Liam Gallagher, who hasn’t released a worthwhile song since 1995, is wrong about Fontaines DC

Liam Gallagher has accused Fontaines DC of ‘not being good enough’ to open for them despite releasing five dud-free albums while Oasis rack up a fortune as a nostalgia jukebox for Gen-Xers Fontaines DC 'have done what every decent group should in order to prove their durability and that is to continually shape-shift and to look to the future'. Photograph: Ewen Spencer Rock stars of a certain age love to live in the past – and for proof you only have to look to 54-year-old Liam Gallagher and his tragic attempts to start a Blur v Oasis-style feud with Dublin’s all-conquering Fontaines DC.Liam recently took to social media to claim Fontaines “don’t have any tunes” and are “not good enough” to open for Oasis on their Cash Grab 2027 world tour, coming to a credit card bill near you very soon.Not good enough? Oh really, Liam – and you would know, not having released a worthwhile song since 1995 and today living an artistically aimless (if extremely lucrative) shadow existence as nostalgia jukebox for Gen Xers who can’t bear to chuck out their old bucket hats.Yes, 1995, the year of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory and the last time Oasis achieved anything of cultural relevance. Their final moment of pop music pertinence predates high-speed internet, the smartphone, the Irish housing bubble, the genre of nu-metal, the birth of the entire line-up of indie band Geese and the moral collapse of Manchester City into a cash-drunk parody of a top-flight soccer team.READ MORETalk about clinging on to old glories. Ever since, the Gallaghers and their fanbase have been getting by on the fumes of the band Oasis used to be. And were they even that good to begin with, or just a terrace-anthem dumbing-down of the transcendent indie pop made by Liam’s idols The Stone Roses?Liam’s delicate ego is still presumably recovering from Fontaines’ hard-to-disagree-with assertion in 2024 that the return of Oasis was “really annoying” – and, by extension, represented another step along rock music’s descent into dotage. “I’m not excited about it ... to be honest,” said the band’s Conor Deegan. “I feel like we get caught in the last era – like the ’10s – and into such a nostalgic thing that we’re forgetting to make new things.”It is worth pointing out that not everyone in Fontaines DC agreed – singer Grian Chatten distanced himself from the remarks. He was also at the premiere of the new Oasis documentary, Don’t Look Back in Anger – a soulless piece of fan service that had nothing interesting to say about the troubled relationship between Noel and Liam and which instead insisted that we simply roll with it and enjoy footage from their comeback tour, though unlike that tour, the price of going to see the documentary at the cinema didn’t skyrocket depending on the length of the queue.Oasis will live forever in the estimation of their fans – and who doesn’t love to squeeze into some Fred Perry, retrieve that aforementioned bucket hat from the back of the wardrobe and honk their way through the chorus of Live Forever? Even when you’ve had to take out a new mortgage and put off the kitchen extension to pay for the privilege of seeing them in concert.Liam Gallagher of Oasis performs on stage at the GNP Seguros Stadium in Mexico City on September 12th, 2025. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images But as a band rather than a cash-generating nostalgia machine, Oasis haven’t been at the races for decades and their transformation into top-drawer stodge merchants was arrested only by their break-up in 2009. What a bullet we dodged – imagine the music Oasis would have continued to roll out in the 2000s and beyond had Liam and Noel’s sibling enmity not bubbled over backstage in Paris 17 years ago.As Oasis fans survey their ruined bank accounts in advance of their Slane Castle dates, here is a teaser to ponder. What’s their favourite post-Morning Glory album? It’s obviously a trick question as each of those records is instantly forgettable. Some are so inert they can’t even bother to be bland and instead just exist in a nether-state of whinging, artistically bankrupt dad-rock.[ Fontaines DC: ‘We just hang out with ourselves and don’t really interact as much with other people’Opens in new window ]That’s in contrast to Fontaines DC, who have done what every decent group should in order to prove their durability and that is to continually shape-shift and to look to the future. Yes, their latest album, Dopamine Chamber, is good rather than great and too indebted to the brooding synth pop of late-period Joy Division and early Cure. But it does at least try to do something different and to move on from early hits such as Boys in the Better Land. Just like the Gallaghers, Fontaines are also of course playing Slane. Oasis by comparison, are men in their 50s trying to recapture that gone-in-a-blink thrill of being in your 20s and believing that you really can live forever. But you never can go back – no matter how much you spend on Oasis Adidas merch or how enthusiastically you dance the Poznan during Cigarettes and Alcohol.The grim fact is that we all have to grow up and that we can’t be 21 and fearless in perpetuity. That’s a truth that Oasis are unwilling to confront. Fontaines DC meanwhile are forging ahead, trying new things and bringing their fanbase with them. They’ve released five albums with not a dud among them while Oasis rack up a fortune as live music’s eternal karaoke kings – getting rich(er) off a glorious past that was over in a heartbeat and which wasn’t all that glorious in the first place.IN THIS SECTION