‘Oi, tofu boy’: The best putdowns, quips and insults from Noel and Liam Gallagher’s 15-year-long feud

Noel and Liam Gallagher fighting is a fact of life.

It’s as simple as night and day, as reliable as death, taxes, yada, yada. They’re like a cat and a dog, and Oasis is the sack they were stuffed in together. Unfortunately it got them all riled up, and took a good 15 years for them to finally wave the white flag and declare peace.

But now they’re back! An Oasis reunion is finally happening, with a world tour in the works and fourteen UK and Ireland dates on the cards.

So, while we enjoy this slice of calm in a seemingly endless storm of brotherly hatred, let’s look back on the funniest things they’ve said about each other. It turns out lyricists can come up with some great insults.

‘Sit the f*** down, you’ve had too many G&Ts’

In an interview with NME journalist John Harris back in 1994, Liam and Noel managed to derail the entire conversation, which descended into roughly 10 solid minutes of insulting eachother.

It begins with Liam talking about his and most of the band’s recent arrest on a ferry to Amsterdam, and his acceptance of the “rock and roll animal” personas that Oasis were busy earnong, to which Noel interrupts him and says: “Well if you’re proud of getting thrown off of ferries then why don’t you go and support West Ham and get the f*** out of my band and go and become a football hooligan, right? Cos’ we’re musicians, we’re not football hooligans', right?”

While it’s a decent blow landed by Noel, one of the best lines from this interview comes from Liam, who later tells Noel: “Sit the f*** down, you’re getting into a state, you’ve have too many G&Ts.”

‘B*llocks, let’s have it’

While recording hit album What’s The Story, Morning Glory? things were less than peachy between the pair, and things escalated to the point where Noel took a cricket bat to Liam’s head - repeatedly.

Noel describes the incident somberly, saying in one interview: “As I recall, Liam was going pretty f***ing mad. Somebody let a fire extinguisher off in the farmhouse. I think maybe one of my guitars got damaged, and I blamed him. [...] I ended up having a proper fight with Liam. It might have been the biggest fight we ever had. I remember smashing his head in with a cricket bat.”

Whereas Liam, naturally, remembered it more... angrily. “The whole studio got smashed to pieces, everything just got blitzed to bits,” he recalled in an interview. “It was probably me not giving a f***, and him trying to write f***ing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and me going, ‘B*llocks, let’s have it’.”

The very same bat was later sold at auction in 2011.

‘A man with a fork in a world of soup’

As the brother’s fractured relationship quickly approached the point of no return in the late noughties, Noel did an interview with Q magazine where he spoke honestly about his opinions on Liam, issuing the now infamous quote: “He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

A decade later, Liam, king of not letting things go, responded to the quote on Twitter with a video of him... eating soup with a fork. In the video, he thanks people for buying tickets to his tour, saying, “You’ve made a very so-called-angry man, very very happy.”

‘Noel ‘Katie Hopkins’ Gallagher’

You will notice at this point that the insults tend to emanate from the direction of Liam Gallagher, as the musician is very partial to using his Twitter account to air his feelings towards his brother when he so chooses. One of his best, though, is when he referred to his brother as “Noel Katie Hopkins Gallagher.”

This came after Noel, in an interview with Rolling Stone, firmly denied an Oasis reunion was happening and claimed that the rumour had come from Liam’s camp. Liam, clearly unhappy with this information, tweeted: “I see Noel Katie Hopkins Gallagher is talking out of his slack arse again go and polish your SAXAPHONE Ha ha,” punctuating the tweet with his trademark, “LGx”.

‘I don’t listen to his music because I can’t stand the sound of his voice’

Okay, it’s not just Liam that can be petty. In an absolutely savage interview with The Guardian, which was headlined “I liked my mum until she gave birth to Liam,” Noel discusses his brother’s solo efforts, and he’s not particularly kind.

“I don’t listen to the albums because I can’t stand his voice. But I hear it on the radio,” he says. “I think it’s unsophisticated music. For unsophisticated people. Made by an unsophisticated man. Who’s giving unsophisticated orders to a load of songwriters who think they’re doing the Oasis thing,” later adding: “I reckon if I put my two sons in a room – one’s nine, one’s 11 – for about 45 minutes, they could probably muster up something better than that new single of his.” Yeesh.

‘Oi tofu boy’

With all this talk of tofu, why not end on one of Liam’s finest? In April 2020, Noel released a demo of Don’t Stop... without Liam’s vocals or guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthur’s riffs, to which Liam got rather upset. He took to Twitter, as he does, and said:

“Oi tofu boy if your gonna release old demos make sure im singing on it and boneheads playing guitar on it if not it’s not worth a w*nk,” with the trademark sign off, “as you were LG x.” At least he’s consistent.