By his own admission, Brit-pop superstar Liam Gallagher is a reformed character. When Oasis visit Hong Kong for a gig next month, gone will be the wild man who was banned from flying with Cathay Pacific for an airborne punch-up on a flight to Perth after their first show in the city in 1997 and in his place will be a calmer, more mature Gallagher who prefers a night indoors to one out on the town.
'I've done my partying,' the former hellraiser says. 'I like to be with the missus and our kid. We just go round people's houses or they come round to ours.'
It's a far cry from the young upstart from Manchester who rose to fame in the mid-1990s with a band that blazed bright at the vanguard of a newfound British rock euphoria, the banner-wavers of the Brit-pop sound.
Although there was little new about Oasis' musical style, theirs was the first British pop in a long time that swaggered. Songs such as Wonderwall, Don't Look Back in Anger and Supersonic, although lyrically meaningless, had an ambition about them that ideally suited the times.
Adding to the myth was Liam and his songwriting brother Noel's penchant for fighting and partying. Rarely did a week pass when they weren't splashed over the tabloids for coming to blows in public, making outrageous statements or rumours of rampant drug taking.
Most prominent was their public rivalry with fellow Brit-poppers Blur, which came to a head in 1995 when both bands released comeback tracks from new albums on the same day in what was billed as the 'Brit-pop wars'. Oasis lost that battle - Blur's Country House beat the Mancunians' Roll With It to the top spot - but with more than 10 million albums sold, they eventually won the war.
