FEATURE:
Oasis’ Be Here Now at Twenty-Five
Fade In-Out: A 1997 ‘Classic’; a Modern-Day ‘What-If’…
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I have written one feature…
about Oasis’ third studio album, Be Here Now. One might think it is odd to wrote another, as the album is not as regarded as their first two. Definitely Maybe is their iconic debut of 1994; (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out in 1995. On 21st August, 1997, Be Here Now dropped into the world. A huge seller that went to number one in the U.K. and two in the U.S., there is no doubt Be Here Now was a monster success! The album actually features a couple of Oasis’ best songs. I especially like Stand By Me. Noel Gallagher’s songwriting still shows shades and glimmers of what he produced for the band’s first two albums. Liam Gallagher’s vocals do what they need to do, and the band are committed to the material. I think the problems come when you consider the length of the album: 71:33! Throw into the mix the sheer hype around in 1997, and it had all the hallmarks of a disaster. I was fourteen when the album came out. More of a Blur fan (if we are choosing Britpop clans), I was still excited by Be Here Now. You could not help but be caught up in the mania and expectations! Before coming to a 1997 review that bigged the album up, Wikipedia provide some information about the making of and recording of the biggest album of 1997:
“Recording began on 7 October 1996 at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London. Morris described the first week as "fucking awful", and suggested to Noel that they abandon the session: "He just shrugged and said it would be all right. So on we went." Liam was under heavy tabloid focus at the time, and on 9 November 1996 was arrested and cautioned for cocaine possession at the Q Awards. A media frenzy ensued, and the band's management made the decision to move to a studio less readily accessible to paparazzi. Sun showbiz editor Dominic Mohan recalled: "We had quite a few Oasis contacts on the payroll. I don't know whether any were drug dealers, but there was always a few dodgy characters about."
Oasis's official photographer Jill Furmanovsky felt the media's focus, and was preyed upon by tabloid journalists living in the flat upstairs from her: "They thought I had the band hiding in my flat." In paranoia, Oasis cut themselves off from their wider circle. According to Johnny Hopkins, the publicist of Oasis's label Creation Records, "People were being edged out of the circle around Oasis. People who knew them before they were famous rather than because they were famous." Hopkins likened the situation to a medieval court, complete with kings, courtiers and jesters, and said: "Once you're in that situation you lose sight of reality."
On 11 November 1996, Oasis relocated to the rural Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey. Though they reconvened with more energy, the early recordings were compromised by the drug intake of all involved. Morris recalled that "in the first week, someone tried to score an ounce of weed, but instead got an ounce of cocaine. Which kind of summed it up." Noel was not present during any of Liam's vocal track recordings. Morris thought that the new material was weak, but when he voiced his opinion to Noel he was cut down: "[So] I just carried on shovelling drugs up my nose." Morris had initially wanted to just transfer the Mustique demo recordings and overdub drums, vocals, and rhythm guitar, but the 8-track mixer he had employed required him to bounce tracks for overdubs, leaving him unable to remove the drum machine from the recordings.
Noel, wanting to make the album as dense and "colossal" feeling as possible, layered multiple guitar tracks on several songs. In many instances he dubbed ten channels with identical guitar parts, in an effort to create a sonic volume. Creation's owner Alan McGee visited the studio during the mixing stage; he said, "I used to go down to the studio, and there was so much cocaine getting done at that point ... Owen was out of control, and he was the one in charge of it. The music was just fucking loud." Morris responded: "Alan McGee was the head of the record company. Why didn’t he do something about the 'out of control' record producer"? Obviously, the one not in control was the head of the record company." He said that he and the band had been dealing with personal difficulties the day and night before McGee visited the studio”.
It is only right that critics and fans would expect a masterpiece from Oasis after (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? The band played two nights at Knebworth in 1996. They were on top of the world prior to 1997. There was no band bigger in the world than Oasis. There was also no other band with such weight on their shoulders. Not wanting to repeat themselves, maybe the success and momentum of 1996 made quality control and editing a low priority. There are anthems on Be Here Now, but many run too long, meaning they are distilled. That said, there was a lot of loyally positive press for the Manchester legends. This is what NME wrote in 1997:
“THE STORY, part one: so there's this geezer, right, and he walks into a cab office in Finsbury Park. At 4am, it's a strange enough place to be, anyway, a near-silent Jim Jarmusch film set replete with flickering TV screen, shadowy (fat) controller and requisite empty, darkened streets outside. The geezer isn't about to make it any saner.
Because this geezer is a) a not entirely sex-tastic wobble bottom, b) very much a late 30-something and c) extremely wankered. And he has just staggered over to the kiosk and asked the controller for a cab down to Olympia so he can "buy one of them there Oasis tickets, like".
The story, part two: a seething yellow fanzine crash-lands in the NME office, rocketing straight outta Hampshire. In a mini-rant subtitled 'Music Con Of The Year' the authors acknowledge that Oasis gigged with U2 in America. Then they describe them by screeching, "Commercial pop for those of us who don't think, but just do as they're told by the music press and garbage tabloids. Conservative, safe, dribbly, plastic pop for mummies (sic) boys who don't like getting their hands dirty. Boring unoriginal poo stick."
Nice!
Somewhere in between this brace of profound tales, obviously, is where you find the huddled critics. Can't wait for the gigs, but itching to give 'Be Here Now' a kicking; to smear their byline in blood beneath a (5) or (oh, if dreams could only come true if we wanted them to!) a (2), if only to somehow redress the amazing - and therefore entirely unjust - imbalance between Oasis' record sales and those of anyone else who can play guitar; if only to eradicate that jaw-jutting Liam pose from our minds forever; if only to undermine the utterly ridiculous concept of having to sign a legal document before being 'privileged' to receive an advance cassette; if only to be f--ing different. Yeah, we are a sadder breed than you could ever imagine. It is to his eternal credit that Noel Gallagher has helped our cause tremendously. Because 'Be Here Now', the third Oasis album, is one of the daftest records ever made. Like, on a scale of one to comical, this really is Terry F--wit climbing into the cage to stroke the furry tigers. It is tacky. It is grotesquely over-the-top. It features the same old guitar runs, the same old drawled lyrical doodlings, the same pub-tastic, pint-mungous rhythms... In fact, if there is a single plangent note in these 11 tracks that has never been heard before in the past 30 years of rock, I will eat my grandma's cat. And I haven't even got a grandma.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! This is The Great Rock'n'Roll Dwindle! Noel may have mixed it up with The Chemical Brothers not so long ago, but he's stubbornly neglected to bring any new electronica vibes along to 'Be Here Now'. This remains strictly whiter-than-white boy guitar territory, a funk-free zone, a cod-psychedelic festival of old-school sensibilities with another heaving sack of numblingly blatant Beatles references. It's trad, dad - about as subtle as a Frenchie with Mike Tyson, and so utterly reliant on the same-old-same-old cheeky chirpy chappy Oasis formula you can scarcely believe they've even dared to release this record in the same decade as Radiohead, Prodigy, Spiritualized, et al, let alone the same sodding year. "Boring, unoriginal poo stick" indeed.
And then? And then, halfway through the epic ablutions of 'All Around The World', you realise that every single hair on your arms and neck is standing erect. And you think, defiantly, but very, very quietly, "Bugger".
Rewind, then. Reconsider, then. Rebel rebel, your face is a mess, then... After the somewhat crummy statements of 'Champagne Supernova' (see the super-snooty declaration, "Where were you when we were getting high?") 'Be Here Now' is our open invitation to the Oasis party, a gilt-edged card saying, "Hey, you may have seen us having a laugh with Tony Blair on the front of your newspaper, and you might have have glanced at the crafty papara
8/10”.
Few albums have been subject to so much radical retrospection and re-evaluation. I think that the world of 1997 was very different to the one Oasis entered years before. Tastes had changed and, with Electronic and other genres taking hold, they had to get bigger and bolder. I don’t know whether Oasis planned an album that was shorter and similar to their first two. There is that great sense of ‘what-if’ with them. A couple of the tracks – I am thinking I Hope, I Think, I Know and The Girl in the Dirty Shirt – could have been taken out. You are left with ten tracks. Shorten most of them down, and already you have a stronger album! Opening Be Here Now with a 7:42 track (D’You Know What I Mean?) is not the sort of quick and instant classic you want. It is not even an epic. It seems almost a chore to get through the first track - even if it has a lot of strengths and a great chorus. Maybe longer meant better to Oasis in 1997. Many of the tracks are great, yet they would be a lot better if they were shorter. Be Here Now does feature some crackers. But, again, they are too long. All Around the World is 9:20 for instance! You could cut that song in half and it would be much more engaging. There are too many aimless solos and instrumental passages; far too much repetition and filler. The band had it them to release an album that is a lot more focused. I am going to round up soon and offer something positive. After all, Be Here Now is a very important album. In spite of some weaknesses, it has sold enormous units and topped charts around the world. Marking its twenty-fifth anniversary is only right! Before getting there, Drowned In Sound reviewed the Chasing the Sun Edition of Be Here Now in 2017:
“A lot has been said - not least by Oasis themselves - about why the Mancunian titans' third album Be Here Now went so 'wrong'.
It is, for sure, a less good album than Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory, being in large part the sound of a band who'd made their name writing three-to-four-minute-long indie rock songs now trying to write seven-to-nine-minute-long indie rock songs, with indie-rock not being a genre especially supportive of that sort of length, especially from a group that were hardly virtuoso musicians. It also mostly lacks the aspirational rock'n'roll swagger that had defined their early work.
The obvious exception to both these rules was the awesome lead single 'D'You Know What I Mean?', on which the gargantuan running time was justified by the fantastically bombastic deployment of FX - morse code! Backwards vocals! - and lyrics that (insofar as they meant anything) seemed to exist as monument to the scale of the band's success ("all my people right here right now, d'you know what I mean?" - millions of people did). But it's the peak of the album by a long shot, and the generally accepted wisdom is that fame and its attendant drugs had buggered up songwriter Noel Gallagher’s muse.
But in many ways the absolute last thing that you should really blame Be Here Now's 'failure' on is the efforts of the musicians involved. Essentially Oasis turned in a third album less good than their first two albums. It may have been a disappointment, but if they hadn’t been so outlandishly massive it wouldn’t have been that a big deal. But Oasis had sold 5m copies of Morning Glory, and a substantial enough portion of the nation felt so invested in a third Oasis record being good that it convinced itself it was a masterpiece. Pretty much everyone was complicit: in the pre-digital era, music hacks who'd had weeks to listen to the record bestowed top marks upon it, almost across the board. When the 'D'You Know What I Mean?' single arrived at Radio One, it wasn't just played hourly - its B-sides were played hourly. National newspapers ran endless articles on the band, earnestly attempting to 'decode' the cover art as if there was some great hidden meaning. And while the public may or may not have been been given helping push into making it the fastest-selling album of all time (until last year), from what I observed of school friends' reactions, people seemed to love the record for a good few weeks, maybe months, before they realised they might not be playing it quite as much as its predecessors. Eventually the backlash emerged and the record was written off, but it gave people genuine pleasure for a summer, at least.
Though they would continue for another 12 years, Be Here Now essentially broke Oasis. While Pulp and Blur ran away from their Britpop-era success, Oasis never stopped trying to appease the multitudes that had bought their first two records. Though they would continue to be a big band, they would effectively become a nostalgia act from this point on - at their last ever gig, 12 of the 19 songs played were from the first two records and accompanying b-sides.
Nowadays this all feels like a distant tale from another age, and it should be easier to listen to the record with something like objectivity. But the truth is that it's hard to imagine it being made by a band not in their weird, impossible position. 'D'You Know What I Mean?' opens it in bombastically brilliant fashion. 'All Around the World' closes it interminably, a Beatles-y plodder far far far too enamoured of its expensive, cokey orchestra. In between there are definite moments, but the preponderance of very long songs makes it a slog to this day. That all accepted, it’s not like Noel had totally lost it: if you liked the early stuff, there’s no real reason why you’d have a problem with ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Don’t Go Away’, ‘The Girl in the Dirty Shirt’ et al, they just lack the romance of the early stuff”.
Actually, before offering my take, this article discusses the legacy of Be Here Now. To be a teen in 1997 and witness the circus and show around the release of Be Here Now id indescribable! Could Oasis ever live up to anything like that realistically?!
“It takes an understanding of just how big Oasis was in the mid to late '90s to see how the media’s fear of being on the wrong side of history in part influenced initial critical response to Be Here Now. But journalists weren’t the only ones still under Oasis’ spell circa 1997; Be Here Now burned straight to the top of the UK charts, selling over 400,000 copies in its first day alone, making it the fastest-selling record in the history of the British charts. But as the hype cooled down, so too did public perception of the record. It’s a common tale for bands left to follow up on massive success. Morning Glory set Oasis’ third act up pretty nicely for success, but while the honeymoon was good, it would have been almost impossible for such a willfully cranky and boisterous record to hang on to the mantle for the long haul. The commercial momentum behind Be Here Now was not to be sustained, as it fell down the charts almost as fast as it climbed them.
Critical praise for the record also waned in the years since its release. The media, operating now outside of the bubble of adoration that once shrouded the band, began walking back some of the record’s acclaim. In his review of the deluxe reissue of Be Here Now for Drowned In Sound in July 2016, Andrzeg Lukowski described the record as the one that “essentially broke Oasis”, noting the band’s failure to reclaim its critical and commercial peak. Pitchfork sized up the record retrospectively as “bloated and indulgent.” Even Oasis’ beloved admirers over at Q Magazine failed to stand behind their initial five star review 19 years later. But perhaps no one more bluntly spelled out just how out of favor Be Here Now had fallen than Rob Sheffield in his 2016 reevaluation for Rolling Stone.
“There will never again be a rock bomb like Be Here Now, and as such its memory should be honored,” he wrote backhandedly.
Twenty years out, Oasis’ third record sounds neither like the fantastic work it was first proclaimed to be nor the misguided noise fest it’s since been painted as. Maybe it’s easier to just call Be Here Now what it is: A record with the unfortunate luck of having to follow two modern rock classics. It would have taken a superhuman effort to one-up a record like Morning Glory, especially circa 1997. Perhaps sensing as much, Oasis opted instead to follow a different, more adventurous path. “An extraordinary guy can never have an ugly day,” Noel sings on “Magic Pie,” as if he could see the inevitable backlash coming far around the bend.
What Be Here Now might be is the record that best sums how the world looks at Oasis. You love them or hate them, but very few people abstain from having an opinion about them. Oasis has always been stellar at stirring up fans’ and critics’ thoughts and feelings, and no one of their records accomplished that the way Be Here Now has. Everything else falls into neat categorization. Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory are the proven classics, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and Heathen Chemistry are the relative flops, while many true believers see late entries Don’t Believe the Truth and Dig Out Your Soul as comebacks.
But Be Here Now’s fate hasn’t yet been completely sealed. Unlike other Oasis records, there may still be some room for it to evolve in stature. For all of the talk about the volume, length, and extracurricular distractions that continue to hang over any discussion of the record, Be Here Now isn’t without its bright spots. “D’You Know What I Mean” is surprisingly catchy in spite of its bloat. “My Big Mouth” and “It’s Getting’ Better (Man!!)”, meanwhile, are scorchers that support the record’s overarching thesis that bigger is actually better. And what would happen if those early demos were to be released that stuck a little closer to Oasis’ bread and butter? All of this suggests that while Be Here Now has thus far led a complicated life, but like many of its bloated track times, has yet to truly die”.
Near the end of the magical summer of 1997, there was a lot of change in the British music scene. Oasis arrived just prior to Britpop starting. They were one of the major acts of the movement, alongside Blur. Whereas Blur, in 1997, released their exceptional eponymous album – where they embraced U.S. sound and bands like Pavement -, Oasis did not take the same evolution. Their music did not change sound of direction. Instead, it got fatter and more confident (if not focused). The brilliance of their first two albums is that the tracks are anthemic and short enough so they leave you wanting more. There is nothing like this on Be Here Now. I do admire the sheer bold-faced bravado of the band. And, yes, there are more than a few gems. I guess getting the mood right for listening is important. Be Here Now is an album you can’t really have in the background. You need to clear some time and really immersive yourself! The guys are clearly having fun throughout. Even if both Gallaghers have had different retrospective takes on the album, Be Here Now was met with a flood of praise and celebration! Maybe critics were a bit rash proclaiming it. But it still holds up twenty-five years later. I hope there will be a future version where things are tightened and shortened. Maybe shifting the tracks around (Stand By Me should be the final track; All Around the World needs to be around about track five or six). Regardless of current opinion of Oasis’ third studio album, there is going to be a lot of new inspection on 21st August. Go and get the new anniversary release if you are a fan of the album. A bold and cocaine-confident declaration from a band who had ever right to strut and swagger, Be Here Now is a messy album that could have been a masterpiece! It is that sense of what could have been. It is sad to realise that we…
WILL never know.