Be Here Now (album) - Background

Background

By the summer of 1996, Oasis were widely considered to be, as guitarist Noel Gallagher put it, "the biggest band in the world." According to the guitarist, Oasis were "bigger than, dare I say it, fucking God." The huge commercial success of the band's two previous albums had resulted in media frenzy and an ubiquity in the mainstream press that was in danger of leading to a backlash against Oasis. Oasis members were by then being invited to functions at 10 Downing Street by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and holidaying 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 Oasis's third album. He had suffered from writer's block during the previous winter, and has since admitted he wrote only a single guitar riff in the six months following the release of (What's the Story) Morning Glory?. After a few weeks "idling", 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 has later said about the album "...most of the songs were written before I even got a record deal, I went away and wrote the lyrics in about two weeks."

In August 1996, the band performed two concerts before crowds of 250,000 at Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, while 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. By this time however, there was much instability and internal conflict emerging between the band members. On 23 August 1996, vocalist Liam Gallagher refused to sing for an MTV Unplugged performance at London's Royal Festival Hall, pleading a sore throat. Though he did attend the concert, he spent the evening heckling Noel from the upper level 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 re-joined 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. The following day, The Sun led with the front page headline "America sickened by obscene Liam's spitting rampage." Amongst much internal bickering, the tour continued—with Liam—to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Noel finally lost his patience with his brother and announced he was leaving the band. He later admitted "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." Although Noel rejoined Oasis a few weeks later, the band's management and handlers were worried. With an album's worth of songs already demoed, the general feeling among the Gallaghers was that they should record as soon as possible. Their manager, Marcus Russell, said in 2007 that "in retrospect, we went in the studio too quickly. The smart move would have been to take the rest of the year off. But at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. If you're a band and you've got a dozen songs you think are great, why not go and do it."