The relationship between Noel and Liam Gallagher is the most publicly documented sibling conflict in rock history — documented not through the accounts of outsiders but through the participants themselves, both of whom have shown a consistent willingness to say exactly what they think about each other in public forums, with a directness that ranges from amusing to genuinely cutting depending on the day and the specific grievance being addressed. They have not been in the same room voluntarily since Oasis dissolved backstage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris in August 2009, when Liam reportedly smashed one of Noel’s guitars and Noel decided he had experienced the last of something he had been tolerating for thirty years.
The specific song that has generated the most sustained version of the conflict — the one that Noel has spoken about in a way that Liam has found most offensive and most revealing of the dynamic between them — is Don’t Look Back in Anger, which Noel wrote in approximately ten minutes in 1994 and which became one of the defining anthems of Britpop and, after the Manchester Arena attack in 2017, something that exceeded the category of music entirely and became a specific kind of public memorial.
Noel has said the song is the best thing Oasis ever recorded. He has said this with the confident directness that characterizes his public pronouncements about music generally — not as a performance of confidence but as a statement of what he actually believes. He has also said that the specific fact that he wrote it in ten minutes and that it represents his best work is either the most encouraging or the most discouraging fact about songwriting depending on your relationship with the effort that craft requires.
Liam’s objection to the song’s exaltation by Noel is specific and has been stated publicly with equal directness. Don’t Look Back in Anger was sung by Noel. In a band whose vocal identity was defined by Liam’s voice — the sneer, the Manchester drawl, the specific quality of Liam’s delivery that was immediately recognizable and that gave Oasis’s music its particular character — Noel’s identification of a Noel-sung song as the band’s best work is, by Liam’s reading, a statement about the dispensability of everything Liam contributed.
Liam has said, in interviews across the years since the split, that Champagne Supernova is the best Oasis song, which is his vote for a song he sang. He has said Live Forever is the best Oasis song. He has said various other things at various other times, and the consistency is not in the specific song he identifies but in the consistent quality of his objection to Noel’s assessment — the objection being that Noel’s idea of Oasis’s best work happens to be the version of Oasis that does not require Liam.
Noel has responded to this interpretation with the specific amusement of a man who believes the other person has correctly understood what he said and is incorrectly outraged by it. He has not revised his assessment of Don’t Look Back in Anger. He has not revised his assessment of Liam’s contribution to Oasis generally. The song played spontaneously by a crowd at a vigil for the Manchester Arena bombing victims — strangers in a public space singing it without accompaniment as an act of collective grief — is the most unexpected and most profound reception any Oasis song has received, and it happened to be the song that the band’s most famous argument is partly about.