Released on August 21, 1997, Oasis’ third album had the unenviable task of following up the colossal, era-defining success of 1995’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?. Oasis had hit a career peak the previous summer, performing two nights at Knebworth Park in August 1996. But rather than taking a well-needed break, they came straight off the aborted US leg of the tour and hurtled into the sessions for Be Here Now.
Having given many of his best songs away as B-sides (the pick of which would be released as The Masterplan the following year), it dawned on Noel Gallagher that his once inexhaustible stash of classic tunes was starting to run low. As Noel recalled to MOJO’s Keith Cameron, the situation wasn’t helped by intra-band fighting, hubris, and a blizzard of cocaine…
Noel Gallagher: “They were turbulent times. A lot of drugs involved. We should never have made that record then. From Knebworth, we have a couple of weeks off, then that American tour collapses halfway through… Relationships between people in the band were either non-existent or fractious. Instead of going, ‘We should go our separate ways for a year or two’, we decided like idiots to go straight into Abbey Road, arguing.
“[The session] didn’t last too long. There’s a bar in there! We were just getting pissed all the time. I wasn’t there when we got kicked out, so I’d hazard a guess it was summat Liam had been up to. We moved to Ridge Farm [in Surrey]. It took ages to get going. The press had followed us, and because it’s on a farm there’s lots of farm people knocking around, so you would always be looking suspiciously out of a window – admittedly high as a fucking kite – thinking: ‘That sheep’s got a camera. I bet he works for The Sun.’ One night we convinced Liam his bedroom was haunted. When he’d get up in the morning to have breakfast, someone would go in and turn all the pictures back to front or move a lamp. He’d arrive, pale – ‘You been in my fucking room?’ ‘No.’ ’Cos the lamp’s now in the fucking toilet.’ ‘Whooooo!’ Highly amusing.
“We had to go back to London. I’m sure it wasn’t for any technical reasons – just chaos of some description. If I was to have my time again, I would have walked away. Just to get peace and quiet, spend some money. I should be buying a yacht, what the fuck am I doing here arguing with Bonehead about a capo?! In that band, it’s futile. Because you’ve got a singer who speaks a different language, who’s got a brain the size of a frog. Like arguing with a Chinese fella about the German alphabet – there’s no fucking point. You might as well just plug in and play.
“So we went to AIR [George Martin’s studio in London]. Pissed all day again. It was getting to that point where no one was allowed in the studio when Liam was singing. I was like, I’m gonna go on holiday… I remember coming back after a month, and listening to it: I thought it was shocking. I called Owen and said, We’ve got to go back to AIR… We did the whole album in two days. And that’s what ended up on the record. You could never leave them alone in the studio, any of them.
“The mix is terrible. There was 10 people in the control room – seven of them Liam, pontificating about some such fucking nonsense. It was excruciatingly loud. We were high as kites. We didn’t know what we wanted. I think subconsciously no one really believed it was a great album, just a case of, ‘Fuck it, this’ll do. Let’s get out on the road.’
“If you’re making a record you believe in, there’s no way that [other] shit would get in the way. ...Morning Glory was chaos. The reason it worked is because the songs were great – or they were better than Be Here Now. We recorded Definitely Maybe three times! There was all manner of shit going on around the group then. But the songs were better. So that’s the fundamental problem of this album. I look back on it as a real missed opportunity. It goes back to giving all those great songs away as B-sides – The Masterplan, Half The World Away, Acquiesce…
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READ MORE: Every Oasis B-Sided Ranked!
“The original idea was to have four separate album covers: Bonehead was gonna design one, Alan was, I was, Guigs was – but Liam was gonna be in all of them. ‘Be Here Now’, right? Geddit?! No, neither did anybody else. Someone said, ‘This is going to cost over a million quid…’ ‘OK, maybe we’ll just have one album cover.’ In the stately home where we shot it, there was a famous painting of a fox hunt. Someone had drawn a cock and balls on a horse jumping over a fence chasing the fox, with a felt pen. We had to buy the fucking painting! It was a lot of money; I do hope Bonehead’s got it in his toilet.”
As told to Keith Cameron
This interview appears in MOJO’s latest Oasis special, Oasis Essentials 2025 Special Edition. The definitive guide to Oasis’s albums, songs, films and books, newly updated for this summer’s reunion shows. More info and to order a copy HERE!
