The Park Before the City Wakes Up
At six-thirty in the morning, Hampstead Heath belongs to the squirrels and to people who don’t feel like talking to anyone. The grass soaks your shoes up to the ankle, the paths climb toward Parliament Hill, and from up there London keeps its distance, a gray line of cranes and glass that hasn’t started making noise yet. Anyone who runs at that hour knows the feeling. The city is already there, but it hasn’t seen you yet.
For years, at that hour, Liam Gallagher was out there too.
I know it the way anyone who reads interviews more closely than captions knows it: because he said so. In September 2017, on the eve of his first solo album, he explained that he went running every morning around six-thirty, in the park near his home, and that he felt great afterward. A few sentences, tossed off without any pose, from a man who has built a thirty-year career on posing.
Today he turns fifty-four. The parka zipped to the chin, the voice that comes through the nose and scrapes, the hands clasped behind his back at the mic, the fights with his brother that made the front pages for two decades: we know the character by heart, even people who never bought one of his records. I heard that voice mostly through headphones, while running, like millions of others. Less familiar is the man who got up early to sweat where nobody was watching, and I want to set the two face to face, because I think the second explains the first more than it seems.
The Kid Who Ran for Manchester
William John Paul Gallagher was born in Manchester on September 21, 1972, and grew up in Burnage, on the south side of the city. As a boy he ran middle distance in inter-school races, representing Manchester, and brought a few medals home.
When he talks about it, he finds an almost technical precision, strange coming from him. He wasn’t fast, he says, but he could go the distance. Anyone who ran track as a teenager recognizes that self-diagnosis instantly. There are the kids already out in front on the first straight, and the kids still hanging on at the third lap, short of breath, legs that for some reason refuse to quit, who learn early that their talent is less spectacular and far more stubborn. The second kind picks up something that stays with them for good: fatigue can be lived in, if you give it enough time.
Then came the band. He’s said himself that from then on all of that went out the window, and for a long stretch running stayed buried under everything else. The Oasis nineties were many things, and none of them looked like a training plan.
Rereading those interviews, what strikes me is that his return to running comes with no conversion story attached. No rebirth, no new man. In 2020, speaking to Rolling Stone Italia, he said he’d always done it this way: as a kid he ran the streets of Manchester, as a grown man he jogged, and in between there had only been a long, loud parenthesis. He added, in the tone we all know, that he didn’t see himself as a health nut and had nothing in common with people who spend hours on a mat doing yoga.
Not fast, but able to go far. From a fifteen-year-old middle-distance runner, that’s an athletic assessment. From a man nearly fifty, it sounds more like a reckoning.
No Watch, No Audience
That same year, in New York, on the morning of an interview with the American edition of Rolling Stone, he had already run about seven miles in Central Park. The reporter found him pacing the carpet of a hotel room, a jacket zipped up top and running shorts below, dressed for two climates at once.
How many miles he usually covered, he claimed not to know. The wristwatches people use to count every step struck him as ridiculous; he just went out and kept going as long as he had it in him. Read today, that indifference looks almost like a political gesture, at a time when every run leaves a trace behind it and an average pace to share. For him it was something simpler and more necessary. A watch that measures is already a spectator, and he had enough spectators for the rest of the day.
The 2020 interview holds a detail worth more than all the rest. He liked going out when nobody’s around, he explained, when you pass maybe a couple of people with their dogs and the squirrels crossing the grass. And he summed himself up in a line that is pure Liam:
“I run like Forrest Gump, but cooler-looking.”
Around midday, on the other hand, the park turned into chaos, with people stopping him for selfies. The only clock he admitted checking once the run was done was the one telling him how long until the pubs opened. He laughs at himself even as he hands you the key to the whole thing.
To understand what that hour meant, you have to remember how his job works. Onstage, Liam Gallagher is the most motionless frontman British rock has ever produced, hands behind his back, chin tilted up toward a mic set too high. In that same American interview he explained it was a choice built to last: at eighty he had no wish to be dancing like Mick Jagger, and staying on his feet would be plenty. In public, the body stays still and only the voice works. At dawn, on the grass of Hampstead, the voice goes quiet and everything else gets to work.
He had put the reason for those dawn runs into words during the same weeks, in an interview with a British newspaper, with an image of his own, crude and perfect. He ran to let off steam, to get out whatever he was carrying, because in his view a lot of people keep it all bottled up at home. He compared himself to a well-oiled conveyor belt: head out for a run, get it out, come back in, pick it all up again, and start over the next day. It’s the most honest description of mental hygiene I’ve ever read from a rock star, and not one word of it is borrowed from a manual.
People who live exposed have no private rooms. Every sentence turns into a headline, and even silence gets interpreted. The dawn run was the one place where nobody expected anything from him, not even a number.
When the Hips Ask You to Stop
At some point, the body sends the bill.
The first warning came in 2019, in an interview with a British music monthly: arthritis in his hips, and doctors telling him to run less. In October of the following year, an agency photographer caught him on the Heath in the rain, on a woodland path, heavy jacket on top and shorts below, the same two climates as ever. He was on a bike. Even there, in the park that for years had been the one place out of sight, someone was watching.
In 2022, talking to another magazine, he said the advice by then was to stop altogether. He delivered it with his usual cheerful bluntness, and anyone reading might almost have taken it for one more front-page quip. What I read in it was the end of that conveyor belt, and I kept coming back to it for a long time.
What happened next, in his mornings, I don’t know, and I have no wish to imagine it on his behalf. I do know what happens to runners when running is taken away, because it happened to me, over far less and for far less time. More than the fitness, you miss the hour. That window when the day hasn’t started yet and your head works on its own, while your legs do their part without asking anyone’s permission.
It’s like limping on a sprained ankle and, a few days later, feeling it in the other knee. You find out how much one part of the body was compensating only once it can’t anymore. Running works the same way, on a larger scale. While it’s there, it seems like one habit among many, one way as good as another to start the day. Lose it, and you realize how much weight it was quietly moving every morning, and how much now stays in the house.
For those who live in full view, running is the most private form of mental maintenance, and its value shows exactly on the day the body takes it away.
The Tour Starts Up Again
On September 14, Oasis announced Oasis Live ’27: thirty-eight shows between May and September next year, opening May 21 at Celtic Park in Glasgow, closing at Knebworth, with two nights at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico on July 29 and 30. Three days earlier, the documentary Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger had come out, and the Gallagher name is back in every conversation, the way it was thirty years ago.
In the announcement, the band declared itself “fit for purpose” once again and invited everyone to come see what kind of shape it’s in, playing on that word, fitness, which means something else to anyone who trains. For a rock band, fitness is measured in tickets sold and in brothers willing to share a stage. For a body, the numbers are different, slower, and not mine to run.
What I do know is how we’ll see him in July, under the lights of the Olimpico. Standing still, hands behind his back, while tens of thousands of people sing along at the top of their lungs, a glorious, cathartic collective rite. A man who for thirty years has managed to stay motionless in front of a crowd, and who for many of those years paid for that stillness somewhere else, at dawn, with wet feet on a hill in London.
Nobody ever counted those miles. Least of all him.
© cover image: By Thesupermat – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0