Robert DeNiro says Noel Gallagher asked him to listen to Oasis but he never will (2025)

The Hollywood icon and Britpop legend met at Bono’s house in 2016 when Noel made the plea that the actor listen to his songs

Robert DeNiro has opened up for the first time about meeting Oasis rocker Noel Gallagher back in 2016, when they were at Bono's house for lunch.

The Hollywood icon and Britpop legend met at Bono’s house in 2016 when Noel made the plea that the actor listen to his songs.

When asked whether he had heard Oasis he flatly replied: “Did I go away and listen to Oasis? No!”

One of Noel Gallagher's favourite stories has been to tell people about a long lunch he and Robert De Niro shared in the south of France.

The acclaimed actor had never heard of Oasis back then even though the band had dominated the British charts and further afield ever since the Battle of Britpop against Blur back in the mid-1990s.

At the time they broke into the mainstream, Oasis were signed to Scots music mogul Alan McGee's independent label, Creation Records, and releasing musical masterpieces such as albums Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

In a new interview, DeNiro admitted that he is more aware of Oasis these days, though he still hasn’t dived into the band’s back-catalogue.

Gallagher first shared news of their meeting on Instagram in 2016. Alongside a picture of the two sat at a table seemingly in deep discussion, he wrote: “So we’ve been down to The South Of France for a few days and at a 17 hour lunch at our friends house THIS..THIS.. Actually happened!!!”

Later, Gallagher told TalkSport that the lunch took place at a mutual friend’s house and that they’d sat together for “a good couple of hours” while he “bombarded” De Niro with questions about Raging Bull, Goodfellas and more of his most famous movies. They also discussed Donald Trump, with De Niro “slagging off” the then-US presidential candidate. Trump would go on to be elected later that year.

When the actor left around 9pm, Gallagher said, De Niro asked him to “write down the name of that band that you were in again”.

In a new interview to promote his new mob drama The Alto Knights, NME asked De Niro if he went away and listened to Oasis at Noel’s suggestion. “No!” he answered, before bursting into laughter.

Though he hasn’t caught up on the likes of Rock ‘N’ Roll Star and Champagne Supernova, De Niro said he was aware that Noel and famously estranged brother Liam have reconciled for a huge reunion tour beginning this summer.

“I heard about it through a friend who knows him,” the double Oscar winner revealed. “He said that they were getting back together and it’s a big, big deal.”

But DeNiro, unsurprisingly perhaps considering the iconic soundtracks of films such as Goodfellas and The Irishman, prefers American singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole (all of whom are dead, just sayin') as his go-to artists of the moment.

“I used to like to listen to rock and roll when I was a kid, a teenager,” he told NME adding that he has turned to older icons recently: “I don’t know why, it feels nostalgic.”

DeNiro stars in The Alto Knights, which tells the story of real life mobster, Frank Costello who moved from Italy to the United States on January 26, 1891, when he was a boy, becoming the boss of the Genovese crime family in 1937 when his good friend, Vito Genovese, fled the country after a double homicide.

The Alto Knights follows the period when Vito returns to the United States, keen to reclaim his title.

De Niro takes on the two roles, that of both Frank and Vito in The Alto Knights.

The search for who would play Vito was cut short when producer Irwin Winkler suggested De Niro play both roles.

"I said, let me think about that," De Niro said. "I wanted to work with everybody again. I'd known them so long and worked so many times with everybody that it was like Old Home Week.

"I definitely wanted to do it and would've done it anyway, but the fact that Irwin brought this up made it more enticing and more of a justification on many levels. I said, yeah, okay, I'll do it.

"The thing that I realised was that I couldn't just do it with somebody reading lines to me. The other mob characters were cast already, so I interviewed a few of them to see who would be the best as the other actor opposite me.

"There was one actor who played [Joe] Profaci named Joe Bacino. Joe learned the two scenes, and we worked on them until maybe two weeks before we were gonna shoot them. I couldn't have done it without having another person like him do it."

The Alto Knights is in cinemas now.