Oasis Definitely Maybe artwork ‘will live forever’

It is 30 years since chart-topping Definitely Maybe by Oasis turned the Gallagher brothers into stars – literally taking them from a Manchester living room to the world’s biggest stages.

Supersonic. Shakermaker. Live Forever. As 1994 reached the height of summer, the band’s star was in the ascendency with each new single charting higher than the last.

The LP that spawned those anthems, the swaggering and belligerent Definitely Maybe, became the fastest-selling debut in UK history when it was released on 29 August.

It helped light the fuse for Britpop and set the group on their way to record-breaking shows at Knebworth just two years later in front of 250,000 people.

It was, says Oasis confidant Brian Cannon, “a meteoric rise”.

“It was like The Beatles. Everything just clicked and they became massive so quickly.”

To fans, the album’s cover, with the band’s five members pictured in the front room of rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs’ West Didsbury home, is as familiar as the songs within.

Art director Cannon, who is credited with the sleeve concept and design, explains the idea of Oasis “chilling out” owes much to an image of the Fab Four shot in a Tokyo hotel room three decades before and a second, much older, source.

“I just thought it was a fantastic picture,” he says, pulling out a framed copy of a Beatles’ compilation album at his Microdot design company headquarters in Kendal, on the edge of the Lake District.

“The photograph on the back of A Collection of Beatles Oldies was taken in Japan in the mid-60s. They know there’s a camera person there, clearly, but it’s a proper fly-on-the-wall shot.

“That’s kind of where the idea came from.

“Most groups on their first album do some kind of pose, but Oasis are sat watching [Clint Eastwood Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on] the telly which I thought was hilarious.

“Another one to look at is the Arnolfini Portrait by [15th-Century artist] Jan Van Eyck. It’s in the [later] style of Flemish Renaissance art where the images are littered with visual metaphors.”

Where the enigmatic oil painting featured slippers, a dog and oranges, the Oasis cover, shot by photographer Michael Spencer Jones, included footballers Rodney Marsh and George Best, musician Burt Bacharach, a pink flamingo and a packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes.

“The mirror on the wall was out of my flat,” Cannon says, “but all of those little bits including the inflatable globe came from recording engineer Mark Coyle and roadie Phil Smith’s house.”

Despite Noel and younger brother Liam’s reputations as hell-raisers, the May 1994 shoot was trouble-free, according to Cannon, who points to the importance of a test session he says was conducted a couple of weeks earlier.

“I went round there with the photographer and me and Bonehead’s wife were sat in different positions.

“It’s effectively still life that you’ve got complete control over. The photo used on the sleeve just clicks. It’s perfect. There’s not one person where you think we should have had them doing something else.

“Our shoots were always skeleton crews. I just don’t see the need to have people stood about and the last thing you need is anyone from the record company hanging about poking their nose in.”

Had any alternative ideas been considered though? Cannon recalls a single, somewhat bewildering, suggestion.

“Liam’s idea was a knife sticking out of a lump of butter. I don’t know what he was going on about or whether he was being serious. After that we never bothered having band meetings again.”

Cannon’s involvement with Oasis had begun a year or so earlier, having bonded with Noel over a love of footwear.

“There’s a story that we met in a lift talking about trainers,” he says. “That’s probably a slightly romanticised version of what happened, but it’s more or less it.

“He was working for the Inspiral Carpets in the same building where I had a tiny little office and we struck up a conversation because we had a mutual interest in Adidas trainers. I was wearing a pair I’d bought in Italy when I took my mam to Rome for her 60th birthday.

“Noel had seen the work I’d done for The Verve and said to me ‘when we get signed’ – not if, because they knew how good they were – ‘I want you to do the artwork’.”

His earliest efforts saw a redesign of the band’s logo, replacing a swirling union jack motif used on their demo cassette with a simple black-and-white box inspired by the Decca Records label from the 1960s.

For Definitely Maybe, there would be one much more personal touch – handwriting its title to tie in with the informal feel of the sleeve.

He retains the scrap of paper that was scanned for printing.

In a pre-internet age – and indeed without a computer of his own – the design process would often prove sticky.

“Back then you’d get the photography done and have to paste up all the artwork on to boards,” Cannon recalls.

“When I delivered Definitely Maybe I didn’t have a car either. My mate Matthew Sankey drove me to London in his Peugeot 205 because it was the only copy of the camera-ready artwork and I couldn’t risk it getting lost in the post.”

Cannon’s partnership with the band covered every release until 1998’s B-sides compilation The Masterplan, but then “it was all change”, he says disappointedly.

“Bonehead left, [bassist] Guigsy left, Owen Morris wasn’t producing the records anymore, Noel wasn’t even writing all the songs any more.

“To coincide with that they said ‘we’re going to have a change in artwork direction as well’. So that was it.”

Today, still on good terms with the band, he sells merchandise online harking back to their 90s heyday and also has a shop in Manchester city centre.

And to mark Definitely Maybe’s 30th anniversary, the album is being re-released with different artwork – a slipcase showing Bonehead’s front room minus the band using Michael Spencer Jones’ outtakes, along with black-and-white cover shots newly taken by Cannon at Monnow Valley and Sawmills recording studios where it was made.

However, it is the original that will be remembered most fondly by fans.

“I’m super-proud of it,” he says. “It will – to quote a phrase – live forever.”