Liam Gallagher is one of the country’s foremost trendsetters. When Oasis emerged in the 1990s, you couldn’t move for the sight of young men doing their darndest to look like him – wearing parkas and swaggering around as if they had just wolfed down a breakfast that didn’t agree with them.

Which is to say, we should probably expect stocks of metal detectors to run low in the coming days, because Gallagher has apparently outed himself as a keen detectorist. “I’m a big fan of the metal detector phenomenon,” he tweeted on Sunday, adding in a separate message that: “I do it for the buzz n the bing.”

Assuming that Gallagher is telling the truth here – and that’s a big assumption, given his tendency to tweet falsehoods about everything from the existence of a new Oasis album to the possibility that Peppa Pig would soon join them on drums – doesn’t it make perfect sense?

If nothing else, it means that he has finally found an appropriate pastime for his uniform. It’s a little ridiculous for him to wear big coats when he’s singing songs to thousands of people in a stadium, but stick him in a field on a drizzly Thursday afternoon and it suddenly all falls into context. Plus, you know, what is Oasis if not an exercise in getting stuck in the quagmire of the past?

And if it is real, it couldn’t be more timely. Metal detecting, by all accounts, is on the up and up. Not only do 1% of British adults say they have tried metal detecting in the last year, but they are finding things at an extraordinary rate. Last year the government released its reported treasure finds for 2023 and 2024, noting that a provisional 2,883 pieces of reported treasure were found across the UK (though not including Scotland) over those years – the highest figure since records began – with many of the finds being acquired by museums. And the overwhelming majority of these treasures were discovered by metal detecting.

Now, there is no point attributing this popularity solely to Gallagher, because he has only just jumped on to the bandwagon. More likely the rise is down to Detectorists, the bucolic comedy-drama written by Mackenzie Crook, and co-starring Toby Jones, which ran from 2014 until 2022. That show was so gentle, and painted such an idyllic picture of detecting, that membership of the National Council of Metal Detecting has reportedly quadrupled over the last decade.

And, excitingly, there is still plenty out there to be discovered. More than 800 iron age objects were unearthed in North Yorkshire’s Melsonby hoard in 2021. That same year, a medieval gold coin worth almost £650,000 was found in Devon. And two years before that came the Chew valley hoard, where seven Somerset detectorists found 2,584 silver coins that were subsequently valued at £4.3m.

With riches like this still lying beneath our feet, no wonder Gallagher has taken to the pursuit with such aplomb. Especially since, given the perennial palaver over his band’s ticket prices, he seems especially well versed at extracting every last penny from well hidden spots.