Back at the very start of my career, when I was 25, I knew an art director who was working on a new magazine called Loaded. In May 1994, he rang and said: “I’ve got a job for you.” He gave me the address of a hotel somewhere in Manchester and told me to meet a guy called Noel Gallagher. I thought he was a tour manager, at first. Nobody said he was actually in the band.
The hotel was like an Edwardian house: the place was so depressing. The receptionist had that Mancunian ambivalence, very downbeat. I said I’m here to see Noel Gallagher and she gesticulated with her thumb. So I go down this corridor, knock on the door. He answers and just goes: “All right?” That’s it, devoid of any warmth.
He’d split up with his girlfriend and they’d shared a flat, so the record company were paying for him to live at the hotel. He had this little pocket address book and was making phone calls. Each one was the same: “All right, seen our kid? OK, bye.” I was sitting there like a lemon thinking: “What is ‘our kid’?” So I thought: “I’ll just take some pictures.” Then he got up and said: “Let’s go.” As we were leaving, he stopped and said: “What do you think of Blur?” And I went: “I quite like them.” “Second-best band in Britain,” he said.
We walked to this street corner and then four guys came from the opposite direction. You could identify the leader from 200 yards away, because he had this unbelievable walk. It was mad experiencing that walk. I quickly gathered Noel and Liam were brothers. They spoke to each other in such a relentlessly passive aggressive way. Noel would tut and roll his eyes at everything Liam said.
Liam asked me what football team I supported. I said Arsenal. He put his hand up to my face and went: “I can’t even look at you.” For the actual shoot, we went to Maine Road [then Manchester City’s home]. I got on the ground and he made as if he was kicking a football at the camera.
Before that day, I had been living a very precarious existence. Afterwards, I started to get a lot of well-paid work. My wife’s best friend knows Noel and a couple of years ago we both went to a birthday dinner at her house. I said to Noel: “I often think of that photo as the day my career started.” He goes: “I’ll tell you why that’s the day your career began – because that’s the day you met Oasis.”
-photographer Chris Floyd
