The announcement of a long-awaited Oasis reunion created plenty of hype. Guy Trebay explores the related resurgence of their choppy, mod-ish 90s hairdos.
For the legions of Oasis fans who thought a reunion would never happen after the band broke up 15 years ago and vowed to regroup only when
That hair is foundational to pop identity is beyond dispute. Think, at random, of Little Richard’s lacquered pompadour; James Brown’s conk; the Beatles’ mop tops; Sinead O’Connor’s shaved head; Johnny Rotten’s mohawk; Boy George’s plaits; the jet-black nimbus – part bouffant, part rat’s nest – of the Cure’s lead singer, Robert Smith. Think Billie Eilish’s slime-green roots.
“Hair is essential to rock ‘n’ roll as a music and to rock stars as idols,” said Joe Levy, a former executive editor at Rolling Stone and the curator of a forthcoming photographic history of rocker hair and style for the Illuminarium theatre in Atlanta. “It’s a flag of freedom.”
Surely it was that for brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher in the long-ago 1990s, when they formed Oasis in Manchester, England. They wore hairstyles that could be described as tough, northern-English versions of the ‘60s mod cuts popularised by the Beatles (a band Oasis plundered from liberally and without compunction).
“It’s this very English kind of look that morphed from ‘60s Stones and Beatles, the mods, into this Gallagher version with bangs, sideburns and a short crop at the top,” said Guido Palau, a go-to hairstylist for designers including Kim Jones and Marc Jacobs and a man Vogue once deemed to be among the most in-demand coiffeurs in the world.
Palau, who is English, added that there had often been a grittiness to British rock ‘n’ roll and youth cultures that was missing among their American counterparts. “There’s always more of an in-your-face class thing, a peacocking punkiness,” he said, adding that the Oasis members’ hair “doesn’t seem cut so much as chewed.”
Now in their 50s, the Gallagher brothers are expectedly showing signs of wear, plagued by the usual indignities of ageing (psoriasis and a hip replacement for Liam) and by the physical consequences of hard-partying lives. Yet there is enough vigour left in their looks to remind us, as Levy said, of the role hair played in making them and Oasis world-famous.
Recently, as the Evening Standard of London reported, Gallagher hair has been embraced by an army of Gen Zers in the British capital – and also online. Predictably, tutorials demonstrating myriad ways to achieve a cut that, for all its studiedness, looks as if it was hacked with a pair of nail scissors, have mushroomed on TikTok.
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Advertise with NZME.Like so much else about the Oasis members’ style – the oversized parkas, the vintage anoraks, the baggy jeans, the retro tracksuits, the polo shirts and the grandpa cardigans – their hair telegraphed the band’s roots in a working-class city in the industrial north of England. Though the look might have appeared unselfconscious and drawn from unglamorous everyday life, the Oasis members’ clothes and hair were in many ways no less performance props than the proper-looking collarless suits and mod cuts favoured by the Beatles in their early years.
“In reality, those guys were tough, working-class men and the suits were a complete costume,” said Thomas Beller, an English professor at Tulane University in Louisiana and the author of a memorable 1997 profile of Oasis for Spin magazine, referring to the Beatles. The Gallaghers, Beller added, were themselves to some degree in costume, though a slicker version of the one they were used to.
When the band’s blockbuster debut album, Definitely Maybe, came out in 1994, its members were flag bearers for a class still reeling from the aftereffects of the systematic dismantling of Britain’s social safety net by Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister. Spewing profanity, lips curled in a sneer, hair coarsely shredded, they conveyed that most essential element of rock identity: rebellion.
“Oasis changed my life a little bit in their sense of bravado, of ‘Do what you want, wear what you want, say what you’ve got to say, and don’t let anyone get in your way,’” Beller said. And, as with other rocker renegades, the hairstyles the Gallaghers wore then – and essentially still do – played no small part in signalling that.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Guy Trebay
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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