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Thanks to isolation, people have significantly more free time on their hands. Time to finally get through that stack of books, maybe, or learn the piano like you’ve been telling your mates you will for a decade. There’s also an unending amount of evenings to ponder the really big questions. How will humanity rebuild after a pandemic such as this? What do I want to change about my life once lockdown is over? Was ‘Be Here Now’ actually… quite good?
See you at 8.30pm. Be Here Now #TimsTwitterListeningParty I’m not gonna blind you with guitar amps and drums sounds, just turn it up and I’ll introduce each track and answer as many questions as I can. Tune into @sleafordmods before that at 7.30
— Paul Arthurs. (@BoneheadsPage) April 23, 2020
After hosting online listening parties for Oasis classics ‘Definitely Maybe’ and ‘What’s The Story, Morning Glory’ – albums whose classic status daren’t be questioned – Tim Burgess brought his ever-growing, cultish #timstwitterlisteningparty series to 1997 last night. He brought it, specifically, to ‘Be Here Now’. It gave the unfairly maligned third Oasis album a deserved second chance.
As they entering sessions for their third album, Oasis were – as Noel Gallagher put it in 2007 – “the biggest band in the world … bigger than, dare I say it, fucking God.” Excess and indulgence ruled everything around ‘Be Here Now’. Noel rented Mick Jagger’s house to record demos in and videos were shot in RAF helicopters. This excess was so intense, in fact, that Liam refrained from taking part in last night’s listening party because he “can’t remember pish” from the creation of the record.
While few would suggest that ‘Be Here Now’ could hold a candle to its pair of predecessors, the album provides a different kind of feeling to anything Oasis created before or since. Propelled to extravagance and indulgence by their godlike status, there were no pop songs here – everything was stretched to its transcendent limit – and you weren’t going to argue with the band that were bigger than God, after all. ‘My Big Mouth’ is the closest the album gets to a straight-forward single, but it’s still stretched and warped to over the five-minute mark, and ‘All Around The World’, an attempt at recreating the grandeur of ‘Champagne Supernova’ nearly reaches 10.
While a more critical ear in the editing process might’ve made the album be remembered a little more kindly in history, it would’ve also diluted the sheer chaos of its creation and the fame- and drug-addled creatures who put it together.
From a fan’s recollections that Noel has no idea what ‘Magic Pie’ is written about because he was “high as a kite” to Bonehead questioning a “mad note on the guitar 6 seconds in” on ‘I Hope, I Think, I Know’, it appears the band are as in the dark about this formless, baggy, 70-minute beast as legions of Oasis diehards were in 1997.
Held up against ‘Definitely Maybe’ and ‘What’s The Story Morning Glory’, ‘Be Here Now’ inevitably pales, but as we get deeper into months of quarantine and dive further into our record collections, it’s one to give a deserved second chance.
The album is a gloriously messy, half-cut portrait of rock’n’roll excess, and of clinging on desperately to the good days. Its creation fed the album with a psychedelic kind of anxiety and pressure, of claustrophobia and worry while also desperately trying to live in the present and make every moment count. Sound familiar at the moment? In essence, it’s an ideal lockdown album.
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