In August, and will share headline status at Reading and Leeds, the pop-punk trio returning to the festival for the first time in 10 years and the former Oasis man making his second headline appearance after topping the bill in 2021. You might assume that given the disparate musical worlds the two parties inhabit, they would never have previously crossed paths. But by doing that, you would be underestimating Liam Gallagher’s ability to cockily swagger into the orbit of other people and make his mark.
In an old interview that resurfaced this week, Blink-182's Tom DeLonge recalled an encounter with Gallagher when Oasis and Blink-182 were both appearing on the bill for a radio show in Detroit. “I remember sitting backstage and I’ve got my sideways hat on and nose piercings and crazy shit,” DeLonge recalled. “I hear the door open and here come all these guys in trench coats and Beatles haircuts and my first reaction is, ‘Oh, they look pretty cool’, but they’re not punk-rockers.
” It was this point that DeLonge said he remembered some advice Clash icon Joe Strummer had given him a few days prior about broadening his horizons. “We go up,” he continued, “play our show, we weren’t that big of a band yet so we were really fucking rude in the funniest way, we would take those moments because 17,000 people are watching us that didn’t know who we were and we were playing with other bands so we’d just say really bad shit.” “So we get offstage, I’m covere.
