Unseen images from Oasis’s heyday are to go on display to mark the 25th anniversary of the band’s debut album Definitely Maybe.
The exhibition at the h Club Gallery in London will feature the work of British photographer Michael Spencer Jones, who shadowed the Manchester band from their pre-fame days.
Spencer Jones shot the cover for their debut album and was allowed full access to the Gallagher brothers in their more intimate moments as well as on their world tour in 1997 and 1998.
The exhibition will include images taken during recording sessions at Rockfield Recording Studios in Wales and guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs’s front room, as well as various letters, scraps of paper and props from Spencer Jones’s myriad shoots with the band.
Also featured will be to-scale immersive mock-ups of the cover art of Definitely Maybe, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and Be Here Now – including the famous submerged Rolls-Royce featured on the front of the latter.
Spencer Jones said: “I am delighted to be exhibiting my work with Oasis at h Club London, especially the shots and artefacts fans will never have seen before.
“Seen from the digital matrix in which we now live, Oasis were the last gasp of air in the analogue age; the last great rock’n’roll band before Zuckerberg, before iPhones and before the internet began to shape and control our lives.
“I hope this exhibition gives fans a chance to pause and reflect and look back upon a time when the face and image of Britain was being revolutionised from below.”
The gallery’s chief marketing officer Michael Berg said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be exhibiting Michael Spencer Jones’s brilliant work, which shaped Oasis’s image.
“It’s difficult to imagine Definitely Maybe without seeing a spinning globe in a living room, Be Here Now without a Rolls-Royce in a swimming pool, or Wonderwall without a girl in a picture frame – without Michael, Oasis may have been an entirely different band.”
Definitely Maybe was released on August 29 1994, earning critical and commercial success.
But Liam and Noel Gallagher have feuded publicly since the band split in 2009, prompted by a backstage brawl at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris.
Masterplan 25: The Oasis Photographs runs from November 22 2019 until January 12 2020.
