In this year of Arkid 2022, Noel and Liam have mounted separate live shows across the UK with new material and a handful of lad-tastic megahits in their back pocket. We caught them both this June  – Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds at Dundee’s Slessor Gardens and Liam at Glasgow’s Hampden Park – and, in a bid to fan the flames of their ever-lasting dispute, we decided to compare the two to see which Mancunian megastar gave crowds the best performance. 

Who sang more Oasis tunes? Exactly how many times did fans scream ‘GET OASIS BACK TOGETHER’? Who sported the coolest sunglasses? Read on to find out, know what I mean?

Solo material 

Noel’s solo material, a series of dynamic art-pop smashers focusing more on grooves than catchy choruses, can withstand the judgement of a crowd far better than Liam’s, in no small part because they aren’t in thrall to the swaggering lad rock that came to define Oasis’ biggest hits. 

Opening with ‘Fort Knox’, a practically wordless squall of tribal noise and shrieking, is a statement of intent here; Noel’s moved on, playing material almost exclusively from his eccentric third album Who Built The Moon?, and he’ll win his fans over whether they’d prefer to hear ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ or not. 

Poor Liam can't say the same. He looks visibly agitated when an entire stadium of fans grow restless during the material from his latest album C'MON YOU KNOW, which feel like intrusions on time that could be better spent singing ‘Live Forever’. His new tunes aren't bad per se, but they're also too derivative of meat and tatties rock ‘n’ roll to ever be more than passable. Bizarrely, he even decides to play a solitary track from his post-Oasis rebound project Beady Eye, a move that momentarily murders the enthusiasm of his 50,000-strong crowd.

Noel: 4/5
Liam: 2/5

Oasis material 

Noel’s a savvy operator. Knowing that his new material can’t go toe-to-toe with fan favourites, he saves the Oasis portion of his set for its second half with 'Little By Little’, before a segue into the underrated Kinks rip-off ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’ and a bevvy of Oasis singalongs. He may be nothing more than workmanlike on stage, but that barely matters when he's armed with an arsenal of tunes that emit their own charisma and cultural weight. 

Conversely, Liam knows how to inject any song with a bratty snarl that makes them exhilarating, opening his set with the 90s classic ‘Hello’ and rasping his way through a note-perfect ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ as a follow-up. He finishes the night with a formidable encore of ‘Some Might Say’, ‘Cigarettes And Alcohol, ‘Wonderwall’  and ‘Champagne Supernova’, proving that, while Noel understands songcraft, Liam can fill even the most nonsensical lyrics with soul. 

Noel: 4/5
Liam: 5/5

^{Picture: Iain Stewart}

Frontman-ability

Noel’s never cracked the art of the frontman. He wanders onstage and plays his tunes with the enthusiasm of a supermarket shelf stacker finishing their shift, not ungrateful to be there but not exactly savouring the moment either. 

At least he seems aware of his lack of charisma, selecting band members with enough magnetism to compensate for his relative listlessness. Charlotte Marionneau, who’s become famous in her own right as Noel's scissor player, is the MVP in his assembly of soaring avians, beaming her way through the performance as her Rick Wakeman-style cape floats on the Dundee wind. Still, there’s a frontman-shaped hole in this outfit and Noel seems reluctant to fill it. 

Liam’s bandmates, by contrast, have the anonymity of mannequin dummies, in part because they don’t need to upstage the lairy king of rock ‘n’ roll. He’s a charisma machine surrounded by drainpipe jean-wearing ciphers, beaming his confidence like a laser beam at his audience. He ended his set by balancing a tambourine on his head for an inordinate amount of time, staring into the crowd with the expression of an emperor sneering at peasants, proving that he didn’t even need music to maintain his fans' attention. 

Noel: 2/5
Liam: 5/5

Conclusion 

Despite both their set lists featuring a bevvy of Oasis classics, Noel and Liam are travelling along increasingly different creative paths. Noel's comfortable showcasing his new experiments in sound while Liam thrives playing the part of rock's last titan with his tambourine and his never-ending supply of Pretty Green parkas. 

What unites them both is their fans, who’d much prefer to be transported back in time to 1996, when bucket hats were the height of fashion and the youthful dream of Britpop made them feel like they'd live forever. Will Liam and Noel ever break away from the Oasis anchor that connects them in their solo careers? Probably not. Then again, a world in which either of them stop playing ‘Wonderwall’ is much less interesting.