(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, the much-anticipated second album from Oasis, has gone down in Britpop folklore – not least because the first week of the six-week recording session ended in an almighty fight between Liam and Noel Gallagher that nearly sank the band.
‘A fight?’ recalled one member of the group’s entourage. ‘There were air rifles, fire extinguishers and a TV was hanging out the window while still plugged in.’
During the 1995 session in a South Wales studio, a bored Liam – still waiting to be called to record his vocals – spent the afternoon in a nearby pub, where he made some friends over a lot of booze.
When he trooped back to the studio with his new following, Noel took exception. He tried to force the group to leave, and Liam ‘lost it’ lunging at his brother, and attacking his guitars. Noel retaliated using a cricket bat.
The band’s photographer Michael Spencer Jones said he’d seen a few rucks before but this was ‘on another level’. ‘It was chaos and the scene of devastation in Liam’s room afterwards was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was like a nuclear explosion had gone off.’
Liam Gallagher performs live at the O2 Forum Kentish Town on March 25, 2024
Liam Gallagher and his girlfriend Debbie Gwyther wearing at the Burberry February 2018 show during London Fashion Week
Liam Gallagher and Debbie Gwyther attend The Q Awards in London back in 2017
The damage totalled £800, which the band paid the studio before returning a week later to finish recording the album, which went on to sell a record 345,000 copies in the first week.
For Liam, it was all part of being a rock ‘n’ roll star. As was getting his teeth knocked out in a drunken fight while on tour in Munich in 2002, which prompted his five-star hotel to be raided by 20 armed police officers and ended in a 50,000-euro fine.
So the organisers of next year’s hugely anticipated Oasis reunion tour will be forgiven for some trepidation. But Liam is a changed man. He was touring solo this summer, and there are no reports of smashed guitars or TVs hanging out of windows. Instead of his rider of 24 cans of quality lager in the late 1990s, the 51-year-old limits himself to one beer after each gig, and he’s in bed by midnight.
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The person behind the transformation is 40-year-old Debbie Gwyther, Liam’s girlfriend of ten years who is also his manager. She has been hailed as his saviour, the tamer of the rock legend, the woman who has managed to pull off an entirely sober Gallagher tour of Britain.
One friend of Liam tells me: ‘He is like a different person on this tour, there is no rock ‘n’ roll to be seen. It’s all very sensible and tame. Debbie knows what’s best for Liam. She is strict with him. Not only is she his girlfriend but she is his manager so she knows exactly what needs to be done. Unlike his previous girlfriends and wives, he listens to Debbie, he adores her and trusts she knows what she’s doing.’
As those who have known Liam for years admit: ‘You need to be a hell of a strong character to have any sort of hold over him. Loads of people have tried and failed, but he loves her and knows how much of a positive difference she has made to his life.’ Put simply: ‘She doesn’t take any s***.’
Not only has Debbie got Liam – who proposed to her on Italy’s Amalfi coast in 2019 – sober but, according to a close source, she was fundamental in orchestrating the Oasis reunion.
While the ‘brilliant businesswoman’ has played hardball with international promoters Live Nation and SJM, as well as with Noel’s team, her biggest feat of negotiation has been between the two brothers.
Debbie, 40, has been Liam’s girlfriend for ten years and is also his manager
Noel and Liam Gallagher proved they had buried the hatchet on their 15-year feud as they met up this summer to pose for a photo together to mark Oasis’ comeback tour
‘Debbie came into the scene after the band had split up, and was a fresh pair of eyes and a cooler head without all the baggage,’ says a source. ‘Debbie blew everyone away. Let’s just say if it wasn’t for her, things would not have gone anywhere near as smoothly as they did in the end.
‘She was determined to get Liam back on stage with his brother.
‘She’s said for years she thinks they should try to patch things up – and she loves Liam’s family, especially his mum, Peggy, and wanted them to smooth things over for her, too. It’s hard to imagine this ever having happened without her. She should work for the UN with those skills.’
Debbie was a working-class girl, growing up in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, the daughter of a postman and stay-at-home mum.
She didn’t go to university but instead moved to Dalston, East London, in her late teens to find a job in the music industry.
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Debbie met Liam when she worked as his personal assistant in 2013 – after taking a job with his then management company Quest, run by Paul McCartney’s manager Scott Rodger. The pair began a relationship after he divorced All Saints singer Nicole Appleton in 2014. He has said that Debbie introduced him to ‘a whole new world’ beyond his comfort zone of Primrose Hill in North London where he had lived during his marriages to Ms Appleton and actress Patsy Kensit. It is also where he brought up two of his children, sons Lennon, 24, and Gene, 23, whose mother is Patsy.
Liam admits that Debbie ‘saved’ him. He said: ‘Debbie swooped me up as I was falling. She just said, ‘Stop being a d***head.’
‘She got me out of the house, introduced me to all kinds of people outside my world, got me doing new things. I’ve lived in London a long time, but I only really knew Hampstead.’
He added: ‘She was a breath of fresh air, man. She sorted me right out. Me and her like to do the same things. We like having a laugh. I’ve met my match, I’ve met my soulmate. It’s good because the kids love her, the lads love her.’
But Debbie hasn’t always been known for her hard-nosed sobriety. She and her sister Katie, who also works in the music business and helps manage Liam’s career, had reputations as party girls when they emerged on London’s rock ‘n’ roll scene.
They ran a public relations company, Fear PR, and were regulars at gigs. Debbie and Katie often had late-night drinking sessions in grungy venues but, it is said, few could outmatch their staying power. ‘They were a pretty wild pair when they wanted to be,’ one insider admits. ‘But they have calmed down now.’
Debbie Gwyther out and about in London in June 2019
The 1996 Oasis gigs at Knebworth saw the largest ever demand for gig tickets in UK history
As well as owning a £4 million home down the road, Debbie and Liam moved to a manor house near Stroud in the Cotswolds this year. They are understood to be renting the property for £17,000-a-month. The move, say friends, is another part of the ‘New Liam’. Less time is spent propping up the bar of their London local, The Flask, and instead the couple are seen walking their dog on a nearby common. Liam sets his alarm for 5am for an early-morning run.
In his pre-Debbie years, he would have still been partying at that hour, pals point out. Debbie – whose Lake Como wedding to Liam last year was postponed when he had hip surgery – once said: ‘The Liam I know and the Liam in the public eye are totally different. He’s impulsive, and he swears a lot, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be soft at the same time.
‘He has a lot of onus on family. The way he is with me, the way he is with my family, his kids and his mum is the reason that I love him. I knew he would never be happy unless he was singing.’
That said, things haven’t always been easy.
In 2018, Liam was pictured appearing to assault Debbie in an ugly late-night incident at London’s celeb honeytrap Chiltern Firehouse.
CCTV footage showed Liam appearing to place his hands on her neck in a boozy row, prompting later questions from the police, but the pair fiercely denied anything malicious, with Debbie angry that the images were published.
As one source later put it: ‘They’re used to fiery moments – it’s their world.
‘What looks horrifying to some people felt different to them, and they dealt with it themselves.’
Now, there are fewer fiery moments in their lives. In fact, Liam has ‘wonderful’ relationships with all of his children. He was estranged from his eldest, daughter Molly, 26, from a brief fling he had with model Lisa Moorish while he was married to Ms Kensit.
‘That was Debbie, too,’ says a friend. ‘She knows what’s best for Liam and he listens.’ Let’s hope her peacekeeping skills last through next year’s sell-out tour.