Today marks the 43rd birthday of William John Paul Gallagher, better known as Liam Gallagher, sometimes known among very casual fans of his and his brother Noel’s former band, Oasis, as the one who just stood there and sang, as opposed to the one who wrote the songs and just stood there and played guitar.
Aside from his wielding the greatest rock n’ roll voice in a generation, we toast Liam today for unabashedly and seemingly intuitively holding down the mantle of Last Living Rock Star. In an age when Morrissey refuses to perform in venues serving meat in its concession stands, and Win Butler of Arcade Fire sings the praises of staying home to garden, Liam is forever drinking too much, saying the wrong thing in the most perfectly preposterous way, and spouting opinions on anyone or anything, at any time. A small sampling:
On Radiohead’s The King Of Limbs: “[A song about] a thousand-year-old tree? Go fuck yourself!”
On why Oasis never quite conquered America: “Americans want grungy people stabbing themselves in the head onstage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don’t get it.”
On what the public thinks of him: “Loudmouth blagging gobshite from Manchester . . . and they’d be totally correct.”
This, after all, is a man with self-confidence to spare. It’s one thing to sing “Rock n’ Roll Star” to 130,000 fans at Knebworth House; It’s quite another to sing it three years earlier with exactly the same swagger to a crowd of nine at a pub in Glasgow, but that’s part of what makes him Liam—equal parts Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Petronius’s Trimalchio, wrapped up in a bowl-haircutted, mutton-chopped, mod-parka-and-trainers–wearing package.
He’s seemed to be struggling a bit as to what to do with his time since his post-Oasis band, Beady Eye, disbanded recently—aside from his side gig working on what his brother told us recently was a project to make “the perfect desert boot” for his label, Pretty Green—though some reports have him working on a new project with Lee Mavers of the legendary band the La’s, which would be a stroke of genius. But then again, work, for Liam, has always been secondary to his real job: Simply being Liam. Live forever.