HOWZAT

Kids and clothing aside, a lot of our conversation is about what Liam doesn’t like or doesn’t do. He has a Mini and a Range Rover but doesn’t drive, has never learnt. He doesn’t read, apart from to his children. “It’s Grizzly Dad today, about a dad that turns into a bear. Don’t like Dr Seuss, too smart.” He hasn’t got the patience for other books, “and it’s a form of people telling you how it is, isn’t it? I like to make my own mind up.” He doesn’t want to make new friends. “Quite happy with what I’ve got.”

He tends to go to the same pub. “Read the paper, have a beer, someone says ‘Mind if I join you?’, I might shoot the breeze, depends what mood I’m in.” He doesn’t go back to Manchester much, has stopped going to Man City, “just get mithered. Noel goes. He likes signing autographs.” He doesn’t socialise with his brother. “All we need to do is make music together.”

He’s tried golf a few times – “Bit of exercise, spliff, whack f*** out of the balls, beer afterwards, it’s good” – but doesn’t sound as if he’ll be taking it up regularly. Still, if he hadn’t made it as a rock star, he’d have fancied a job “cutting grass on a golf course. Nice and chilled. Outdoors, not inside, walls and that.”

He isn’t interested in politics, although he’ll watch Prime Minister’s Questions. “I like the noises they make.” When his brother went to Downing Street to meet Blair in 1997, he isn’t sure whether he was invited or not, but “I wouldn’t have gone.” He’s lost interest in feuding with other bands. “I’m cool with Damon [Albarn]. That was only a bit of a laugh.” How about Robbie Williams? “Funny how he says a couple of things then moves to LA, know what I mean? Gives it all that and packs his bags.”

He insists he is “a passionate man”, however, and there are three other subjects he becomes passionate about. One is the paparazzi. “See me coming out of a pub with five million birds, charlied out me head, they’ve every right to take a picture. Get in my way when I’m going about me business, freak my kid out, then they get a slap.”

Another is being in Oasis. “We’ve no competition, none at all.” He knows many people, including all critics and his own brother, think the band’s form dipped after the first two electrifying albums, but he isn’t having it. “Just ’cos Noel and a couple of divvy journalists think that doesn’t mean it’s right. I think all our records are great.”

And the other subject is religion. “I don’t pray and I don’t go to church but I’m intrigued by it, I dig it. I’m into the idea that there could be a God and aliens and reincarnation and some geezer years ago turning water into wine. I don’t believe when you die, you die. All the beautiful people who have been and gone, Lennon, Hendrix, they’re somewhere else, man. Whether it’s here or whether it’s there, they’re doing some musical thingummyjig. They got to be somewhere else, haven’t they? I’d like it if everyone were all right at the end of it.”

And shortly after that, Liam, by now a little late to pick his son up, bounces to his feet. He’s taking his lad to the cinema, or, as he puts it, “I’m off to f****** ’ave it with Kung Fu Panda.” Does it feel strange, I ask, to do a big interview for The Times? “No,” he says, staring coolly back, “it’s about f****** time.”

The new Oasis single The Shock of the Lightning is released on September 29, and the album Dig Out Your Soul a week later on October 6, both on their Big Brother label

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010