Be Here Now (album)

Be Here Now is the third studio album by the English rock band Oasis, released on 21 August 1997 by Creation Records. The album was recorded at multiple recording studios in London, including Abbey Road Studios, as well as Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey. Although most tracks retain the anthemic quality of previous releases, the songs on Be Here Now are longer and contain many guitar overdubs. Noel Gallagher said this was done to make the album sound as "colossal" as possible. The album cover features a shot of the band members at Stocks House in Hertfordshire. It is the last Oasis studio album to feature founding members guitarist Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs and bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan as the two left in 1999, and the first to entirely feature Alan "Whitey" White on drums, having joined the band two years prior.

Following the worldwide success of their first two albums, Definitely Maybe (1994) and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995), the album was highly anticipated. Oasis' management company, Ignition, were aware of the dangers of overexposure, and before release sought to control media access to the album. The campaign included limiting pre-release radio airplay and forcing journalists to sign gag orders. The tactics alienated the press and many industry personnel connected with the band and fuelled large-scale speculation and publicity within the British music scene.

Preceded by the lead single "D'You Know What I Mean?", Be Here Now was an instant commercial success, becoming the fastest-selling album in British chart history and topping the albums chart in 15 countries. It was the biggest selling album of 1997 in the UK, with 1.47 million units sold that year. As of 2016, the album has sold eight million copies worldwide. It has been certified 7× Platinum in the UK and Platinum in the US, being Oasis' third and final Platinum album in the latter country.

According to co-producer Owen Morris, the recording sessions were marred by arguments and drug abuse, and the band's only motivations were commercial. While initial reception for Be Here Now was positive, retrospective reviews have been more negative, with many calling it bloated and over-produced. The band members have had differing views of the album: Noel has severely criticised it, while Liam Gallagher has praised it, calling the album his favourite Oasis album. Music journalists such as Jon Savage have pinpointed the album's release as marking the end of the Britpop movement. In 2016, the album was reissued with bonus tracks, including a new remix of "D'You Know What I Mean?"

Background

By the summer of 1996, Oasis were widely considered, according to guitarist Noel Gallagher, "the biggest band in the world ... bigger than, dare I say it, fucking God." The commercial success of their previous two albums had resulted in media frenzy in danger of leading to a backlash.

Earlier that year, Oasis members holidayed with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss in Mick Jagger's villa in Mustique. During their last stay on the island, Noel wrote the majority of the songs that would make up Be Here Now. He had suffered from writer's block during the previous winter, and said he wrote only a single guitar riff in the six months following the release of (What's the Story) Morning Glory?. Eventually, he disciplined himself to a routine of songwriting where he would go "into this room in the morning, come out for lunch, go back in, come out for dinner, go back in, then go to bed." Noel said "most of the songs were written before I even got a record deal, I went away and wrote the lyrics in about two weeks." Oasis producer Owen Morris joined Gallagher later with a TASCAM 8-track recorder, and they recorded demos with a drum machine and a keyboard.

In August 1996, Oasis performed two concerts before crowds of 250,000 at Knebworth House, Hertfordshire; more than 2,500,000 fans had applied for tickets. The dates were to be the zenith of Oasis's popularity, and both the music press and the band realised it would not be possible for the band to equal the event. He attended the concert and heckled Noel from the upper balcony. Four days later, Liam declined to participate in the first leg of an American tour, complaining that he needed to buy a house with his then-girlfriend Patsy Kensit. He rejoined the band a few days after for a key concert at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York, but intentionally sang off-key and spat beer and saliva during the performance.

Amongst much internal bickering, the tour continued to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Noel finally lost his patience with Liam and announced he was leaving the band. He said later: "If the truth be known, I didn't want to be there anyway. I wasn't prepared to be in the band if people were being like that to each other." However, Morris later wrote: "It was a mistake on everyone's part, management very much included, that we didn't record Be Here Now in the summer of 1996. It would have been a much different album: happy probably." 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." and largely follow the typical verse – chorus – verse – chorus – middle eight – chorus format of guitar-based rock music. Reviewing for Nude as the News, Jonathan Cohen noted that the album is "virtually interchangeable with 1994's Definitely Maybe or its blockbuster sequel, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?", while Noel had previously remarked that he would make three albums in this generic style.

The tracks are more layered and intricate than before, and each contains multiple guitar overdubs. While Morris had previously stripped away layers of overdubs on the band's debut Definitely Maybe, during the production of Be Here Now he "seemed to gleefully encourage" such excess; "My Big Mouth" has an estimated thirty tracks of guitar overdubbed onto the song. A Rolling Stone review described the guitar lines as composed of "elementary riffs".

There was some experimentation: "D'You Know What I Mean?" contains a slowed down loop from N.W.A's "Straight Outta Compton", while "Magic Pie" features psychedelically arranged vocal harmonies and a Mellotron. According to Noel, "All I did was run my elbows across the keys and this mad jazz came out and everyone laughed." The album's production is dominated by top-end high frequency tones, and according to Uncuts Paul Lester, its use of treble is reminiscent of both late 1980s Creation Records bands such as My Bloody Valentine, and the Stooges' famously under-produced Raw Power (1973).

Photographer Michael Spencer Jones said the original concept involved shooting each band member in various locations around the world, but when the cost proved prohibitive, the shoot was relocated to Stocks House. Spencer remarked that the shoot "degenerated into chaos", adding that "by 8 pm, everyone was in the bar, there were schoolkids all over the set, and the lighting crew couldn't start the generator. It was Alice in Wonderland meets Apocalypse Now." Critics have tried to read into the selection of the cover props, but Johns said Gallagher simply selected items from the BBC props store he thought would look good in the picture. Two props considered were an inflatable globe (intended as a homage to the sleeve of Definitely Maybe) and the Rolls-Royce, suggested by Arthurs.

Jones has said that the partially submerged Rolls-Royce was in reference to Keith Moon's oft-fabled sinking of a Lincoln Continental into a hotel swimming pool in 1967. The release date in each region was commemorated on the calendar pictured on the sleeve; Harris said the dating "[encouraged] fans to believe that to buy a copy on the day it appeared was to participate in some kind of historical event."

Release

Promotion

When Alan McGee, Creation's publicist Johnny Hopkins, and marketing executive Emma Greengrass first heard Be Here Now at Noel Gallagher's house, each had their doubts about its artistic value, but kept their doubts to themselves. One Creation employee recalled "a lot of nodding of heads, a lot of slapping of backs." McGee later admitted to having strong misgivings at first: "I heard it in the studio and I remember saying 'We'll only sell seven million copies' ... I thought it was too confrontational."

However, the extent that Ignition were willing to go to control access to the album generated more hype than could normally have been expected, and served to alienate members of both the print and broadcast media, as well as most Creation staff members. When "D'You Know What I Mean?" was planned as the first single, Ignition decided on a late release to radio so as to avoid too much advance exposure. However, three stations broke the embargo, and Ignition panicked. According to Greengrass: "we'd been in these bloody bunker meetings for six months or something, and our plot was blown. 'Shit, it's a nightmare'." BBC Radio 1 received a CD containing three songs ten days before the album's release, on condition that disc jockey Steve Lamacq talked over the tracks to prevent illegal copies being made by listeners. The day after Lamacq previewed the album on his show, he received a phone call from Ignition informing him that he would not be able to preview further tracks because he didn't speak enough over the songs. Lamacq said, "I had to go on the air the next night and say, 'Sorry, but we're not getting any more tracks.' It was just absurd." According to Creation's head of marketing John Andrews, "[The campaign] made people despise Oasis within Creation. You had this Oasis camp that was like 'I'm sorry, you're not allowed come into the office between the following hours. You're not allowed mention the word Oasis.' It was like a fascist state." Reflecting in 1999, Greengrass admitted: "In retrospect a lot of the things we did were ridiculous. We sit in [Oasis] meetings today and we're like 'It's on the Internet. It's in Camden Market. Whatever'. I think we've learned our lesson." According to Perry: "It seemed, particularly once you heard the album, that this was cocaine grandeur of just the most ludicrous degree. I remember listening to "All Around the World" and laughing—actually quite pleasurably—because it seemed so ridiculous. You just thought: Christ, there is so much coke being done here." The release date had been brought forward out of Ignition's fear that import copies of the album from the United States would arrive in Britain before the street date. Worrying that TV news cameras would interview queuing fans at a traditional midnight opening session, Ignition forced retailers to sign contracts pledging not to sell the record earlier than 8:00 am. The album became their highest-charting release in the US by debuting at number two on the Billboard 200 chart. However, its first week sales of 152,000—below expected sales of 400,000 copies—were considered a disappointment. It missed the top of the chart by sales of only 771 copies.

Be Here Now was the biggest-selling album of 1997 in the UK, with 1.47 million units sold that year. By the end of 1997, Be Here Now had sold eight million units worldwide. However, most sales occurred during the first two weeks of release, and once the album was released to UK radio stations, the turnover tapered off. Buyers realised that the album was not another (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and by 1999, Melody Maker reported that it was the album most sold to second-hand record stores. Four of the album's 12 tracks were released as singles: "D'You Know What I Mean?", "Stand By Me", "All Around the World" and "Don't Go Away". In 2016, following the album's reissue and the release of the documentary Oasis: Supersonic, the album topped the UK Vinyl Albums Chart, 19 years after its original release.

Critical reception

Initial response

Initial reviews of Be Here Now were, in John Harris's words, unanimous with "truly amazing praise". According to Harris, "To find an album that had attracted gushing notices in such profusion, one had to go back thirty years, to the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." While Q described the album as "cocaine set to music", David Fricke of Rolling Stone complimented the song formula throughout the album, writing that it "pays off". However, as a whole, he felt the album was "music built for impact, not explanation".

Reviews in the British music press for (What's the Story) Morning Glory? had been generally negative. When it went on to become, in the words of Select editor Alexis Petridis, "this huge kind of zeitgeist-defining record", the music press was "baffled". Petridis believed the initial glowing reviews of Be Here Now were a concession to public opinion.

Be Here Now proved divisive among Planet Sound readers, who voted the album their "most loathed" of 1997, as well as their second-favourite of the year, behind Radiohead's OK Computer.

Retrospective appraisal

Retrospectively, reception to Be Here Now has been more negative, with critics calling it bloated and over-produced. Reviewing in 2002, Stephen Thompson of The A.V. Club felt that although there were good tracks present, naming "My Big Mouth", "Don't Go Away" and "Stand by Me", the majority suffered from "cumbersome overlength", feeling that the band's attempt to make a "grand, career-defining statement" backfired. In 2020, Luke Holland of The Guardian described Be Here Now as a "flawed masterpiece"; writing that "as a snapshot of 90s excess – a bygone age of pig-headed rock-star bravado – it’s a preposterous hoot."