The circus around Oasis’ third album, Be Here Now, makes the modern hoopla surrounding Frank Ocean, Kanye West, and Beyoncé look like amateur hour. Never was the hunger for new product greater, and never was the infrastructure designed to supply it in poorer shape. Back in the summer of 1997, the Manchester band’s label, Creation, and management, Ignition, were mobilized for battle, attempting to downplay the hype after months of tabloid chaos and over-saturation. Oasis had actually made another album, which should have been news enough.
Never mind that in September of ’96, Liam Gallagher had bailed on their diabolical MTV Unplugged performance before walking out on an American tour because, he claimed, he needed to buy a house. Two months later, he was arrested on London’s Oxford Street at 7.25 a.m. with his pockets full of cocaine, described by police officers as “an unkempt man, obviously the worse for wear.” The following January, Noel Gallagher left the nation clutching at pearls after declaring drug-taking to be as normal as having a cup of tea. The pair of them could barely leave their houses for the throngs of paparazzi camped outside.
It might sound like damage control, but if anyone was engaged in that, it was the British music press. They had looked foolish after underrating What’s the Story (upon which Oasis played to 250,000 people across two nights at Knebworth), and were aware that Britpop’s luster was starting to tarnish. Every major news program sent a camera crew to regional record shops on the Thursday of release (MTV UK captured a young Pete Doherty in the queue in London), and HMV issued special certificates to first-day buyers. Magazine sales were predicated on their access to to the band, a valuable commodity that could easily disappear at the first sign of dissent, as evidenced by the album’s desperate and ingratiating reviews: “Oasis’ third LP is a veritable rock’n’roll monsoon of an album; a giant jigsaw puzzle, an elemental force, a monster that cannot and will not be contained,” claimed Vox. “Dem a come fe mess up de area seeeeeeeerious,” suggested Charles Shaar Murray in Mojo. Q actually called it “cocaine set to music,” which was about the only factual statement amid the lashings of hyperbole. Of the many cultural changes that Be Here Now triggered, the shift in power from the music press to marketing men may be the most toxic and enduring.
What sounded like a dog’s dinner in 1997 sounds no better on this 2016 remaster, which remains one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music. It’s not necessarily the songs—Noel Gallagher’s way with a hook is diminished, but passable enough to make “do you know what I mean, yeah yeah” feel sticky and semi-poignant. Even “Stand By Me” is genuinely touching. But the mix is gristle to Definitely Maybe’s fillet. There were reportedly up to 50 channels of guitar on each of Be Here Now’s tracks, sometimes coupled with a 36-piece orchestra, the effect evoking something like hell churning around a cement mixer, or agonizing indigestion. Aside from a two-minute reprise of a nine-minute song, the shortest track is 5:13. It boasts more key changes than a single series of “X Factor.” The morse code blips in “D’You Know…” supposedly spell out “bugger all.” A toilet appears to flush at the end of the title track. “In the first week, someone tried to score an ounce of weed, but instead got an ounce of cocaine,” said co-producer Owen Morris. “Which kind of summed it up.” After the two massive shows at Knebworth, there was nowhere left for them to go. The lyrics are jaded about success and filled with a foreboding sense that nothing’s set to last. (And they only add to one of pop’s greatest mysteries: How can two such naturally funny men be so bereft of lyrical talent?)
It’s easy to write off Oasis given what they became, but as the forthcoming documentary Supersonic makes clear, they were irresistibly magnetic in the early days. Their god-given wit and lack of inhibitions had even made traditional rock star excess into a guilty pleasure for fans who knew better than to buy into the cliche of throwing televisions out of windows. Be Here Now was the flipside of that Faustian pact, trading a generation’s communal optimism for empty calls-to-arms. Noel, at least, realized this and was doing down the record months prior to its August release. “It’s rocking but it’s not innovative,” he said in February ’97. “There’s no new ideas going on. It’s just us.” Within a few years, he admitted that he had been “making records to justify spending fucking thousands on drugs.” This reissue contains “NG’s 2016 Rethink” of “D’You Know What I Mean,” though that’s the only reworked track. “Someone (I can’t remember who) had the idea that we revisit, re-edit the entire album for posterity’s sake,” he said in a press release. “We got as far as the first track before we couldn’t be arsed anymore and gave up.”
So why bother reissuing a record so shit that it never even became a cult classic, that its warring creators can’t even be bothered with it? (Other than to flog £100 vinyl box sets, that is.) There are two-and-a-half hours of bonus materials here, few of them essential and most of them familiar: B-sides, demos, and live tracks—including the live debut of “My Big Mouth” at Knebworth, which somehow sounds better than the studio recording despite being recorded in the midst of a mob. Of most interest are the previously unheard and surprisingly fleshed out demos that Noel cut while on holiday in Mustique with Kate Moss and Johnny Depp (who plays slide guitar on grim blues pastiche “Fade In/Out”). In a sense, this turgid collection is the ultimate expression of Be Here Now: as bloated and indulgent as the record itself, the music a secondary concern to the product’s status.
It wasn’t just the end of Oasis’ imperial period, but the record industry’s as well. Ten days after the album came out, Princess Diana was killed in a car accident, shifting the national mood towards mass grief and mawkish sentimentality. Britpop receded to make way for a more humble kind of rock star in the likes of Travis and Coldplay. Although Oasis rightly questioned the absurd wave of national mourning, they also, in some backflip of contrarianism, started dedicating “Live Forever” to Diana at their autumn ’97 gigs. There was a lavish stage setup at these shows, with the band entering and departing through a giant phone box. The echoes of “Doctor Who”’s time-traveling Tardis were unavoidable: Oasis belonged to the past now.
