Gene Gallagher on Oasis, fame and the advice his dad, Liam, gave him (2024)

What’s your favourite Oasis song, I ask the magnificently eyebrowed model and musician Gene Gallagher. Silence. Is there more than one? Or maybe he hates them all? “No, no, there’s definitely one,” he says. “No one will know it though … it’s off one of those weird ones …” He picks up his pint, his sharp blue eyes full of Gallagher mischief. “Wonderwall,” he says and bursts out laughing. Seriously? But doesn’t your uncle Noel tend to sing that one live these days? “Yes, he does, it’s my all-time favourite.” I bet your dad [Liam] isn’t happy about that. “It’s his favourite too.” Interesting.

Could this be the secret message we’ve been waiting for: are Oasis finally getting back together (they split in 2009)? The 23-year-old gives me his best poker face. “Nothing to do with me,” he says, ruffling his shaggy brown mop. “I mean, will they? I don’t know. I would love it but it’s so beyond my control.” Maybe he has been sworn to silence. “No, no. I get the feeling my dad wants it too. Let’s hope it happens.” Pause. “It’s easier to speak about after a couple of pints.” Order another, I say.

We are sitting outside the Flask pub in Highgate on a sun-drenched July afternoon, middle-aged day drinkers slouching on benches nearby. We’re not far from where he was brought up, and still lives, with his pop star mother, the Canadian-British All Saints singer Nicole Appleton (she and Gallagher divorced in 2014), his stepfather of three years (the Brit tech executive Stephen Haines) and his four-year-old sister, Skipper.

Just as his father embodied Britpop fashion before him, Gallagher Junior is now the flag-bearer for Gen Z’s upgraded version of 1990s mod style. Today he’s wearing a vintage Levi’s denim jacket, a Noah hoodie, Needles tracksuit bottoms and new high-top Converse (“They’re brand new, I destroyed my Adidas last week at Glastonbury”).

The nascent rock star (he confirms his mother named him after the Kiss frontman Gene Simmons, and not, as his father would like us to believe, the drummer Gene Krupa, aka the “King of Swing”) tells me he has spent most of the past year touring small UK venues with his band, the Nineties grunge, Britpop and Arctic Monkeys-influenced Villanelle. The band aren’t yet signed but will release their first track under an independent label in November. “I want to be the biggest band in the world,” he says. “Of course I f***ing do, otherwise what’s the point of doing it?”

Does he get heckled on stage for being an Oasis nepo brat? “People say to me: ‘Ooh it must be so easy for you to get a band together.’ It’s not. We’re earning our stripes.” When Liam suggested his son could borrow his tour bus for a gig in Glasgow, Gallagher immediately said yes. “I was like f*** yeah, who is going to say no to that. We were the support act but we rocked up like massive c***s in a double-decker bigger than the actual venue. We only played five songs but we smashed it,” he says, with typical Gallagher swagger.

Earlier this year Liam announced that Villanelle would be the support act on his Definitely, Maybe 30th-anniversary arena tour, which kicked off in Sheffield in June. Did they audition? “The first time my dad came to see me he said: ‘Go on, let’s see what you’re made of because if you’re sh*t you’re not playing.’” Liam also warned him not to dance “because you’ll cringe when you watch it back”.

When Liam and his fiancée, Debbie Gwyther (a music producer, now his manager and publicist; they’ve been together since 2013), came to watch Gallagher rehearse, he deliberately finished with what he calls a “cringe jump to annoy him. He hated it. He said: ‘You’re lucky you’re still on the tour after that.’ ”

Being the offspring of a Gallagher has to be an interesting case study. What’s his earliest memory? “Picking flowers for my grandmother,” he says sweetly. “She was passing away so my cousins and I would put them on her bed.”

• Liam Gallagher and John Squire: ‘Being in a band is like a marriage’

He remembers his dad as being quite cuddly and affectionate (“I wouldn’t kiss him now,” he says, pulling a face) and doing the school run every day. What about parent-teacher meetings? “I think he came to one and then f***ed off.” Bedtime stories? “I’m not sure that ever happened. There was no Thomas the Tank Engine in our house. But we watched cartoons like SpongeBob Square Pants together.” Gallagher senior was quite the disciplinarian, it turns out. “There was no leaving stuff on the floor, we weren’t allowed slime.” What about bedtimes? “He didn’t care about any of that.” One night he and his older half-brother Lennon, who is now 24 (from his father’s first marriage to the actress Patsy Kensit), were woken up at 1am on a school night. “Dad said: ‘You two, come downstairs now, we’re watching Quadrophenia.’ He made us a bowl of Coco Pops and then fell asleep.”

Gallagher senior was also strict about what music his children listened to at home. (He also has a third child, a daughter, Molly, 26, with the singer-songwriter Lisa Moorish.) “None of us grew up with pop. He didn’t want us listening to Justin Bieber or One Direction, none of that malarkey. He forced the Who and the Beatles on us.” His mother, on the other hand, was a fan of R&B and hip-hop. She sounds like his dad’s polar opposite. “She’s always trying to do little things to make me happy. She takes my birthday so seriously.”

Considering how vocal his dad is during interviews and on X, he must be a laugh. “I never thought he was funny growing up,” Gallagher says. “I thought he was a bit set in his ways. As I’ve got older I find him funnier. He’s getting wiser. He can go into dad mode if sh*t hits the fan, but he’s like a best mate.”

Gallagher, who knew never to pilfer from his dad’s wardrobe (“I’d always have to ask first, then he’d give me whatever I wanted”), says he has always been obsessed with music. He first took piano lessons as a child but hated it and learnt the drums instead. When a girl he fancied told him she was into the Arctic Monkeys, he bought a guitar to impress her. “I became obsessed with Alex Turner after that,” he says of the band’s frontman.

His brother, Lennon, was firmly into grunge, which his dad dismissed as being too emo, and it was only after Lennon forced him to listen to Nirvana’s entire songbook while on a flight to Japan to join their father on tour that he got hooked. “By the time we landed in Tokyo I was sold. I bet Lennon wishes he’d never introduced me to them because I’m now the biggest Nirvana geek. I even got my dad into them, not that he’d ever admit it. The Arctic Monkeys and Nirvana are the reason I play guitar.” With that he orders another pint.

Gallagher was diagnosed with ADHD while at school, where he struggled with his studies. He took the meds at first but stopped after a while. “They made me boring and grey, antisocial,” he says. “I’d be sitting at break and friends would say, ‘Come on let’s do something’, and I’d be like, ‘No, I’m going to sit here.’” His dad noticed the change in his behaviour too, how he’d stopped engaging when they were together. “He said, ‘You need to come off it.’” When he was 17, his private school in Hampstead told him he should leave because he wasn’t working. “I was done. I left before they could kick me out.”

In May 2019 Gallagher was involved in an incident in a Tesco Express in Hampstead. He and two friends, Ringo Starr’s grandson Sonny Starkey and the former model Noah Ponte, were trying to buy alcohol after hours. Ponte was apprehended by staff, accusing him of stealing a can of gin and tonic costing £1.70. A brawl ensued after a member of staff pushed Starkey to the floor. The trio were sent to trial but prosecutors dropped the assault and affray charges on the first day; Ponte was tried for theft but was cleared by the jury. The judge warned them to behave in a more orderly fashion in future. “The judge threw it out straight away,” he says now. “But if someone has that much time on their hands, I’m pretty sure there’s some CCTV footage out there for the doom-scrollers.”

The young Lothario liked girls from an early age. “At Disneyland I always wanted to check out the Disney Princesses. I was the only boy there.” Does he have a girlfriend? “Maybe,” he says. “I’m having a good time.”

• Interview: Nicole Appleton on motherhood, dating and fame

Gallagher has already caught the attention of fashion brands, notably Chanel and Stone Island, and occasionally appears on the front row. A brand once asked him to appear in their catwalk show. “They told me I had to walk in a certain way. I said f*** off. I’m not such a fashion head. I like what I like, mostly vintage.”

He says his friendship group consists largely of old school mates, Lennon and his cousin Anaïs (Noel’s daughter). “We’ve been rocking together since we were kids. We go to our gran’s house together, we message all the time. She had a pink scooter when we were growing up and I really wanted it.” You wanted a pink scooter? “Yes, I thought all the girls would want it.”

Now that he’s two pints down: do you and Anaïs ever talk about Oasis getting back together? “No, we have jokes about it but we don’t go at it. She knows what her dad’s like and I know what my dad’s like. Hey, we’re a big happy family everyone.” He laughs. “It’s nothing to do with us.” But couldn’t you do an intervention? “They’re both [Liam and Noel] way too smart for that, it would never work.”

A sleek, black Mercedes draws up by the pub. Gallagher gets up to leave but throws me a final salvo. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he says, parodying the famous Gallagher Mancunian twang, as he jumps into the back of the car. Sorry Liam, Gene’s “our kid” now.

Villanelle are touring the UK in November. For more information visit villanellemusic.com

Styling: Ben Schofield. Grooming: Lesley Vye using La Roche-Posay. Hair by Sam McKnight. Local production: The Curated. Thanks to: The Bull and Last, Highgate