Liam Gallagher says he and his brother “are two totally different people and the sooner people realise that the less we can go on about it”. Fair enough, but, having interviewed Noel several years ago, I can report the Gallagher boys have more in common than being in the same band and having the same mum and dad: extreme candour, for one thing. You asked Noel a question, you got a straight answer. If anything, his kid brother is even more straight-talking. Also (and I didn’t think this could be possible), Liam swears even more.

When I ask Liam what he thinks the public thinks of him, for instance, he says: “Loudmouth blagging gobshite from Manchester…and they’d be totally correct.” Or here he is on the subject of Wayne Rooney’s wedding to Coleen McLoughlin, which had taken place, and subsequently appeared in OK! magazine, not long before we met. “You’ve got this kid who’s f****** 19 [22] or whatever the f*** he is, who 20 minutes ago was playing for Everton, having a five million pound wedding! How do you f****** grasp that?”

“All right,” Liam continues, “he earned his f****** money, do what you want, but I couldn’t live with meself. That to me is just f****** ridiculous. There’s ways of doing it. In fact, what did mine cost? I got married at Marylebone station, er, Marylebone registry office. In and out, no f****** about, it cost £18. Reception over the road, it was nice, we drank champagne, but I’ve still got a lid on it.”

Would anything have induced him to sell the photographs? “Absolutely f****** nothing. It smells funny, it doesn’t sit right. I’d have to be well and truly f****** desperate. I’d have to be homeless. It’s like, haven’t you got e-f******-nough, you little ****? I find that hard to f****** take. But that’s famous people for yer. When they’re not on the f****** telly they want to be in a f****** magazine and when they’re not in a magazine they want to be on a f****** bottle of water. It’s like, f****** chill the f*** out, you can’t do one f****** job right let alone f****** trying to do f****** five, you *****!”

It’s not just footballers “spending 100 grand on f****** Rolexes” that Liam objects to; he doesn’t have much time, any time, for celebrities per se. “I’m not one of them that walks around town like I’m the king of London. If I need to get milk I go out and get milk, but most of the time I’m indoors.” Noel, he says, “loves being famous. He adores it. I don’t think about it. I don’t do what famous people do. I don’t go to famous-y events. As long as I’m in a band and making music and playing gigs, I couldn’t give a f***.”

Oasis are soon to release their seventh studio album. “We should have made more, we should be on our tenth or summat,” thinks Liam. “We don’t struggle for songs.” Besides Noel’s output, Liam now writes as well, contributing three (one good, one bad, one indifferent, in my opinion) of 11 tracks on the new album. What’s I’m Outta Time (the good one) about, I ask. “Ain’t got a clue, man. Didn’t sit down to write about being out of time, in time, on f****** time, it wrote itself.” He finds melodies easy, he says, but “I find it hard with words”.

He can be inarticulate in person, too, yet he is one of those people, like John Prescott, whose meaning is crystal clear despite verbal infelicity. Oasis’s publicists are nervous at letting Liam loose in a full-blown one-on-one. He is uncompromising. He doesn’t try to be your friend. His conversational style is combative. He gives an answer, then juts his chin up and stares you out with those unblinking blue eyes. Liam doesn’t trouble with the usual niceties of shifting product either. “Buy it [the new record] or don’t f****** buy it, I’m not mithered either way.”

We’re in a photographic studio in East London, sitting on facing sofas, the publicity team out of sight behind a wall but in earshot. The biggest surprise comes right at the outset. Liam, now 35, is off the fags, off the booze, off “the other stuff” (cocaine) as well. He’s been off them for nine days at any rate. And he has taken up jogging. “Not jogging, man, running. Get up early, live right on the heath [Hampstead], pair of trainers on and away I go. Beautiful.” (I’m going to edit out most of the expletives from here on, I’m sure you’ve got the general idea.)

He covers ten miles in an hour and a half. (That’s a shade over 6.5mph which, sorry Liam, is jogging, not running, speed. But well done anyway.) He comes home, walks his kids to school, has a bath, chills out, watches TV, does “whatever’s on the menu for the day”. When we met, that meant rehearsals for the new tour (now under way in Canada), hence his abstemiousness.

“Last week me voice was a bag o’shite, I had to have a word with meself. I want this to be a success, I want this to be great, I thought I’m going to have to tone it down a bit. Load of big fat lines, load of cigarettes, staying up late talking the same shit you talked the night before and the night before that, that’s not good for it [his voice]. It’s not a big deal. I’ve got willpower.” When his voice is good, he says, “no one can touch me”. (Many would agree.) “And when it’s bad, it’s a bit better than Pete Doherty’s.”

When he does drink, he says, he might “do a bottle of tequila in a couple of hours, no problem. The good stuff, Patrón.” Doesn’t that make him ill? “No, I feel all right. Red wine I can’t handle, just want to batter everyone. On tequila, I’m Bob Monkhouse. I’m a good drinker, but it’s dominos, isn’t it? Get pissed, smoke, do the other…”

I ask if he’s mellowed with age. “I can still go pound for pound with any clown at any time,” he says. “I’m not on about fighting,

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