A violent bar fight between rock stars would probably be newsworthy enough on its own, but Liam Gallagher’s wild theory about injuries he sustained during that concert-canceling brawl in Germany sensationalizes the story that much further. In true Gallagher fashion, the Oasis frontman claimed—amidst a myriad of expletives and Mancunian slang—that official reports differed from the true events.
Videos by American Songwriter
If Gallagher’s claims were true, they’d be a disturbing punctuation to a story that, in all fairness, didn’t need anything else to make it extraordinary.
A World Tour Keeping True to Its Name
The “Heathen Chemistry World Tour” certainly lived up to its name between 2002 and 2003. Oasis was on the top of the world, so to speak, as the last breaths of the Britpop movement bolstered them through Europe, the U.S., Japan, the Philippines, and beyond. But with great rock ‘n’ roll stardom comes great risk of highly public, destructive behavior, which would be a reasonable way to describe what happened one fateful night in a Münich hotel bar.
According to Liam Gallagher, who recounted the story to The Guardian in 2018, the trouble started when an Oasis roadie “[gave] some bird the f***ing eye and that.” The woman’s partner confronted the roadie, and as one might imagine, that’s when the melee began. “I remember we were sitting at a table under a balcony, and our security guard just grabs us by the neck, drags us over the f***ing table, and the next minute, there’s a geezer on the balcony [who] drops a f***ing glass table on our heads. But the security’s got us out of the way, or it could have f***ing killed us. Then it went off, man.”
Per The Guardian’s reporting from 2002, an eyewitness statement said that someone jostled one of the people in Oasis’ party, who then “fell on to the table of five Italians.” With such a chaotic scene unfolding so rapidly, it’s unsurprising that other people’s perceptions of the fight would differ from men like Liam Gallagher, who were in the thick of it. But it’s what Gallagher posits happened after the fight began and authorities arrived that is, somehow, the most shocking.
Liam Gallagher’s Theories About His Injuries From the Bar Fight
Hotel staff quickly called the police after the situation escalated into a physical altercation. But, of course, the law’s presence did little to quell the violence. “One of the officers was kicked in the chest with full force by Liam Gallagher and suffered minor injuries,” The Guardian reported of the 2002 scuffle in Germany. Police arrested Gallagher for bodily harm, trespassing, and material damage. He received a €50,000 fine, but that money paled in comparison to the physical price he paid for the event: his two front teeth.
When Gallagher awoke in jail, he discovered his two front teeth were no longer there. Police told him he tripped up the stairs and whacked them on the ground. “But they’d have broken, wouldn’t they?” Gallagher argued to The Guardian just under two decades later. “You don’t f***ing have them completely fall out like that. I woke up in a prison cell, handcuffed, no teeth, but I could still [whistles]. No other marks on me.”
“If I was to hit you in the mouth, you’d think you’d have a fat lip, right?” Gallagher argued. “I didn’t have a flat lip; I was still f***ing whistling while I worked, mate. So, I think they give me a whack over the head in the back of the f***ing van, and I think they’ve just gone, ‘F*** you, c***,’ later on, because they were pulled out completely perfect.”
“That was one time I thought, ‘What the f*** am I doing here?’” Gallagher said. We can’t say we blame him. Now, did anyone else have to rub their tongue across their two front teeth to make sure they were still there?
Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.