When Pete Doherty stood in line to get Oasis’ ‘Be Here Now’
Oasis was such a culturally dominant force in the 1990s they touched nearly every British soul of the period. Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs estimated in the BBC documentary series 7 Ages of Rock that there were 2.7million ticket applications for the band’s 1996 Knebworth concerts. That kind of success isn’t just “indie” success: it makes you the biggest band on earth.
Of course, that plane had to crash eventually. Most people tend to point to 1997’s Be Here Now as the moment that Oasis became too big for their own good. Everything about Be Here Now, from its run time to its song lengths to its arrangements and its mixing volume, was massive. Its release was massive too: with nearly 664,000 copies sold in its first seven days, Be Here Now became the fastest-selling British album of all time in terms of first-week sales.
Everyone in Britain was clamouring to get their hands on Be Here Now, including future Libertines frontman Pete Doherty. The then-18-year-old had just graduated from school that same year and was about to enrol in Queen Mary College at the University of London when he waited in line to get his hands on Oasis’ third album.
Cameras from the BBC and MTV’s UK affiliate were on hand at Doherty’s local record shop in London, where he was waiting. Wearing a striped polo shirt and looking much younger and healthier than he would when he rose to fame, Doherty pledges his allegiance to Noel Gallagher once the cameras decide to focus on him.
“I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel Gallagher is a poet and Liam is a town crier,” Doherty explains in the interview, “and I’ve always seen that as a perfect combination.” The interviewer for MTV is clearly delighted with Doherty’s answer and asks him to repeat it, which Doherty gamely does. When asked for one word to describe Oasis, Doherty goes with: “trousers.”
Years later on Phil Taggart’s Slacker podcast, Doherty revealed that he wasn’t actually looking to grab Be Here Now that day – he just wanted to be interviewed by MTV. “I wanna clear this one up”, Doherty explained. “I was working in the Trocadero Centre [in London] demonstrating wind-up frogs, and I knew that there was something going on cos there was all these TV cameras and photographers, and there was a giant cardboard cut-out of Noel and Liam, so I went down there – I just wanted to get on the telly”.
“I joined the queue, grabbed the cardboard cut-outs, was doing these stupid ‘please photograph me’ things,” Doherty added, “jumping on the back of an open-top bus with these cardboard cut-outs and then the next morning running to the newsagents thinking I was gonna be on the front of the newspaper with these cardboard cut-outs.”
“I wasn’t queuing for an Oasis album”, he claims. “My sister was a big Oasis fan, and I later tuned into them and decided they were brilliant, but at the time, I was far more interested in getting photographed on the back of a bus with a cardboard cut-out.”
Watch the hilarious moment below.
