Have you seen the video of Liam Gallagher making tea? Yesterday it was everywhere, but in case you haven’t actually watched the video I implore you to do that now. (NSFW, so put your headphones on.)


It starts with him really enjoying the process and then, because it’s Liam Gallagher, it turns into a rant about the state of rock ‘n’ roll. Have you heard? It’s dead.

And he’s probably serious, but Liam is also quite funny. Confrontational and insulting, but in the most hilarious way. You can see, a few seconds in, when he decides to turn it on and put on a little show. Liam is seasoned – he knows that people absolutely love it when he goes off like this and he is basking in the attention.

How does one rant about tea? Well, he used to have four people making it for him. It was the 90s, and musicians were flush with beverage-assistant cash. Liam’s team had a “geezer,” a “kid” (which could literally be any age, he calls people older than him kid) and two f-ckers on tea duty. Now he does it himself, like a pauper.

As he explains, money is “too tight to mention” because no one buys records. Pointing to the camera he says, “These little smartasses download f-cking tunes. For nish.” That would be us.

While he shakes his fist and tells kids to get off his lawn, it’s interesting to note that, at 45, Liam probably doesn’t realize he is only about a decade older than the founder of Napster. Definitely, Maybe preceded file sharing by just a handful of years. So if we are talking about piracy and the state of modern music, we can’t blame millennials but rather the generation who came of age during Oasis’s prime.

Liam probably doesn’t care about the specifics because as far as he’s concerned we are all f-ckers. Stupid f-ckers. And we have ruined rock ‘n’ roll.

He has been eulogizing the rock star almost as long as he’s been a rock star, but is it really true? Or is that just another ego-stroke for Liam? Because if it is dead, he gets to be one of the last in a line of greats. But if they aren’t dead, he has to acknowledge that today’s rock stars, like Rihanna and Florence Welch, don’t need the old mold – his mold. (And Rihanna could definitely have 4 people on tour to boil her some water, if she felt like it.)

What Liam is really grappling with is the encroachment of irrelevance most pop figures must face. And Noel. He misses Noel.

Liam’s career will always have a footnote, and that footnote is his brother. As I mention often in Smutty Social Media, Liam loves to disparage Noel (aka “potato”) on Twitter and in interviews. A few weeks ago I came across this tasty nugget in the Daily Mail from earlier in the summer: Lisa Moorish, mother of Liam’s estranged daughter Molly, posted a photo of Molly and Noel on Instagram. That alone is great gossip but add to the fact that Liam has never met Molly and it becomes a nuclear sibling sh-t situation. It may also explain why Liam has been particularly vocal about Noel this summer.

But can the battles go on like this forever? They are getting old. One day, they might be invited to join the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (they are eligible in 2019). Then what? Will they stand side-by-side for photos? Tearfully make up? Will Liam keep calling Noel a “working class traitor”? Will Noel walk off stage? More important, who is going to put the f-cking kettle on?

Here's Liam at the GQ Men Of The Year Awards earlier this month.