playing a different song to the rest of the band and even sings in a strange voice. Liam sits down at numerous points, before turning on his brother, getting in his face, telling him to go "fuck himself" and smacking him on the head with a tambourine. He then churlishly quips: "He’s lucky I didn’t launch a monitor at him or something, or a fucking drummer”. Ah, brotherly love.
Finally, Liam gets up from his seat, and begins storming around the stage, before jumping ship and running out into the streets. His brother then quits the band for two weeks and well, we all know what happens next: Oasis break America and beyond, and further trouble between the brothers continues for decades.
Check out the performance below:
