Peggy Gallagher, the ‘angel’ who fled an abusive husband and got Oasis back on stage

Many reasons have been put forward to explain why the Gallagher brothers decided that Oasis will finally reunite next year: the 30th anniversary of the release of one of their most emblematic albums, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, Noel Gallagher’s finances — the guitarist has just faced a multi-million divorce settlement — or the predictions that each of the brothers will pocket around €60 million ($66.7 million) for resuming their collective rock star status are some of the most common ones. However, in recent days the UK press has confirmed that their reconciliation was only made possible thanks to the efforts of the one person who continued to unite Liam and Noel after 15 years of fraternal discord: their mother, Peggy Gallagher.

According to various British tabloids, the first sprouts of their long-awaited reunion germinated over a year ago when Liam accompanied his mother to a spa day at an exclusive hotel outside London to celebrate the matriarch’s 80th birthday. Peggy reportedly told him that the only gift she wanted to celebrate the occasion was for “you two to do is start talking again, and stop all this nonsense,” begging Liam to bury the hatchet and take the first step toward making a rapprochement with his older brother a reality. In addition, their mother’s health seems to have deteriorated in recent months to the point of parting with her second home in the Irish town of Charlestown. This small and idyllic village on the Atlantic coast has been Peggy’s holiday retreat for decades, but the fear of the three brothers — Noel and Liam have an elder sibling named Paul — that she could suffer some mishap in solitude has pushed them to sell the property for an estimated value of €300,000 ($333,700).

In addition to a handful of generational hits and a penchant for the most insolent and foul-mouthed honesty, rock’s biggest peacocks only bow their heads to their mother, for whom they profess undisguised admiration. “My mother is a rock to me,” said Noel, according to The Irish Sun. “Mam is an angel, she’s the coolest woman that’s ever walked this planet in my eyes. She’s an absolute diamond. Everything that is good about me definitely came from her,” added Liam. Born in Ireland in 1943 to a very humble family of 11 siblings, Margaret Sweeney — her maiden name — had to drop out of school to help with the family finances when she was just a child, working as a cook and cleaner in a seminary for a salary of one pound a week. At 18, she moved to Manchester and met Thomas Gallagher, whom she married nine months later and who was the father of her three children. Their happiness was short-lived: Thomas’s addiction to drink and gambling turned the family atmosphere into hell. Liam confirms this: “He was out all the time, fighting, beating my mam up, beating Noel and Paul up.” In the latter’s memoir, he recalls that the stress caused by his father’s fits of rage was such that both he and Noel ended up developing a severe stammer: “At playtime I was always alone because the other children laughed at me. Our stammering was so pronounced that our mother ended up taking us to a speech therapist once a week for four years.”

One night in 1982, when Liam was seven years old, Peggy gathered her three children, packed their belongings into a van, and they left the family home for good. “I left him a knife, a fork, and a spoon. And I think I left him too much,” she would later say of her escape from her abusive husband. She found accommodation for her family in a small council house in Burnage, a working-class neighborhood south of Manchester. Although several of her siblings moved in nearby to help her get by — with a love of music that eventually caught on with Noel and Liam — Peggy had no choice but to juggle several jobs in order to clothe and feed her children. She worked as a housekeeper, a childminder, a school cook and worked in a cookie factory, conciliating “cuddles and slaps” to try to calm the jealousy between the two younger brothers that, according to her, began very early. “I think there was that bit of jealousy with Liam and Noel. Noel was beautiful as a baby and then Liam comes along, it takes the limelight off you,” she said in the 2016 documentary Oasis: Supersonic. She paid for Noel’s first guitar lesson at the age of 12. When Liam told her he wanted to be a singer — Noel dreamed of being a fireman — she replied: “Hurry up and get on with it.”

In another documentary dedicated exclusively to Liam — As It Was (2019) — the always discreet Peggy Gallagher opened up for the first time about what the global success of her offspring meant for her. “For me it was very difficult to deal with it at the beginning. It was all very big. It was difficult to go months without seeing them because they were on tour. I am very proud of them. I still have my box of tissues ready. Every time I see them on television, I have to get out my box of tissues,” she said while again asking her son to make peace with Noel. The scenes were filmed in the same small house that Peggy moved into to escape from her husband, and where she has remained for 40 years despite the fortune reaped by the success of Oasis. “We offered to buy her a house, but five of her sisters live in the same neighborhood, 15 minutes’ walk from each other, so she wasn’t going to move. All she asked for was to change the garden gate, which squeaked every time she opened it. We bought her a new gate and a gold number five, and she was delighted with that,” Noel said in a television interview.

Peggy has never taken one side or the other in the war between the siblings and periodically travels to London to take care of her six grandchildren. In 2016, the siblings came very close to making peace: speaking to The Sunday Times earlier this year, Liam said that all she wanted was for them to resume contact and sit together at the table during the Christmas holidays. “I love my brother, I love my family, and all that Oasis shit, there was no need for it, you know what I mean? Maybe someone can get a bit tetchy on tour. Maybe someone drinks a bit too much. But we didn’t have to split up over it.” Peggy’s feelings now that the long-awaited reconciliation has come to fruition were alluded to by Liam himself, in his standard irreverent manner, in response to a message on X regarding the scramble to attend the reunion tour: “She’s gutted she couldn’t get a ticket.”

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