Liam Gallagher, Down by the River Thames, review: the former Oasis singer rocks the boat

Liam Gallagher is surely the only rock ’n’ roll star who would attempt to start a fight with a giant tourist attraction or dedicate a song to a canoe. On Saturday evening, the former Oasis frontman entered the strange world of livestreams by performing a show on a cargo boat on the Thames. He and his nine-piece band were arrayed across the deck under bright white lights, with protective barges either side and helicopters buzzing overhead as they floated from the Thames Barrier to the Houses of Parliament.

The singer’s belligerent charisma was in full force: he shook his maracas at seagulls, heckled passing boats (“Here’s one for the lovely people on the canoe!”), and expressed his contempt for the London Eye. “I couldn’t give a f*** about you, little round daft thing,” he sneered. It was a ridiculous yet strangely magnificent spectacle, set to a howling blast of soaring guitar rock beneath the vast emptiness of the London night.

Usually at a Liam Gallagher gig, the crowd does most of the heavy lifting, singing along to his set of solo hits and Oasis classics with gusto. Here, though, all he got by way of encouragement was the odd passerby shouting their approval as he passed under Tower Bridge. Still, wrapped up against the cold in a long parka and Cossack hat, the 48-year-old gave it all he was worth.

Gallagher has never been the most mobile of live performers; he tends to stand still and hurl his spirit into the microphone. On a moving barge, however, even as the band remained static, the scenery changed around them, the glittering cityscape keeping the eyes engaged while the music functioned as soundtrack.

The sound itself was great, the songs were enormous, and the presence of Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs as one of three guitarists lent an extra integrity to the eight Oasis classics that made up half of what, in another context, could be described as a crowd-pleasing set.

Gallagher broke off during Oasis anthem Columbia to vent his spleen at the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. After the lines “Is it worth the aggravation /To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?” he snarled, “That’s for you, f------ Rishi and f------ Doris!” But as he was passing under a bridge at the time, it seems unlikely Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson would have heard.

A man who could fall out with his own shadow, Gallagher brought a quality of defiant pathos to his refusal to let the pandemic silence him. There was something undeniably moving about the way he invested his performance with every ounce of furious aggression even as his voice echoed off concrete and water.