The Oasis Rich List: How much money do they really have? (2024)

‘No way,” Noel Gallagher declared just five years ago when asked whether he would ever play another gig with his brother Liam. “If I had [only] 50 quid in my pocket I’d rather go busking. No way, I can’t do it.”

The elder of the brothers was speaking after perhaps the most vitriolic of the Gallaghers’ many bust-ups. And yet last Tuesday, with hostilities ceased or at least on pause, we learned that the bad boys of Britpop — now aged 57 and 51 — will unite next summer for 14 shows, with further gigs added to meet “unprecedented demand”.

There was soon heady speculation that the shows could take as much as £400 million at the box office, with hundreds of thousands of middle-aged fans eager to turn the clock back to the 1990s and belt out Champagne Supernova, Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger one more time.

The scale of the demand, however, led to huge technical problems on the Ticketmaster website on Saturday morning, leaving fans fuming and criticising the band and site for “rip-off” prices.

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An Oasis comeback was always likely to be enormously lucrative for the Gallagher brothers, particularly after such a long hiatus. But why do it now? Is it all about the money? And what does the tour tell us about the brothers’ finances?

For a few years in the mid-1990s, the Gallaghers fronted one of the biggest acts on the planet. Oasis scored eight No 1 singles, eight No 1 albums and six Brit awards.

Historic accounts for Big Brother Recordings, the group’s main company, shows that at their peak the bandmates were typically raking in about £9 million a year between them — big money for the music world in the days before Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.

The high point for Oasis came in August 1997 with the release of Be Here Now, their third record. It shifted 663,400 copies within three days and became the fastest-selling album in British history.

All this helped propel the Gallaghers on to the annual Sunday Times Music Rich List. By 2009, when Oasis split after yet another fraternal bust-up, their combined wealth was calculated at £52 million.

In the years after the split the Gallaghers’ fortunes increased as Oasis album sales continued and Noel tasted success with his follow-up band High Flying Birds. The group’s debut album was the UK’s second biggest-selling rock record of 2011, after Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto.

Noel’s musical success explains why the Gallaghers’ joint wealth was calculated by Sunday Times Rich List researchers to have climbed to £60 million by 2018.

Liam’s successor band, Beady Eye, split after five years. Their bestselling single, The Roller, peaked at No 31 in the UK charts. His three solo studio albums later topped the UK charts between 2017 and 2022.

Noel was always the wealthier brother — and the more commercially attuned. The elder Gallagher was the principal songwriter so he has always received the lion’s share of royalties from album sales and record deals.

His sibling’s big bank balance clearly needled Liam. In 2016 he was asked if his brother would make it to the premiere of an Oasis documentary. “Oh no, he won’t be here,” Liam replied. “He’s in one of his really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really big houses.”

Financial records filed at Companies House give a flavour of the gulf between the brothers’ finances. Sour Mash Records, the label Noel set up to publish his post-Oasis music, shows a healthy £3.4 million on its balance sheet. Liam’s main company has assets of just £83,389.

But the Gallaghers have both endured expensive financial hits along the way. Liam’s three-year marriage to the Lethal Weapon 2 actress Patsy Kensit ended in 2000. The size of the divorce settlement was never made public, but was conceivably a seven-figure sum.

A year later Noel split from his wife, the music publicist Meg Mathews, the mother of their daughter Anais. Their union ended with a £4 million settlement for Mathews — £1 million for each year the pair were married.

Liam’s break-up with his second wife, the All Saints singer Nicole Appleton, ended with a £5.5 million payment to Appleton in 2015. Court documents revealed this sum represented half the younger Gallagher’s wealth at the time. The same year, he also agreed to pay child support for his two-year old daughter Gemma by Liza Ghorbani, rumoured to cost him £3,000 a month. He has three other children, Lennon with Kensit, Molly with the singer Lisa Moorish and Gene with Appleton.

The couple also chalked up £800,000 of legal bills — a sum described as “manifestly excessive” by the presiding judge.

However, the cost of that legal brawl looks modest compared with Noel’s divorce from his second wife, Sara MacDonald. This constituted a £20 million settlement for MacDonald, and the former publicist also received their grade II listed country house, near the Hampshire village of East Meon on the South Downs. They share a son, Donovan Rory MacDonald Gallagher, born in 2007.

As the couple divvied up their assets after 12 years of marriage, Noel booked himself into a £2,500-a-night suite at the Mayfair hotel Claridge’s. He has now bought a flat in Maida Vale, west London, where his fellow musicians Paul Weller and Ronnie Wood have homes.

Liam and his manager-turned-fiancée Debbie Gwyther, 42, share a mock Tudor mansion just a few miles away in Highgate, north London. He bought the £4 million pad shortly before the pandemic and dismayed residents with plans for a swimming pool as well as a high-security wall and gates.

The couple also rent an 11-bedroom Cotswolds mansion for almost £17,000 a month. The grade II listed Victorian pile has a 2.5-acre garden and a sauna.

Liam owns a six-bedroom villa an hour’s drive from Cannes in the south of France. He bought the 18th-century retreat last year for about £3 million from another famous Noel: the television presenter Noel Edmonds.

Do these heavy divorce settlements and a taste for the high life explain the brothers’ decision to team up once again? There’s no doubt next summer’s shows will boost the brothers’ finances, but talk of box office takings of up to £400 million look bold.

There will be just under 1.4 million tickets available for the Live ’25 Tour. Ticket prices (including fees) will range from £73 to £270. Assuming an average ticket price of £175 suggests box office takings of around £240 million. There will also be money to be made from broadcasting rights for the shows, with Apple already said to be embroiled in a scrap to air the concerts. Then there’s the merch. T-shirts available on the Oasis website start at £30. Taylor Swift’s recent Eras tour made millions from a merchandise megastore outside Wembley Arena.

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There have been 17 tour dates announced across the UK and Ireland but the band are also expected to tour Europe and the US with rumoured venues including the MetLife Stadium in New York and Rose Bowl in Los Angeles.

But even the best-known musicians typically see less than half of box office takings from their tours. Venues, promoters and agents all take their cut. Then there will be tax to pay. Even so, the Gallaghers should jointly clear £50 million after tax from their comeback tour.

But there is a far bigger payday in the offing — for Noel, at least.

In recent years record labels and investment companies such as Hipgnosis have paid vast sums to buy rights to the back catalogues of well-known musicians and bands. Queen recently sold theirs for £1 billion. Phil Collins and his Genesis bandmates received about £269 million for theirs.

Noel is acutely aware of the goldmine he could be sitting on. “[Bob] Dylan just sold his back catalogue,” he said three years ago. “What do you do? Leave it to your kids? They don’t value music. Or do you take the £200 million and buy the superyacht and the Learjet and go, ‘F***ing have it, come on!’ I think the latter.”

How valuable are Oasis’s song rights? Those who buy back catalogues keep a careful eye on how often artists are streamed on platforms such as Spotify. That is ultimately where the bulk of revenues are expected to flow from.

Oasis’s streaming numbers, however, have hardly been supersonic. Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac and even Gorillaz — Damon Albarn’s successor band to Blur — all have far stronger digital sales numbers than Oasis.

But a high-profile tour and perhaps even new songs have the potential to introduce the band to a new generation of music buyers and pump up the value of the Oasis back catalogue. Some years ago, Noel identified 2025 as the first time such a sale could take place: that is the year he said that the songs’ publishing rights will be fully owned by him, as outlined in their record contract.

A sale of Oasis song rights for hundreds of millions of pounds sounds like Noel’s masterplan. He just needs to keep things cordial with his brother for another 12 months.

Robert Watts compiles The Sunday Times Rich List