Oasis spat with Edinburgh Council is more fun than going to their gig

The Herald Scotland

22-06-2025

Gallagher hit back with 'I'd love to see a picture of all the people on the Edinburgh council. Bet there's some real STUNNING individuals.' It's always great when celebs resort to caps; it reveals they are really irate. And we've all enjoyed the Oasis brothers' long-running spat, suspecting it's little more like a 15-year-old mump and that the pair would kiss each other's scratchy faces and make up just as soon as the ink was dry on the £100m performance contract.
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But why do we really enjoy these feuds? We clearly love the theatre of it all, the unscripted (or sometimes scripted) bitching, we get to see the celebs with a real clarity; we see where their heads and their hearts truly are. And this insight helps determine our remote relationship with them.
Don't we all love to see someone agree with what we've been thinking, when their truth coalesces with our truth? (Had to agree with Gallagher on this occasion. Local politics is politics is hardly overpopulated by those defined by a clean, healthy living regime.) And who could criticise Sir Rod's once machine gunning of Michelle Mone? "I think Michelle Mone is a nasty piece of work, I really do," he fumed. "She is a manipulative cow.' Except perhaps Mone's accountants, lawyers and family.
As humans, we've long existed thanks to our learning what makes others tick, whether they have a Rolex Daytona personality – or that of a hastily made bomb. Wasn't the best part of Celebrity Big Brother centred on the times countless feuds feature?
And isn't it great to be caught up in the heady discourse of debate, which almost becomes a TV game show in itself, whereby the terminal whiners with issues can be set up in front of a camera and proceed to whack each other about the head with rhetoric - and sometimes a little bit of bile. Remember the war of words between the US literary giants Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, prompted by Vidal's unflattering comments about Mailer's book The Prisoner of Sex. Of course, we didn't enjoy it so much when the spat turned physical when Mailer later headbutted Vidal. Six years later, Mailer lamped him again, prompting Vidal's immortal line: 'As usual, words fail him.'
Bette Davis (Image: free) And we won't forget the acid tongues of both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the movie stars who hated each other more than they hated losing the Vaseline on their spotlight. Crawford once put rocks in her pockets in preparation for a scene in which Davis had to drag her across a floor in the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Then Bette Davis taunted; 'Joan slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.'
Okay, I know what you're thinking; it's undignified to surrender to a little schadenfreude. But isn't seeing the more human side of celebrity useful, in that it that stops our aspirational fires burning to the point you can smell singeing? And don't we sometimes simply crave for a truth, which happens to coincide with our truth?
Yes, Elton may have been a little unkind to label one-time chum Madonna a 'fairground stripper,' but who can argue he was wrong to take a pop when he described the Material Girl as a 'lip-syncing miserable cow,' who was charging a (then) whopping £75 to see her mouth the words to backing tracks?
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Yet, you had to admire Madge's miaow of a reply, after turning down an invite to sing at Reg's wedding. 'Madonna wishes Elton all the best and hopes married life will make him a happier person.'
Yet, we aren't always treated to clever bitchery, which is often about self-aggrandising behaviour. Did Louis Walsh have to continually refer to his former protégé Ronan Keating as 'the former shoe-shop worker? Did Mel Brown really have to claim a lesbian tryst with fellow Spicer Geri Horner? Could it have been about Brown's need to shift book sales rather than come out with her truth?
Of course. But let's enjoy the little spats, nonetheless. They are wonderfully reductive, sometimes wise, often waspish. It's conflict, but not REAL conflict. And when the Beckhams or the Sussexes fall out with their families, we can take comfort that it's not just us muggles who are capable of that.