The Second Serve // Two Inch Bum Hair

With the Gallagher brothers looking set to bury their decades-old hatchet and reform Oasis, we thought we’d compile together some of our favourite old Liam’n’Noel stories to entertain on this Bank Holiday Monday.

But where are we going to go next for an amusingly poisonous old music feud?

Tom Jones made a pitch for our attention this weekend, bringing up his old antipathy to UK Eurovision flop Engelbert Humperdinck in an interview with the Mail on Sunday.

“There is nothing friendly about me and Engelbert because he is a prick and you can quote me on that,” said Jones.

Still it’s nice to see – like the Gallaghers – Tom’s showing signs of mellowing over time. His description of his pop nemesis a decade ago when last asked about him by Metro?

“Once a cunt, always a cunt.”

People getting excited for a Heaton Park Oasis reunion gig might want to temper their expectations. When the band played there in 2009, the sound problems were so bad that Noel Gallagher announced he’d be offering everyone a refund.

Noel must have soon regretted this promise when he realised it would cost about three-million quid. But the band employed a sneaky pop trick to stem their losses.

They had special Oasis-branded Bank Of Burnage cheques made up, signed by the band, for the price of their tickets. Leaving fans with the choice to cash it and lose a rare collectors’ item. Or keep the one-of-a-kind souvenir – and leave the money in the band’s account…

One of the most famous Popbitch stories of all time concerns the meeting of Liam Gallagher and his ex-wife Nicole Appleton. The romantic scene unfolded in a recording studio corridor, where Nicole came up to Liam telling him she had something for him in her pocket.

When he asked what, she replied, “My cunt.”

She really met him at his level too. Once when Liam saw an ad poster for a magazine that featured Kate Moss on its cover, he turned to the person he was with and informed them, “I’ve had ‘er on the end of my finger.”

Noel is on the record for saying he did what he could to psychologically mess with his brother on a regular basis, but sometimes he didn’t even know he was doing it.

One day back in the band’s heyday, one of Liam’s favourite Oasis superfan groupies went out and got a big new tattoo. Next time he had sex with her he was confronted by the tattoo across her back.

It simply said “Noel”.

Both the Gallaghers brothers were huge fans of Spinal Tap. Noel remains one, but Liam had a rather dramatic revelation about the band when he went to see them perform in Carnegie Hall.

Liam was horrified to discover the same three actors were performing in different costumes as Spinal Tap’s support act (The Folksmen) before the evening’s main attraction.

Liam couldn’t get his head round it at all. And when Noel told him the bad news – that Spinal Tap was a comedy act – he shouted “I’m not ‘avin’ that” and stormed off. And has never watched the film again.

Phone-hacking was so rife around Fleet Street that not only did showbiz desks have go-to phones to hack for good stories, they also kept a blacklist of celebs who were so dull, it wasn’t worth their time to intercept their voicemails.

Noel Gallagher was one of the bigger names on the blacklist, as the only messages he ever seemed to have on his phone were about his dry-cleaning or his gardening.

If only they’d managed to crack Noel’s highly cryptic code – and figured out what the guy who was forever calling about his “whites” and his “green” was actually talking about…

RJ writes:
“Remember Berri? As in ‘I Wanna See The Sunshine After The Rain’, mid nineties hit?. She shagged Liam Gallagher in the toilets at some industry do and told her management. They insisted she tell the Sunday papers or they’d drop her. She did (“Liam Loo-ved Me And Left Me” was the tasteful headline) and they dropped her anyway.”

We’re leaning to Assorted August: giving you more rounds that are themeless, just made up of ten assorted pop songs you’ll half-remember (or wish you’d totally forgotten).

All you have to do is name the song title and the performing band/artist and you get yourself a point for each. With ten songs in each mini-mix, that’s twenty points in total available.

[Play it here]

Has Spotify shuffle gone to shit?
[Read on Digital Music News]

Craig David, 7 Days, Notting Hill Carnival
[Watch on YouTube]

Following on from last Thursday’s Beatles Airbnb, you can also now stay at The Fox & Hounds in Caversham, where in 1960 John Lennon and Paul McCartney performed a gig as the Nerk Twins…
[See here]