The Oasis Kids Are All Right: Meet the Next Gen of Gallaghers

“I have memories of being super young at shows and falling asleep with ear defenders on,” says Anaïs Gallagher, recalling what many would regard as the ultimate rock ’n’ roll childhood: being brought up by her father, Noel Gallagher, the guitarist and songwriter for Oasis, and her mother, the columnist Meg Mathews. Not that Anaïs was too aware of her eccentric life at the time. “The only thing I cared about was how many packets of Milky Way chocolate stars were in the dressing room.”

Oasis was the exemplary 1990s band. They roared out of Manchester, England, in 1994, hitting the charts with their debut single, “Supersonic”; fizzing with charisma and aggression (thanks to the sibling rivalry seething between Noel and his brother Liam, the group’s frontman); and armed with anthems like “Cigarettes & Alcohol” and “Live Forever,” which encapsulated the ferociously hedonistic energy of the decade. Soon the band was globally famous, becoming so culturally significant in Britain that Tony Blair invited Noel to a party at 10 Downing Street when Blair became prime minister in 1997. Noel and Meg’s more typical hangout, however, was their London home, Supernova Heights, which became the venue for nonstop nocturnal debauchery with the Brit-pop elite. “I grew up hearing stories about it,” Anaïs says of the psychedelic pad, which the Gallaghers left just before she was born, in 2000. “It’s in some Taschen book. It was definitely a drug-fueled ’90s interior—for instance, the giant mosaic target bathtub. It’s mental. But cool, I guess.”

Anaïs is a photographer who has documented her father’s tour with his post-Oasis band, the High Flying Birds, and who currently enjoys shooting behind-the-scenes reportage on film sets. (“It’s like a rock tour, a group of people who band together to make something work, and everybody is equally important.”) She’s chatting in another London house with a crazy interior, where she and Liam’s three children have gathered. The family resemblance is clear—all four of them have their fathers’ unmistakable eyebrows.

Lennon Gallagher, 25, models and sings and plays guitar with a band called Automotion. His brother, Gene, is also a model, and fronts his own “in-your-face, no-messing-about” band, Villanelle (their punky first single, “Hinge,” will be released in this month). “People have been deprived of guitar music,” the 23-year-old Gene says. “But now it’s coming back, and everyone’s getting excited about it.” Then there’s Molly, 27, who models as well, and who today declines to talk, answering questions by email instead. It turns out that she’s pregnant (her partner is footballer Nathaniel Phillips), meaning that Liam will likely become a grandfather during Oasis’s reunion tour, something guaranteed to make the many ’90s veterans in the audience feel their age.

The tour is something that even the Gallaghers’ children never thought they’d see. Oasis split up in 2009 after a physical fight backstage at a show in Paris, and Liam and Noel have spent a lot of the time since then sniping at each other. (Liam once said that Noel looked like a potato; Noel opined that his sons—then 9 and 11—could write better songs than Liam’s solo material.) Last year, though, a statement declared that “the guns have fallen silent” and that the reformed band would tour the world starting in July, with North American dates in August. The announcement caused pandemonium in the U.K.: 14 million fans are said to have applied for the first tranche of 1.4 million tickets. Lennon says that he’s going to go to as many shows as he can. “I can’t wait,” he says, smoking a cigarette. “It’s a massive, monumental thing, and it’s going to be fantastic.”

And still pretty rock ’n’ roll, according to Anaïs. “I’m pre-prepping my liver now by drinking, I don’t know, electrolytes,” she says. “It should be a very fun summer. My plan is to be at every U.K. date, and my camera will be with me every step of the way.” That could be a great photography book, I suggest. “Yeah, I’m sure,” says Anaïs, who has inherited her father’s coruscating wit. “But then my dad would probably want every penny.”

Given that Oasis has been front-page news for decades, one might assume that the Gallagher children were brought up amid chaos, but Lennon says that his childhood was “pretty normal. My mum”—the actor and singer Patsy Kensit, Liam’s first wife—“sheltered me from the public eye, and I was just able to be a kid, which I’m really grateful for.” Lennon grew up adoring Nirvana’s angst-ridden third album, In Utero, and post-rock bands like Slint. Gene also loved ’90s grunge—in other words, the kind of darkly introverted music that Oasis blasted away. “Yeah!” says Gene. “It’s bizarre. Heavy guitar music—that’s what I like. My dad wasn’t fond of the grunge stuff, but I made him come around to it as he got older.”

Anaïs says that the soundtrack to her childhood was Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and “Barbie Girl,” by Aqua, music that probably makes Noel break out in hives—although, she notes, “he appreciates a good pop song. I’m not sure if he’s a big Britney fan, but I think there are a couple of Madonna songs he likes.” Growing up, she assumed that every kid could be taken to the Harry Potter film set to hang out like she was, until her parents set her straight. “They said, ‘You’re different, but that doesn’t mean you’re better than anybody else.’ I think I’ve kept that in mind throughout my whole life.” Their family was aware that the children of famous people often buckle under the pressure of living up to their parents’ success. “My generation has been told that the sky is the limit and that if you dream big, you can invent an app and become a billionaire,” says Anaïs. “But that is such a small fraction of the population. My parents were always like, do whatever makes you happy—you don’t need to be this big superstar.”

Fronting your own band must also be daunting, especially when your dad’s blowtorch vocals and monobrowed glare made him an icon, but Gene says that the comparisons don’t affect him. “It’s just inevitable,” he says with a shrug. “It’s like water off a duck’s back.” He adds that he worries more about what his mother—Liam’s second wife, Nicole Appleton, of the girl group All Saints—thinks of his music than his father. “I’d be more nervous to play it to my mum. My dad hears my music all the time.”

Lennon’s band is a more left-field proposition, with spoken vocals and Krautrock influences—the sort of thing that one might assume a musical traditionalist like Liam would detest. “He doesn’t hate it,” says Lennon, laughing. “He’s always been very supportive. Dad has given me some great pointers. One of the best ones is: Don’t think about what you’re doing when you’re getting onstage. Just get up there and belt it out. It’s a pretty perfect piece of advice, because if you ever think too much, you’ll just get locked in your shell.”

Not all the Gallaghers have the urge to perform. Molly emails to say, “I honestly couldn’t think of anything worse than being onstage in front of an audience.” Anaïs, meanwhile, says she had “a brief stint playing the cello when I was about 11, and it’s safe to say there is not an inherent Gallagher musical gene. My dad came to see a few of my recitals, and he swiftly was like, ‘Maybe it’s not for you.’ ” Liam and Noel are famous for their crushing assessments of other musicians, which have delighted readers of their interviews for decades, but Anaïs says that her father wasn’t that critical of her. “Although, I was looking at some old home videos of me playing the other day, and he is definitely throwing some comedic knowing looks at the camera.”

The Gallagher kids are acutely aware that what fans hope to experience on this tour is not just nostalgia but a communal moment in which people of various backgrounds can set aside their differences and revel in the joy of their parents’ imperishable songs. Anaïs hopes that the audiences will be multigenerational. “So many people want to go with their dad, because he played Oasis in the car when he was driving them to school. Music is an emotional experience—it’s not just a night out.” It’s also something that’s been devalued in the 21st century, she adds. “Gone are the days of fan clubs and seeking out a B-side and buying a magazine because your favorite artist had an interview in there. Now there’s less of a community among fans, and I think that people are desperate for that. The Internet can be such a lonely landscape that coming together with others who have a mutual interest in something positive, like music, really benefits people.”

The siblings and cousins say that they spend a decent amount of time together, sometimes at their grandmother Peggy’s house in Burnage, Manchester, where she brought up Liam and Noel. “She’ll practically waterboard you with tea,” says Anaïs. “We’ll have slices of toast and reminisce about summers in Ireland.” They also often bump into one another when out drinking at pubs in London with their friends. But I thought Gen Z didn’t drink? “Oh no, we’re not that sort of Gen Zs,” Gene points out. “We’re not like those kids who vape and hate the taste of alcohol.”

Do they ever listen to their parents’ stories from the mad-for-it ’90s and feel as if they missed out? “Yeah, of course,” says Gene of the days before smartphones, social media, and Google Maps. “There are romantic things that happened back then that don’t really happen now. Like having to arrange to meet someone somewhere. You had to be there!”

Hair for all talent by Kim Rance at MA + Group; makeup for all talent by Crystabel Efemena Riley at Julian Watson Agency.

Produced by Farago Projects; Senior Producer: Sarah Aranda Garzon; Producers: Benji Landman, Brisa Chander; Photo Assistants: Simon Wellington, Jack Storer; Digital Technician: Shivvy Kanagaratnam; Retouching: ColorCenter.nyc; Fashion Assistant: Cordelia Watson; Hair Assistant: Sam Groeneveld; Makeup Assistant: Ayopo Abiri; Tailor: Lina Krukauskaite.