‘Liam had been drinking all night. Noel was not in a great mood': photographers pick their best Oasis shot

The Guardian

7 hours ago

I didn't really know the Gallaghers then. I had only shot Oasis at the Q awards and live shows. In 2001, I was commissioned by a US publication for a feature about The US tour of Brotherly Love, with Oasis, the Black Crowes and Spacehog. All the bands had two brothers in them, and I had been asked to photograph the Gallaghers and the Robinsons from the Black Crowes together.
The shoot was at the Scala in King's Cross, London. It was peak Oasis, but there was no entourage, nobody watching over my shoulder. There was also literally nowhere to shoot in the venue. I ended up finding a corridor with a white wall and I thought: 'I'll try and make this look as much like a studio as possible.'
I think Liam was holding a can of Red Stripe and they were smoking. I started taking shots of them all together and then, being a savvy photographer, made sure I did lots of the Gallaghers on their own. It is very rare that you see pictures of them laughing: Noel's almost rolling his eyes. I wasn't really tuned into what they were saying – and I might not have even been able to hear. I certainly wasn't the one making them laugh.
I was chuffed to get the chance to shoot them, but I felt like Liam had quite a front, and I couldn't really connect with him. I remember thinking: 'The shots are OK.' Now they feel a lot more classic – black and white, very contrasty – but that's something that only happens with the passing of time.
Back at the very start of my career, when I was 25, I knew an art director who was working on a new magazine called Loaded. In May 1994, he rang and said: 'I've got a job for you.' He gave me the address of a hotel somewhere in Manchester and told me to meet a guy called Noel Gallagher. I thought he was a tour manager, at first. Nobody said he was actually in the band.
The hotel was like an Edwardian house: the place was so depressing. The receptionist had that Mancunian ambivalence, very downbeat. I said I'm here to see Noel Gallagher and she gesticulated with her thumb. So I go down this corridor, knock on the door. He answers and just goes: 'All right?' That's it, devoid of any warmth.
He'd split up with his girlfriend and they'd shared a flat, so the record company were paying for him to live at the hotel. He had this little pocket address book and was making phone calls. Each one was the same: 'All right, seen our kid? OK, bye.' I was sitting there like a lemon thinking: 'What is 'our kid'?' So I thought: 'I'll just take some pictures.' Then he got up and said: 'Let's go.' As we were leaving, he stopped and said: 'What do you think of Blur?' And I went: 'I quite like them.' 'Second-best band in Britain,' he said.
We walked to this street corner and then four guys came from the opposite direction. You could identify the leader from 200 yards away, because he had this unbelievable walk. It was mad experiencing that walk. I quickly gathered Noel and Liam were brothers. They spoke to each other in such a relentlessly passive aggressive way. Noel would tut and roll his eyes at everything Liam said.
Liam asked me what football team I supported. I said Arsenal. He put his hand up to my face and went: 'I can't even look at you.' For the actual shoot, we went to Maine Road [then Manchester City's home]. I got on the ground and he made as if he was kicking a football at the camera.
Before that day, I had been living a very precarious existence. Afterwards, I started to get a lot of well-paid work. My wife's best friend knows Noel and a couple of years ago we both went to a birthday dinner at her house. I said to Noel: 'I often think of that photo as the day my career started.' He goes: 'I'll tell you why that's the day your career began – because that's the day you met Oasis.'
Bands – especially ones with a pretty boy singer or a female singer – can get really nervous that the singer gets all the attention. Noel was never like that. He said: 'You've got to use the assets you've got.' Liam was a really attractive young boy at the time. You put that on the cover of a paper, you're going to sell a lot.
Early on, I was asked by Creation Records to get Oasis used to being photographed and work out what kind of image suited them – whether we wanted a modern look or a 1960s vibe. I was from Manchester originally and Noel, Liam and I supported Manchester City, so the label thought I was the person to ease them into it. Bands are normally a little bit cocky when they first start, but Oasis weren't. They were like: 'Oh, I love those pictures you did of Joy Division.' So they were kind of in awe of me initially.
In July 1994, we went to Manchester to do a big session for the NME. A couple of people at the NME were obsessed with the Beatles and wanted Oasis to be a bit like that, but I didn't really see that in them. They weren't yobby – they were quite sensitive, I felt – but by the same token, they were lads who went to watch football. And those were the people who liked the band.
We went to Maine Road to do some photographs. This picture was taken from the steps of the entrance to the stadium. I like it because it's very monotone. Liam's shirt is pretty much reflected in the painted brickwork around the ground. At the time, City were sponsored by Brother, a Japanese electronics company, and to have 'Brother' on the shirts was an absolute gift. We did a lot of pictures of the band in the Manchester City shirts that day. That was meant to be the cover of the NME, but my editor said: 'I don't want them to be associated with losers' – because City were about to get relegated.
Even now, people associate that shirt with the band. It was interesting because football wasn't fashionable in the way it is now – and it wasn't glamorous at all. It was very difficult for people outside the UK to get football shirts from English clubs but in Tokyo, fans in the front four rows of their shows were wearing Man City shirts. They must have written to the club and had them imported.
In 1994, I was chief photographer for Melody Maker and that July I flew to New York for the Maker's first Oasis cover. We were booked on the same flight, but the band were in club class and me and the hack were in goats-and-chickens. Liam came back to say hello. He was a garrulous guy, even pre-fame. He was standing at the back of the plane having a beer and this woman came by huffing and puffing with some kids and Liam offered to look after one of them. He pulled down one of those seats the flight attendants sit on and had the girl on his lap and chatted to her. After the tales I'd heard, I'd thought I was about to spend a few days with a nutcase. But he was sweet as a nut.
We were out there for four days. They were shooting a video and doing a gig. This shoot was on the third day and we'd over-grooved the night before. It was punishingly hot. We got on the subway, we walked here, walked there, looking for a location, then this woman from the label said: 'I know this place.' She took us to a disused bridge. It was amazing: you can see one of the greatest cities in the world behind the band. I think Liam bought the top in homage to John Lennon. There's a picture that Bob Gruen took of Lennon wearing a similar shirt.
They're really good people. They had a tremendous professionalism, but they always had a cheekiness, too – and such a bloody great sense of humour. Especially Liam. He's a good laugh, a tremendous piss-taker.
I first met Oasis when I was finishing a book called The Moment. The book started with a picture of Paul McCartney taken on an Instamatic and I was looking for an up-and-coming band to end on. I sent Oasis all the live shots I'd taken of them at their gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange and they really liked them. From then on, I started documenting them with their blessing.
This was taken in Paris the first year I was working with them, at the end of 1995. We were supposed to meet them in Noel's room but my assistant found Liam in the bar. It appeared he'd been up all night and was still drinking. Obviously, Noel was not in the greatest mood, having been kept waiting and then seeing that Liam was somewhat inebriated.
I had done several shoots with them already, but never experienced the tension between the brothers that other photographers had recorded. I used to say to them: 'How come you never fight when I'm around?' This wasn't a fight, but it was a chance to document in a subtle way the dynamics. The brothers, who are looking in opposite directions, somehow they're touching but they're also so separate from each other.
We were pursued by paparazzi, probably British, as we were walking along the banks of the Seine, which is where this was taken. Liam was a bit merry and was saying hello to French people. He is an unpredictable soul. He's a joy to photograph, but a challenging person all round. I was very experienced – I'd worked with the punks – so wasn't particularly fazed. I was quite a bit older than them, like a mother figure. That was useful because all of them were more or less brought up by their mums, so they were perhaps more likely to be cooperative with an older female.
My brief from Noel was to just record stuff. They knew already that they couldn't spend hours posing for shoots with fashion accessories and so on, but Noel had the intuition that whatever was happening to them should be documented. If it had been a band that were very protective of their public image, I think the shoot would have been cancelled that day. But Oasis weren't like that. They permitted that closeness. I felt like part of the crew. That was the great joy of photographing them.
Oasis: The Masterplan by Kevin Cummins is published by Cassell. Roll With it by Tom Sheehan is published by Welbeck. Oasis: Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere by Jill Furmanovsky and Noel Gallagher is published by Thames & Hudson on 23 September and available to pre-order.