Oasis Begin Recording Be Here Now at Abbey Road Studios

On October 7, 1996, the band booked themselves into Abbey Road Studios—a deliberate choice, as the Beatles’ hallowed ground symbolised Oasis’s ambition to be seen as their rightful successors. The idea was simple: record a follow-up to Morning Glory that would be even bigger, louder, and more definitive.

Chaos at Abbey Road

The reality was far from disciplined. Producer Owen Morris, who had overseen Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, recalled the opening days with despair. He described the first week of recording as “fucking awful,” confessing he even suggested they abandon the sessions altogether. Noel Gallagher, however, brushed off the doubts with characteristic nonchalance: “It’ll be all right. So on we went.”

Abbey Road became less a workplace than a party venue. Band members, hangers-on, journalists, and photographers circulated freely. Heavy cocaine use clouded focus; Morris later recalled incidents where someone would attempt to score weed but return with cocaine instead—fuel for chaos rather than creativity. Publicist Johnny Hopkins compared the Oasis camp to “a medieval court,” with Noel as king, Liam the jester, and everyone else orbiting them in a haze of excess.

The Recording Process

Despite the distractions, work did get underway. Much of what Oasis laid down at Abbey Road were backing tracks: raw versions of “D’You Know What I Mean?,” “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!),” “The Girl in the Dirty Shirt,” and “Magic Pie.” These skeletal takes were later revisited and rebuilt, but Abbey Road was where their foundations began.

Engineer Nick Brine later explained that “quite a few of the backing tracks were recorded there, but a lot got redone” at later sessions. Still, Abbey Road marked the birth of the sound that would come to define Be Here Now: enormous, wall-of-noise guitar overdubs stacked layer upon layer, stretching songs to six, seven, even nine minutes.

Pressure, Paranoia, and Escape

As autumn turned to winter, outside pressures intensified. On November 9, 1996, Liam Gallagher was arrested at the Q Awards after an altercation, splashing Oasis across the tabloids once again. Journalists hounded the band constantly; photographer Jill Furmanovsky recalled the surreal intrusion of the press into what should have been private studio time.

The mounting scrutiny—and the sense that Abbey Road had become too exposed—pushed Oasis to abandon London. On November 11, 1996, they relocated to Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, a secluded residential studio where they could work (and party) without interruption.

Ridge Farm: Expansion and Excess

If Abbey Road was chaotic, Ridge Farm was excessive. Freed from the city, the band embraced a hedonistic routine of long nights, heavy drug use, and endless overdubs. Noel arrived with strong songs, but his instinct was to make everything bigger. Morris recalled guitars being layered endlessly—sometimes ten, twelve tracks deep—until the songs became thunderous walls of sound.

The atmosphere was tense yet strangely productive. Songs like “Stand By Me,” “Don’t Go Away,” and “All Around the World” (an idea Noel had been carrying since Oasis’s early days) were fleshed out into the massive anthems that would define the album.

An interview with Noel on the making of Be Here Now can be found here

The Legacy of the Abbey Road Sessions

Though most of the finished album came together at Ridge Farm, the Abbey Road sessions of October 1996 were the spark that ignited Be Here Now. They set the tone for a project fuelled by ambition, indulgence, and a sense of invincibility.

In hindsight, Noel Gallagher has admitted the band were “out of control” during this period, and critics would later view the album as a bloated reflection of its times. Yet at the moment Abbey Road’s doors opened to Oasis in October 1996, the band truly believed they were building a masterpiece to follow up Morning Glory.