Liam Gallagher: Drunken, disorderly - and now a toothless rock star

Back in 1996, Oasis's domination of British rock music was at its zenith. That summer, they gave two performances at Knebworth Park, near Stevenage, in front of a combined audience of 250,000; the fact that 2.6 million people had applied for tickets represented an even more incredible achievement. As if to prove that the band were now an integral part of the British cultural patchwork, New Labour's more glitz-obsessed functionaries soon began sniffing around, and 12 months later, Noel Gallagher was paying his famous visit to 10 Downing Street.

Lest anyone think that the elder Gallagher's new-found respectability had kiboshed Oasis's reputation as outlaw rock'n'rollers, his younger brother Liam's behaviour suggested otherwise. Throughout Oasis's imperial phase – and despite marriage and fatherhood – he continued to satisfy those who expected musicians to embody a mixture of menace and blank-faced insouciance – "attitude", as the cliché has it.

"Liam told me this great story," said Alan McGee, the boss of the band's label, Creation, and a fleeting New Labour insider. "He was going through Brixton in his limo, and he got his cashpoint card out and jumped out of the car. He got mobbed by all these kids, and the security guy standing by him was really panicky, going, 'Liam, I think we should get out of here'. But Liam started talking to all these kids, and they all loved him – the reason being that Liam has got the same anger as black kids in Brixton. He's grown up in the gutter and he still remembers what it's like to have fuck all."

This week, Liam unexpectedly returned to Britain, having proved that – even at the age of 30, having fathered his third child – his inner rage may well be undiminished. Last Saturday, as Oasis's touring party reclined in the splendour of Munich's Bayerischer Hof hotel, a dispute occurred between Liam and another member of the entourage. The argument quickly spilled into an area allegedly occupied by Italian gangsters – whereupon a ruckus erupted, the police were called, and Liam was reported to have kicked a German policeman in the chest "with full force". Some £60,000 was needed to release him from custody, Oasis postponed the remainder of their German engagements, and Liam faces the ignominious prospect of spending Christmas without his two front teeth.

This hardly represents the first time that the singer has made life unnecessarily difficult for his colleagues. Since the group's first public manoeuvres in 1993, Liam has made a habit of suddenly bailing out of his band's commitments, picking sufficiently serious fights with his elder brother to threaten their always-rickety alliance, and managing to offend even the most untouchable invitees at awards ceremonies and fashion shows. Liam is, let us not forget, the man who marked Oasis's 1996 receipt of Q magazine's "Best Act In The World Today" trophy by threatening to smash up a Park Lane ballroom and flicking his cigarette ash on Mick Jagger's head.

Ian Robertson was Oasis's head of security between 1994 and 1995, until Liam's sky-rocketing irascibility led Robertson to punch his charge and lose his job. Had he remained on the payroll, it would have fallen to him to stand between the Oasis party and the aforementioned mafiosi and Polizei. "The thing I did love about Liam was that there was no internal censor," he says. "Most of us would filter our emotions before we unleashed them on the universe. Liam would never do that: he would speak his mind. It was total, knee-jerk honesty. Ask him what he thinks about something, and he'll tell you. Some people say that there's a misunderstood genius at work. I don't see that at all, but there's certainly a kind of nobility."

Robertson – an ex-paratrooper, whose observations are a wee bit more erudite than those of the average rock aide – traces some of Liam's loud impulsiveness back to his childhood. There are three Gallagher brothers: Noel and his elder brother, Paul, are separated by 16 months, whereas Liam arrived some five years later. It is a matter of record that the Gallaghers' family life was marked by dysfunction and violence, but Liam still seems to have been indulged.

"I stayed up talking into the night with him on a number of occasions," says Robertson. "One of the things Liam offered up, by his own admission, was that he had been spoilt, in a way that hadn't happened for Paul, and Noel probably didn't need. He kind of went from one bubble to another: from the bubble of mother to the bubble of being in a band."

The move from domestic coddling to life as a moneyed musician was probably always going to encourage Liam's more uncontrollable instincts. Moreover, he achieved celebrity at just the point that, thanks to the rise of the ubiquitous New Lad, his kind of testosterone and lager- fuelled recklessness became culturally hegemonic. In response to his every snort and slurp, one could almost hear a massed yelping of Loaded magazine's catchphrase: "Good work, fella!"

As Alan McGee says, some of his admirers were even happy to acclaim Liam as a new kind of social-realist pin-up. "There's always been middle-class drop-outs turning themselves into debauched enigmas, but Liam remains unaffected," raved the novelist Irvine Welsh. "He makes that faux decadence seem contemptible. There's no pretension about Liam and that's always going to be appealing to working-class people, who act more by instinct than artifice. People in the public eye are encased in a PR machine, so anybody who does something spontaneous – whether it's Liam, Bill Clinton or Paul Gascoigne – gets enormous attention. But despite all that, Liam retains this completely direct mentality. One of the things I hear people saying is that, in Liam's position, they'd do exactly as he does."

One of Liam's more fascinating behavioural tics was his tendency to extend his belligerence to his relations with his own audience. Even when he was faced by adoring multitudes, he usually affected the mannerisms of someone about to start a punch-up. "I asked him once what went on in his head when he was on stage," says Tim Abbot, a one-time close associate of the Gallaghers. "He said, 'It's a fight: a fucking fight between me and the crowd. I'll go out, look into the audience and I'll pick on somebody and glare at them all the way through. I'm there every night to prove that it's my stage, not theirs'."

Unfortunately, the days when Liam was hailed as some kind of rock Übermensch are long gone. With successive Oasis releases, the quality of his vocal performance – in essence, a synthesis of Johnny Rotten and John Lennon – has got better and better. Unfortunately, since the release of the band's third album, 1997's bilious Be Here Now, the standard of his brother's compositions has fallen at speed. As if to acknowledge the rot, the younger Gallagher contributed three rather clumsy songs to the band's last album, Heathen Chemistry, which were acclaimed by some critics as opening up a way back to the band's old brilliance. In fact, such tributes only served to throw the group's declining standards into sharper relief.

Perhaps most crucially, the abiding tenor of rock music left laddish belligerence behind a good five years ago, leaving Liam looking like a semi-tragic throwback. British music's current poster-boy is Coldplay's Chris Martin, a graduate of University College London who dates Gwyneth Paltrow, sings – in vague, distracted terms – of existential strife, and is happy to confess that he did not lose his virginity until his early twenties. He and Liam seem to be the occupants of two completely different universes.

All that said, for a brief moment, Liam seemed to be embracing a new kind of maturity. Having separated from Patsy Kensit in 2000, he began a relationship with Nicole Appleton, then a member of the all-female quartet All Saints. This came just before his brother split with the socialite and occasional Sunday Times columnist Meg Matthews and took up with Sara McDonald, who worked with a London public relations firm. The result of these new liaisons, much to Oasis fans' astonishment, was a becalmed Liam, and some unprecedented fraternal harmony.

"Liam used to really annoy me, but now I think he's a comic genius; the funniest guy I have ever known in my entire life," Noel said last year. "I believe that in the old days he was difficult and drinking heavily because of his ex-wife. She made him unhappy and he used to take it out on the rest of the band. Nicky loves him, she adores him, and he adores her. He's just a joy to be around at the moment. Now that he's with Nicky and I'm with Sara, we go out in a foursome for Sunday lunch... and we have the funniest, funniest times, which we never did before.

"I don't know if it's a cliché or not," he concluded, as he dropped into the kind of vocabulary once associated with Radio One DJs in the 1970s, "but behind these two brothers are two very good ladies."

Eighteen months on, though Liam and Nicole Appleton's bond remains intact (the couple have a son, Gene, born in July last year), Noel has split from Sara. Liam's relations with his brother, meanwhile, have reverted to type: according to reports in the music press, in the wake of Liam's impetuous walk-out four songs into a recent show in Japan, they have not communicated for six weeks. "I haven't spoken to him since," said Noel, "because if I did, I would probably knock him out."

As Liam picked his way through the arrivals lounge this week, his lips tightly shut around his mangled mouth, he looked some distance from the whirlwind of legend: six years after Oasis's peak, and with his thirties extending ominously in front of him, it looked like south Manchester's answer to Dionysius had met his match. His reclamation of his old rock-god mantle will doubtless start with a visit to the dentist – but as anyone who has watched Oasis's descent over the last half-decade can attest, it might take more than false teeth to put Liam Gallagher back where he once belonged.

Life story

Born

William John Paul Gallagher, in Burnage, Manchester, 21 September 1972.

Family

Married the actress Patsy Kensit in 1997; one son, Lennon; divorced 2000. One daughter, Molly, with the London-based singer Lisa Moorish. Current partner is the former All Saints singer Nicole Appleton (right); son Gene, born 2001.

Education

St Mark's High School, Didsbury, Manchester

Musical career

Became lead singer with Burnage band The Rain in 1991; changed name to Oasis at Noel Gallagher's insistence the same year. First single released April 1994; most recent album was this year's Heathen Chemistry. Has guested with Echo & The Bunnymen, Ocean Colour Scene and Death In Vegas.

Albums

Definitely Maybe (1994), What's The Story) Morning Glory? (1995), Be Here Now (1997), Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (2000), Heathen Chemistry (2002).

He says

"I wanted to sing and get off my tits – and I've done that. I'm 30, and I don't want my kids to see their pissed-up madhead dad down the pub. I've got responsibilities, but occasionally I wanna rock with the best of them."

They say

"The Liam that I know, and his family know – he's a polite young man. A really nice young man." His mother, Peggy Gallagher.