Watch Noel Gallagher Talk ‘Missed Opportunity’ ‘Be Here Now’
On the same day Oasis reissued their third album and “great rock bomb” Be Here Now, guitarist Noel Gallagher has offered up a 30-minute discussion about the making of the LP that he admittedly considers “a missed opportunity.”
In the interview with music journalist Keith Cameron, Gallagher says that while perhaps the Britpop group should have spent more time working on and tinkering Be Here Now, Oasis‘ third album and the follow-up to their 1995 classic (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, he was concerned that stopping Oasis’ momentum would ultimately cause the band to implode.
“I don’t think anybody will ever be able to fully explain to people, who are maybe like teenagers now, what a colossal thing Oasis was in the lives of anybody who gave a shit about music,” Gallagher said. “It was massive… I do festivals all over the world, and there are big bands. Fucking Oasis was a hundred times bigger than all of them put together.”
While Be Here Now is now considered “an Ozymandias-size monument to rock-star folly,” as Rob Sheffield wrote in his review of the reissue, Gallagher’s biggest regret is how poorly the album was originally mixed.
“It is shocking. All the things you shouldn’t do when you’re mixing a record, we were doing tenfold. Really, we shouldn’t have mixed it. We should have given it to somebody with a fresh perspective,” Gallagher said.
Some of those mixing issues are remedied on the reissue, which features Gallagher’s remix of Oasis’ “D’You Know What I Mean?”
“I got the master tapes and honestly I was staggered at the amount of nonsense,” Gallagher said. “When we separated the hundred guitars, all doing the same thing, and got the key elements and did the remix, it sounds amazing! You can actually hear the strings and the bass guitar, you can actually hear everything. And the original mix is kind of skrrrgggghhhh! The guy I was with said, ‘Why does it sound like that? I was like, ‘I can only tell you that on the night, it sounded fucking amazing!'”