Be Here Now was recorded in the cocaine confidence of mid-1997 at a moment when Oasis believed they had won. Definitely Maybe had announced them. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? had made them the biggest band in Britain. The logical next step, apparently, was to make an album that lasted 71 minutes and had guitar parts stacked twelve-deep on every song.
It shipped 696,000 copies in its first day. By 1998, everyone agreed it was a disaster. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.
What Went Wrong
Noel Gallagher has said himself that he went into the sessions already bored with Oasis. The band had been touring for two years. Liam’s voice had the effortless sneer that made the first two records feel stolen rather than earned, but here it sounds buried under production by Owen Morris that treated every available frequency as storage space.
“D’You Know What I Mean?” opens the album with eight bars of helicopter noise and backwards guitar before the verse kicks in — a song that would have been a perfectly decent B-side at three minutes runs to seven and a half. “All Around the World” repeats its chorus seventeen times. The mix is so compressed it leaves no room for the songs to breathe.
What Remains
Here is what is also true: “Stand By Me” is a great Oasis song. “Magic Pie” has a melody Noel could only have written when he was still reaching for something. “My Big Mouth” has an urgency the album mostly lacks.
Strip out the dead weight, remaster down from the brick-wall compression, and you have a solid B+ record hiding inside a C. Which is a strange thing to say about the most anticipated British album of the decade — but Be Here Now is a strange monument: enormous, swaggering, and oddly hollow, like a house built mostly of echo.
5/10