Liam Gallagher: My first gig with Oasis was horrible

18 August 2020, 21:04

Liam Gallagher remembers the first show he ever played

The Manchester legend gave us some tips on how to be a Rock ’N’ Roll Star - don’t invite your mates along.

Liam Gallagher reckons his first ever gig fronting Oasis wasn’t that good.

He recalled that he never officially performed with the pre-Oasis band The Rain, but made his debut with Guigsy, Bonehead and Tony McCarroll at the Boardwalk venue in Little Peter Street, Manchester.

The band had been rehearsing in the basement of the club for a while, and finally got a slot to perform "upstairs" on 18 August 1991, where they supported Birmingham shoegazers Sweet Jesus.

Liam recalled: “It was horrible, because the only people there were your mates. It was a bit daunting trying act like Mick Jagger in front of your mates."

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“They were just like, ‘Come on what the fuck are you doing, let’s go to the pub, stop all this guitar music, let’s go an watch the match.

“We said, if you’re gonna be here, skin up a lot more, clap loudly and stop tutting!

“But once you’ve done the hardest gig ever, the rest of them are plain sailing.”

The Rain had recently been renamed Oasis after Liam spotted a venue with the same name mentioned on a poster for an Inspiral Carpets tour that hung in bother Noel's bedroom. At this point, the elder Gallagher was a guitar tech for Oldham's Inspirals and was on tour with the band when he phoned home and discovered - via his mum - that Liam was about to do his first gig.

What did Oasis play at their first ever show?

No setlist has been officially documented, but it's likely that they performed some tracks that were co-written by Liam and Bonehead and later recorded for the band's first ever demo tape a couple of months later:

Alice

Oasis - Alice (1991)
Reminice (their spelling)

Oasis - Reminice (Remastered) Exclusive song!
Take Me

Oasis - Take Me (Demo from The Lost Tapes bootleg)

In 1995, Noel Gallagher recalled his first gig with Oasis - the band's second ever, which took place on 19 October 1991 - when talking to Q magazine some four years later. "There was about 20 people there and we did four songs [including] a song called Take Me that Liam and Bonehead had wrote that I still wish to this day they would record and they won’t.”

The other songs thought to have been played at the second Oasis show, were the live debut of Columbia, something called Acoustic Song (or maybe that was just a description rather than a proper title) which was never heard of again and, according to Noel, "a cover of a house tune that I can’t remember the name of and went on for about 20 minutes". This excellent Oasis demos site claims that this was a cover version of Belgian house act Cartouche's Feel The Groove, which mutated into something called "Better Let You Know".