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Louise Thomas
Editor
The Gallagher brothers’ fraught sibling relationship has been painstakingly documented over the past three decades. But Liam and Noel’s romantic lives have arguably been just as turbulent, littered with expensive splits, reports of infidelity and estrangement, and song dedications given and then taken away. And after the news broke that Oasis are set to embark on a reunion tour in 2025, apparently ending a 15-year feud, cynics inevitably started asking: might a big divorce bill have provided an incentive to get the band back together?
When Liam got together with actor Patsy Kensit at the height of Oasis’s Britpop fame, the pair soon became a tabloid “it” couple. They’d met in late 1995 when Kensit was filming in Manchester; the day after, according to Liam’s version of events, he declared to his friends: “Patsy f***ing Kensit! I’ve got her number. She’s mad for it!” Kensit, meanwhile, seemed to be swept up in the rock and roll of it all. “More fool me,” she’d later reminisce. “I thought I was Marianne Faithfull.” The pair were part of the infamous Primrose Hill set – a group of Brit celebs known for living it up in north London, including the likes of Kate Moss, Sadie Frost and Jude Law – along with Noel and his girlfriend Meg Mathews (she worked in music PR, and had met the musician when he was dating her flatmate, “which made it all a bit difficult”, as she’d later tell The Guardian).
Supernova Heights, Noel and Meg’s home in Belsize Park, became a notorious party hotspot. “So much happened there,” Mathews recalled in an interview in 2008. “I can still see one of the Charlatans breaking his leg falling down the limestone floating staircase.” But Patsy and Liam’s status as the king and queen of Cool Britannia seemed to be confirmed when they appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in February 1997, lying on a Union Jack-printed bedspread. Perhaps inevitably, though, one person didn’t think the couple looked particularly “cool”, and that person was Noel. “Liam looked like an absolute f***ing idiot with a nipple on his head, looking like a f***ing baby bottle with his f***ing missus in a Union Jack bed, topless,” he sniped in 2020.
A few months later, Patsy and Liam got married at Marylebone Town Hall in London (were they influenced by the fact that both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, making up half of Liam’s all-time favourite band, had previously tied the knot at the storied venue?). The relationship was a tumultuous one, though, blighted by various temporary splits and rumours of Liam’s infidelity. It later emerged that he’d fathered a child on tour with Lisa Moorish, who’d had an on-off relationship with the singer before he’d met Kensit; their daughter Molly was born in 1998, and would meet Liam for the first time 20 years later. After one particularly explosive row, Kensit was photographed kicking her BMW in anger.
Kensit, then an actor with credits including Lethal Weapon 2, even claimed that she turned down the role of Ross’s British wife Emily in Friends in order to save the relationship, as she feared filming would have put further strain on the marriage. “Friends was an offer you didn’t pass up,” she said. “But I couldn’t commit to it. I knew I needed to be at home if my relationship with Liam was going to survive. It was already a struggle keeping things together with his touring schedule. I was madly in love and I chose my marriage over the job.” The couple welcomed a son, Lennon, named after Liam’s musical hero, in 1999, but less than a year later, Kensit announced their separation.
Noel’s relationship with Mathews ended up following a similar timeline, too. They’d married on the Las Vegas strip in the summer of 1997, sold up Supernova Heights in 1999 to settle down in the countryside, then had a daughter, Anais, in 2000. But later that year, the pair confirmed their split. Noel was soon linked to publicist Sara MacDonald, who he’d met at a club in Ibiza (although he denied that there had been overlap between the two relationships). Mathews, meanwhile, said she suffered from “terrible PTSD” after the breakup played out in the tabloids. And although Noel once claimed that Mathews had been the inspiration behind “Wonderwall”, he later changed his tune. “How do you tell your missus it’s not about her once she’s read it is?” he said. “It’s a song about an imaginary friend who’s gonna come and save you from yourself.”
In 2002, Liam claimed that this spate of divorces prompted the brothers to get on better. “It wasn’t just those two [Kensit and Mathews], it was their crowd,” he griped. But Gallaghers being Gallaghers, this impasse wouldn’t last all that long. Shortly after his split from Kensit, Liam got together with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton; their son, Gene, was born in 2001. When they eventually married on Valentine’s Day in 2008, media reports defaulted to tropes about Appleton having “tamed” the singer.
The following year, though, Oasis fell apart after an epic row broke out between Liam and Noel backstage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, which reportedly saw the younger brother wielding his elder sibling’s guitar “like an axe”. After that, it was safe to say that Liam was not top of the guest list when Noel married Sara MacDonald in 2011 (by this point, the couple were already parents to two sons, Donovan, born in 2007, and Sonny, born in 2010). Russell Brand served as Noel’s best man at the ceremony in the New Forest.
Things got even messier for Liam in 2013, when it emerged that he’d had an affair with American journalist Liza Ghorbani, who’d since given birth to a daughter, Gemma. He broke the news to Appleton over the phone shortly before the story was about to hit the press, while she was on holiday. Their subsequent divorce was drawn out and eye-wateringly expensive, resulting in legal bills of more than £800,000, an amount that judge Martin O’Dwyer described as “manifestly excessive”. Since the split, Liam has been in a relationship with his now-fiancée Debbie Gwyther, who was formerly his personal assistant.
Meanwhile, the fact that Oasis had apparently split up for good didn’t stop Liam from taking very public shots at his brother and his wife. He’d reportedly never seen eye to eye with MacDonald, but in 2018 relations between the two sides of the family seemed to reach a new low, with Liam claiming in an interview that he “didn’t care” if Noel, MacDonald or “his f***ing kid [Anais]” were trolled on social media. The quotes prompted MacDonald to label him a “deplorable w****r”, which only seemed to prompt more kickback from Liam. “She’s the reason Oasis is no longer,” he wrote on Twitter/X, in just one of many not-so-veiled jibes.
In 2023, Noel and MacDonald revealed that they were splitting up after 22 years together. “I know a lot of people in the same boat as me and Sara,” Noel explained in an interview. “Particularly after the pandemic. It’s not uncommon for people who have been in long-term relationships to go their separate ways in their fifties.” Reports have since claimed that MacDonald received around £20m in the divorce, as well as the couple’s £8m home. It wasn’t hard to detect more than a touch of bitterness when Noel discussed the split during an appearance on Matt Morgan’s podcast earlier this year, joking about cycling past their old home. “I can get on the bike […] and get on the canal outside my wonderful ex-wife’s house and give her a little wave, and go, ‘You didn’t take this from me!’” he told Morgan.
Might a rumoured £50m payday have sweetened the Oasis reunion deal after that expensive breakup? Who can say. But if the Gallaghers decide to write new songs ahead of their comeback, they will certainly have plenty of material to work with.
