Noel Gallagher on why he “hates” Oasis album ‘Be Here Now’
Few albums in the history of British popular music are as important as Be Here Now. That has nothing to do with the quality of material that Oasis put on their third LP, released in August of 1997. It has to do with the sheer size, scope, and after-effects that came before the album’s recording and followed after the album’s release.
When taking into account seven-day sales, Be Here Now is still the fastest-selling album in British recording history. In the process, Oasis managed to alienate everyone from supportive journalists to the brass at Creation Records to their own band members. It was a scorched earth campaign of too much blow and too few ideas. It’s no surprise that the album has garnered some mixed opinions from the Gallagher brothers.
For his part, Liam seems to be a defender, calling out his brother Noel’s later criticisms of the album. “If he didn’t like the record that much, he shouldn’t have put the fucking record out in the first place,” Liam told NME in 2006. “I don’t know what’s up with him, but it’s a top record, man, and I’m proud of it—it’s just a little bit long.”
As Liam implies, Noel Gallagher has spent roughly the last 25 years bashing Be Here Now into oblivion. “It’s the sound of … a bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving a fuck,” Noel summarised in 2004. “There’s no bass to it at all; I don’t know what happened to that … And all the songs are really long, and all the lyrics are shit, and for every millisecond Liam is not saying a word, there’s a fuckin’ guitar riff in there in a Wayne’s World stylie”.
Noel wasn’t that much more generous to the album when Talia Schlanger interviewed him in 2018. “What we just talked about, with second-guessing, that’s what Be Here Now suffered from,” Gallagher said. “It was the first time I was ever required to write an album as the biggest songwriter in the world. So I wilted under that pressure, I think.”
“I hate that album,” Gallagher admitted. “And for no other reason then I was there when I wrote it, and I shouldn’t have written it. Did I know at the time [that it was bad]? Genuinely, I wrote it on holiday. For a start, you shouldn’t write rock and roll records in shorts. And I remember going back to London with the demo tapes, and I thought it was alright. I put it to everybody, and honestly, it was like they’d heard the greatest record of all time, and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it is really good then.'”
“So everybody around – management, record company, the rest of the band – [were saying] ‘Ah, this is amazing. This is the best thing you’ve ever done.’ And I was thinking, ‘Oh, it really is!’ Of course, then you put it out there. I guess the best reviews of any record that Oasis had ever had. So I remember being on tour [with] the two albums we had to play, Morning Glory and Definitely Maybe. A lot of these new songs, it quickly became very apparent after about four weeks that these new songs were now way up to the standards of this other lot.”
Check out Gallagher’s comments on Be Here Now down below.
