Be here now by Oasis was a splendid failure – Giovanni Ansaldo

It was the summer of 1997 and I was in middle school. In the living room of my house at that time we had a fairly small TV, and often to watch it I would stand a meter away, even less. I mostly did it when music videos were on. On MTV and Videomusic they often broadcast a song that I liked very much. I recognized her right away, because at first the musicians got off a helicopter. Every time I turned on the TV I hoped to see it again. They were called Oasis and the song was titled D’you know what I mean?. A few months later, looking back on that helicopter video, I decided I wanted to know more about that band and went to a record store and bought my first CD: Be here now.

This autobiographical premise, perhaps of no interest to readers, serves to say one thing: it is difficult to write a record when you have a strong emotional bond with his songs, especially if that bond dates back to his formative years. Be here now for me it was the first approach to contemporary foreign rock, my adolescence upset me. At thirteen I didn’t just want to listen to Oasis: I wanted to dress like them, act like them, walk like them (yes, it’s funny, but that’s the way it is). They were braggart, excessive, funny, and churned out refrains that immediately stuck to the ears. For me, in those days, the songs of Be here now they were all masterpieces.

Be here now, which came out on August 21, 1997 surrounded by feverish anticipation, just a year after the band’s historic gig in Knebworth and at the height of the Gallagher brothers’ fame, has just turned twenty-five and has been celebrated with a new reissue. And, for better or for worse, it remains a historic record, regardless of my teenage obsessions.

It is the album that closed the Britpop era, drowning that music in cocaine and in a grandeur that was no longer sustainable for anyone, starting with the Gallagher brothers themselves. It is the breaking latest news of a failed attempt, that of building an ambitious and complex psychedelic pop-rock work, which despite everything still sounds engaging and alive. Although its creator, Noel Gallagher, has disowned Be here now in all possible ways, and has refused to play it live for years. According to Noel, the too many expectations of fans and insiders and the decision to enter the studio immediately after the end of the tour of What’s the story morning glory? they prevented him from devoting himself to the composition and recording of the pieces with due lucidity. The excesses the band was used to certainly didn’t help.

Yet this is the last Oasis album to live up to their fame, because already starting from the next one (albeit excellent) Standing on the shoulder of giants, the Manchester band has become something else: a famous group, able to fill the big arenas, but which was already making a living and did not seem able to leave its mark on the rest of the British scene. Around 1997 Oasis, on the other hand, in Europe were really something close to the Beatles in terms of popularity (in the United States they never managed to break through), they were icons.

To listen Be here now in retrospect it is like seeing the defeat of a great boxer. It is clear that he is losing, but here and there he still manages to land some great hits. The aforementioned D’you know what I mean?despite its extreme prolixity, remains a great song with a refrain at the height of the pen of Noel Gallagher, with a drum beat sampled even by Straight outta Compton by the NWA (I can hardly think of two more distant musical universes, yet). As well as the noisy guitars and the usual cheeky Beatlesian quotes – the whole album is full of them, starting with the cover, shot by photographer Michael Spencer Jones, who described the photo set as “total chaos” – by My big mouth, which contains one of the best vocal performances of Liam Gallagher’s career. But we could go on: for example, I am crazy for one of the most mistreated pieces, Fade in outa kind of desert folk rock with Johnny Depp on guitar, and for the Neil Young ballad Magic piewhich arrives for no apparent reason at 7 minutes and 19 seconds in duration and yet excites me every time.

The symbol of the excessive ambition of the entire project is however All around the world, a piece that Noel Gallagher had kept in his drawer for years, convinced that he had his definitive masterpiece in his hand, which ended up drowned in a cumbersome orchestral arrangement. It lasts nine minutes and twenty seconds, and in the second part he just repeats “nananana”, chasing in vain Hey Jude. Much better the next It’s getting better (man!!)a rock song with another not bad chorus.

How it would be Be here now without cocaine, without an unlimited budget to spend on the studio and with a real producer able to put a stop to the Gallagher brothers? We will never know. In my opinion it would have been a great record: despite the confusion from which it was born, the songs were all there. The real drop in inspiration for Noel Gallagher (dramatic in recent years, but maybe he will recover, a little bit I hope) was yet to come.

Great albums were released in the UK in 1997: da Ok computer dei Radiohead a The fat of the land of the Prodigy, from Portishead of Portishead a Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space of the Spiritualized. A year later he would arrive Mezzanine by Massive Attack. In short, the music was going somewhere else and Oasis were already clearly outdated. They were rock stars in love with the excesses of Keith Moon, raised on bread and John Lennon. They were still young, but already nostalgic. They were not ready to live the first two thousand years, to represent its complexity, they were children of the enthusiasm and optimism of the eighties. They weren’t Thom Yorke or Kurt Cobain, nor did they want to be, because they sang things like “You and I are gonna live forever”. Be here nowlistened to today, sounds like their surrender, their testament as an anti-intellectual and genuine band, intolerant of music criticism (a sentiment widely reciprocated), capable of high compositional peaks yet all in all limited. Be here now it was a failure, but a failure in a big way.