Oasis guitarist Gem Archer says it was a beautiful sight to see brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher be friends again on the reunion tour.
The 59-year-old musician was a member of Oasis on the fateful night in Paris in August 2009 when the band imploded following a backstage fight between the two siblings before their headline slot at music festival Rock en Seine which ended with Liam swinging a guitar “like an axe” at Noel’s head.
Gem and bassist Andy Bell – who both became members of Oasis in 1999 ahead of the band’s Standing on the Shoulder of Giants Tour – got the call to rejoin the group for this year’s mammoth run of stadium shows, and the rocker has revealed that Liam and Noel got closer and closer throughout the Oasis Live ’25 tour.
Speaking to Guitar World, he spilled: “They’d immediately start cracking each other up on the ramp while we were walking up. It’s almost like they were just in each other’s ears and faces. But when the curtain opens it all changes; it becomes the show. But they’re brothers – and that’s tangible.”
Gem says when they got in the rehearsal room for the first time along with original guitarist Bonehead and new drummer Joey Waronker it felt like the band had never split 16 years ago.
He said: “I hadn’t seen them together until the first day we all rehearsed. Just looking over and seeing them like five feet apart; it really felt like we’d never split up. But of course I’ve got a guitar in my hand, we’ve got stuff to get on with, so that was it. It wasn’t all lovey-dovey or, ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ or any of that stuff! It was serious business we were getting down to.”
Gem admits he is still in the dark about what will come next with Oasis and after playing 41 shows all over the world he’s happy to have a rest.
He said: “I still don’t know my a** from my elbow. It’s time to decompress.
“It’s not just something you can flick on. We’ve all said we won’t know what this was ‘till next year. It really was a bit of a whirlwind.
“I’d be up for more. But right now, it’s only a couple of weeks since we were doing a gig in Brazil. I’ve got stuff laid all over the floor that’s from the tour. It’s still kind of like, ‘What just happened here?’”
Gem says the shows exceeded everyone’s expectations and it was the joy in the crowd that made the reunion so special.
He said: “None of us expected it to get this kind of reaction. It’s kind of unprecedented that the feeling between us and the crowd was the same in every city. Every gig was just this joyous celebration.
“At one gig, just before Don’t Look Back in Anger, Noel said to the crowd, ‘Now you’re gonna feel what it’s like to be in the band,’ or something like that. And that’s what it was – 80,000 people in the band at that moment. That didn’t really hit us until maybe three gigs in.”