Tender (A britpop era fiction)

Listen Up

"One day Noel invited me to watch them at rehearsals. Usually they were quiet strict about it, no  one else was allowed to be there. They made a big mystery out of it but Tony told me everything I needed to know. He buzzed when he returned from rehearsing, he was always so happy about their progress. Oasis rehearsed five nights a week and if you didn't turn up you would get sacked for a month so they all practiced religiously and they got pretty good very quickly. 

So I came in, Noel had told me to bring my video camera and I filmed them. Don't know how but that video landed on the internet somehow."

"You mean that one?" Matt swipes over his iPad and hands it over to me. I smile as I see the frozen picture. 

"Yeah. That one." I press play. 

"For some reason our kid always put his shoes on the wrong way and Noel and me teased him constantly about it."

"Must've been great, sitting there and listening your brothers putting something together."

"I loved it to be there, but they didn't allow me that often. It was something between the band and their two closest pals, Coyley and Phil Smith. I had to respect that.

I enjoyed watching me brothers the most. I had never seen them with each other like that before. Yeah, they rowed and bickered constantly but when they played music..." I pause, try to find the right words.

"It just clicked. Noel wrote a song and would sing it to Liam once and Liam would turn it into something extraordinary. Because no one else could have understood the lyrics in the way Noel meant them - no one but Liam. And he delivered. Every fuckin time. 

From the day Noel joined Oasis something between them had changed forever. They were allies. I'd never seen them like that and when the whole madness started to take off I was glad they had each other. I would not have wanted Liam to be in a band without Noel. Same the other way around."

They were out to get the world. They felt it, all of us sitting in that basement felt that. But for two endless years, besides rehearsals and some little gigs around Manchester,  nothing happened. 

I was almost sad when they got signed for Creation and that period ended."

"What do you mean? Did you have a feeling about them drifting apart with upcoming success?"

"No, not at all, what I just said was just my very own selfish perspective of things. Of course I wished for them to be successful. A record deal, that would've been it. But hell, for me those were the happy days. I had everything I wanted, I had me brothers with me, I had me job and me own place, mam was healthy and Paul was happy in Ireland. And I had Tony.

My own little universe circled around that rehearsing room in the Boardwalk. Waking up next to Tony in the morning, both of us going to work and meeting up later before he went off to rehearsals. Sometimes I would look out for his little daughter. And then he came home and we sat on the couch the three of us and I hoped the clocks would just stop. 

It felt like the pure sensation of it could never end. The adoration I had for him. He was flawless in my eyes, everything he did was perfect to me.

Of course that's nonsense. Poor Tony was as flawed as all of us and it wasn't his fault I put him on a pedastal he could never live up to. But he was a good guy and he had a kind heart. As I'm a Gallagher, I tend to put all extremes into something I love. And I loved him.