Oasis’ First Breakup Can Be (Partially) Blamed on Their 1994 Supporting Act

The first “official” Oasis breakup of 1994 could be attributed to brotherly grievances, booze, drugs, a rigorous touring schedule, and, apparently, the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

What Los Angeles’ historic Whiskey A Go Go club attendees saw that fateful night in 1994 was a subpar musical performance from Oasis and vocalist Liam Gallagher hitting guitarist and brother Noel Gallagher over the head with a tambourine. But that wasn’t the whole story behind the breakup.

Indeed, that story was missing two critical parts of the narrative: the bill’s supporting act, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and a gram of pure crystal meth.

Setting The Stage For A Split

The story starts on the West Coast, where Oasis was playing a string of shows with the Brian Jonestown Massacre as their opening act. At some point on the run, Oasis asked the support band, “Can you get any sniffs?” Massacre’s tambourine player Joel Gion obliged, whipping out a bag and doling out what Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe recalled as the “tiniest little grain” in a 2018 interview with Clash.

“They’re like, [imitating an English accent] ‘F*** off, mate!’ Joel’s like, ‘You don’t wanna mess with this.’ Those guys didn’t sleep for days,” Newcombe recalled. “They did a whole gram of, like, pure crystal meth because they thought it was just cheap 5% coke from London. It f***ed their show.”

That it did. Oasis’ 1994 performance at the Whiskey A Go Go has gone down in history as one of their most infamous, from the band starting different songs at the same time due to discrepancies in their paper set lists to Liam Gallagher throwing a tambourine at his brother, Noel, in frustration. “I could see Liam going down to one of the amps throughout the gig,” guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs later recalled. “He was just snorting lines of crystal meth onstage.”

The Brian Jonestown Massacre Found Out Their Role in Oasis’ Breakup Later

The embarrassment of flopping one of their biggest U.S. shows to date at the time only added to the growing tensions between brothers and bandmates Noel and Liam Gallagher. But Liam wasn’t the only one who Noel butted heads with on that West Coast tour. Yep, Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe certainly had a supporting role in that, too.

With emotions running high, Newcombe recalled Noel “screaming in my face, [saying], ‘I know for a fact you never f***ing practice. How dare you.’ And I was just like, ‘F*** you, man. You play the same exact equipment as Slash. If you f***ing plug a Gibson guitar with a f***ing Boss pedal into a Marshall amp, you sound exactly like Guns N Roses. It’s not the Beatles. Suck my d***.”

After Oasis’ Whiskey A Go Go set was over, Noel temporarily quit the band. But of course, we know he eventually came back and continued to ascend to fame with releases like (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Oasis would go through several more spats and splits from there, but Brian Jonestown Massacre never knew how integral their part in the first breakup was until years later.

According to Newcombe, he was watching the 2016 Oasis documentary Supersonic when he realized the meth incident in Los Angeles helped spur the first split. “The cool part about it is the minute they were describing what happened, I was like, ‘Holy s***, I didn’t realize that it broke up the band.’”

How’s that for a music industry accolade?

Photo by Shutterstock

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission