The Oasis gig at Lansdowne Road tonight will be the band's last ever performance, except for ones in Wembley, Reading and Leeds next month. The group, following the lead of their mentors, The Beatles, will stop touring altogether and remain a studio band, except Liam Gallagher, who insists they will always play live. His brother Noel is going solo, except he isn't really. The two Gallaghers can't bear to be in the same room together, except they'll be standing shoulder to shoulder on stage tonight. The band are except they aren't.
There was a brief time, shortly after the release of their debut album, Definitely Maybe, when Oasis got more coverage in the music pages than the front pages. Once they crossed the critical divide between people writing about their chord structures and their lyrics to who stormed out where, and what they were wearing and who they were seeing, it all turned to Red-top Soap Opera in the blink of a Britpop moment.
For all the drink, drugs, Patsy 'n' Meg, piss-ups, punch-ups and assorted saddo rock star cliches, it was a tad depressing to think that this was a band who wrote one of the anthems of the 1990s in Live Forever, who could write better B-sides than most band's A-sides, who like The La's, My Bloody Valentine and The Stone Roses, seemed musically capable of anything at any time.
The band blame cocaine use (poor dears) and intrusive media interest in their lives, but more dispassionate observers point to their dwindling record sales and loss of real creative power - their last two albums haven't performed. More prosaically, is it just that the two main members of the band can't stand the sight of each other?
Noel and Liam can certainly talk up a good fight: when Noel walked out of the band's US tour last month, he blamed his younger brother's Spinal Tap on tour excesses for his forced exit.
"What's going on is that I've had a major disagreement with monkey boy, the singer," he told reporters at the time. "It has been made virtually impossible for me to tour because Liam is such an idiot and he's losing it."
The realpolitik behind Noel's remarks, according to band sources, is that Liam was "living it large" on tour, having "romps" with a model/actress/whatever type in his hotel room and generally getting "pissed up and mouthing off at people all the time".
If you think that's all kettle and pot, remember that beneath Noel Gallagher's blokeish facade lies a very intelligent and clever person (yes, I know he hides it well) who perhaps feels that, at this stage of the band's career, they don't have to behave like they've just got their hands on their first free back-stage rider and turn every tour date into a scene from Apocalypse Now.
Not that Liam's going to be spoken to like that by his big brother. In an act of defiance, he drafted in guitarist Matt Deighton to take Noel's place on the European dates of the tour (to promote the Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants album). Incidentally, the only reason Noel is playing with the band on the Irish/British leg of the tour is that he is contractually obliged to do so - given that the band are reported to be on £1 million a night for their bigger UK dates.
The younger Gallagher was also incensed by rumours that Noel was leaving the band to pursue a solo career. "If he does that, Oasis will be over," Liam said. "Solo albums are bullshit and they are for losers. I am not there to be a shelter for him anymore, and if he goes down the solo road and then tries to get Oasis back together again, he can forget it." Unless the two brothers take a prolonged and intensive course of sibling anger crisis management, these last few Oasis dates seem to be the last chance to see them playing live together. The stark choice facing the band come August is to decide whether to become a studio band or break up. If they opt for the former, Noel will most likely adopt the Brian Wilson position - stay in the studio noodling away, while Liam and the other four tour his song-writing wares.
If, as most people believe, the band does break up, it should be done swiftly and not in the protracted Stone Roses style of shedding band members every six months until, in the end, nobody really cares.
The reason the break-up option seems most likely is that Noel will doubtless have been in intense negotiations with his good friend Richard Ashcroft. Ashcroft's band split up soon after its Irish gig at Slane two years ago (spookily enough) for the simple reason that the two creative forces in the band, Ashcroft and guitarist, Nick McCabe, suffered an irretrievable breakdown of their personal relationship. And if Noel does go solo, while his voice isn't as good as Ashcroft's, or indeed his brother's, he's fronted Oasis shows on his own (when Liam flounced off with his "sore throats") and, with a bit of work and some upping of the reverb, it would be good enough to hit the cheap seats of the big stadiums.
Oasis is also fighting against what a one-time resident of its native city referred to as "historic inevitability". All the great Manchester bands - The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, New Order - have burnt brightly in their time only for fame to buckle their "us against the rest of the world" esprit du corps and for money to provoke personality clashes.
Gallagher senior, given that he's a bit of a rock musicologist in his spare time, will be well aware of the perils of leaving a huge band to strike out on your own. The precedents aren't good: Paul McCartney, Johnny Marr, Shaun Ryder, John Squire, Ian Brown. And what the world doesn't need is Noel Gallagher fronting a Seahorses type outfit or guesting on a Fat Les single.
Maybe when he looks over at "our kid" tonight at Lansdowne Road, he won't see the lippy, boorish lad whose behaviour is more fitting of a Club 18-30 holiday group than a rock group but instead he'll see what everybody else sees: one of the best rock frontmen to emerge in the last 30 years.
Smash your guitar over his head, or hug him. The choice is yours, Noel.
Do the right thing.