Liam Gallagher at Reading Festival, 26/08/2024

Gallagher plays Definitely Maybe through in full at Rockstar Energy presents Reading Festival – and gives a shoutout to Noel

For any other artist, dedicating a song to your brother during your Reading Festival set is a sweet, throwaway moment that might get a passing mention in a review. When you’re Liam Gallagher, you’re throwing fuel on one of the music industry’s biggest fires.

“I want to dedicate this song to Noel f*cking Gallagher,” he announces, before launching into ‘Half The World Away’. The response in the field is immense. For most of the young people in the crowd, the countdown clocks that appear prior to Gallagher’s performance and wind the time back to 1994 are transporting them to an era before they were born. Still, they all understand that to hear that sentence from Liam Gallagher is to witness something mythic.

In celebration of the band’s beloved debut album, Definitely Maybe, turning 30, Gallagher plays the record through in full, starting with the cheerful opening riff of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ and closing with a string-driven cover of the Beatles’ ‘The Walrus’. There are a few other unorthodox dedications thrown in – “This one’s for all the vegetarians,” he yells, before ‘Digsy’s Diner’. Prior to ‘D’Yer Wanna Be A Spaceman’ – “Who’s still sniffing glue in Reading? This one’s for all the space cadets.”

He’s fairly static onstage, stood in one position for his entire set, in a black jacket with his cap pulled down over his face. But Gallagher still manages to be present with his audience in the way only he can, with tongue-in-cheek shoutouts and a gritty conviction behind every lyric he sings. A line is altered in ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ to let the crowd know that “it doesn’t matter how many f*cking GCSEs you’ve got”. There’s a brave attempt to rile up the football fans in the crowd as Gallagher wonders if he’s playing to many Man City supporters. Before delivering that closing cover, there’s a brief, expletive-studded monologue, as warm and fuzzy as Gallagher ever is onstage:

“Reading, you’ve been the f*cking bollocks. I was wondering about coming here and I was kinda going, oh, they’ve passed all their exams, they all f*cking think they’re clever clogs, too cool for school and sh*t like that, ‘I’m gonna be a doctor on Monday, f*ck Liam G and all that bollocks and his rock ‘n’ roll nonsense,’ but you’ve actually turned out nice, man. Good kids.”

No matter what happens from here, safe to say the teenagers at Little John’s Farm will always remember being called good kids by Liam Gallagher.

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_{Photo credit: Joseph Okpako}