A wide-eyed Pete Doherty, interviewed by MTV in 1997 before he was famous and while queuing up to buy a copy of Oasis’s third album Be Here Now, was asked for his thoughts on the band: “Noel Gallagher’s a poet and Liam’s a town crier and that, to me, seems like the perfect combination,” he quipped.
It’s 14 years to this weekend since this combination came undone, an acid-tongued forking that spawned two separate projects: Liam Gallagher and Beady Eye on one path, Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds on the other. As with any sibling rivalry, it’s difficult to dodge comparisons.This was a night of firsts; the biggest solo concert the High Flying Birds have played and the first ever concert to take place in Wythenshawe Park’s history. It was also billed as a homecoming of sorts, a few miles from the Gallaghers’ Longsight patch. Yet the 25,000-strong crowd isn’t just a 10th of the mob that headed to Knebworth for Oasis’s classic 1996 weekender; it’s also a fraction of the 160,000 punters who saw Liam’s throwback return there last year, or the 60,000 at his Etihad homecoming gig days before that.
Still, fans flock to catch Noel on a soggy Saturday, with bucket hats in spades and a generous portion of the local delicacy: rain. Tramfuls of chanting fans spill out on to suburban streets and swagger through the gates. It’s a football-crowd atmosphere.
Gallagher’s own entrance, though, is less assured. Sauntering on to Council Skies’ Pretty Boy and immediately following up with the melancholic melodies of the titular track, he keeps shtum until third tune Open the Door, See What You Find, joking after the drum fill that, no, this one is not Supersonic. Cue a few groans. Surrounded by an uninspiring portfolio of potted foliage and letting the songs chug along, it all feels a little radio rock, middle-of-the-road, pedestrian. He might be the poet, but “I see all that I will ever know/ I see all that I will ever be/ And it’s warm outside” is hardly Tennyson.
Maybe sensing this slightly flat atmosphere, Gallagher attempts to rouse the crowd; he kicks into footy mode. The camera pans to a massive Manchester City lightbox on stage before centring on a Pep Guardiola cutout, sparking full-on boos from Man Utd fans among the throng. Low-level banter continues throughout the set, most of it dedicated to calling out a man he spots in the crowd, Luke, who once asked him for a selfie. Whenever there’s a lull, the screen lurches back to the cutout and Gallagher dedicates AKA... What a Life! (his finest solo moment) to City but Going Nowhere to United. AKA … what a joke!
Fittingly, the set is also a game of two halves; after starting with 10 or so High Flying Birds tracks, Gallagher gives a matching chunk of back-to-back Oasis tunesand his most gorgeously written ballads: The Importance of Being Idle, The Masterplan, Half the World Away and Little by Little take the crowd back to the salad days, followed by a buoyant cover of The Mighty Quinn for good measure. Ending with the classics might be a cheap trick to some High Fliers; but when they’re this much better, it’s more than welcome.
Big singalong moment Don’t Look Back In Anger is exactly that: Gallagher chooses not to sing a single word, leaving it in the hands of the crowd, who, you sense, are finally getting what they actually want, even if they’ve had to work for it. As the mob shuffle out, a man shouts “Play Wonderwall!” to a chorus of cheers; the people, it seems, aren’t calling for a poet, they want a town crier.
