An Interview With Kevin Cummins

With Oasis set to reunite this summer, it’s a good time to look backward at how far they’ve come.

Formed in Manchester, England in 1991, Oasis wasted little time getting to the top. Their debut album, 1994’s Definitely Maybe, broke the record for fastest-selling debut album in British music history at the time, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Every single one of their subsequent six albums went to No. 1 in the U.K.

Of course, tensions between brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher reached a breaking point in 2009, triggering the end of Oasis. When their reunion tour launches on July 4, it will be the first time the siblings have played together since Aug. 22, 2009.

As massively successful as the band was, it did not happen overnight — there was a time when Oasis was simply a group of scrappy kids from Manchester. Photographer Kevin Cummins was there, documenting the band in the months leading up to the release of Definitely Maybe.

Cummins, who spent a decade as NME‘s chief photographer and has also photographed the likes of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, New Order and many others, has a new book out. Oasis: The Masterplan features dozens of previously unpublished pictures of the Gallagher brothers on the cusp of worldwide fame, and also includes commentary from Noel himself.

UCR caught up with Cummins to discuss his memories of those shoots.

I know that 75% of the photos in this book were previously unpublished. Tell me a little about going back, finding the photos and the process of selecting them for the book. 
Well, when I was commissioned to do it, it was maybe a year or so ago, so quite a long time before they [Oasis] announced they were coming back, and then I just — all my stuff’s kept in storage at Getty. I just pulled all the [negatives] and transparencies out. … And when you’re revisiting a session, really, you’ve only seen about half a dozen of those pictures each time. Because if you work for a music magazine, you know, you get film processed, pick the best six, and then everything else is filed and very rarely brought out of storage. So it’s quite interesting to see the development of a session again. And what I wanted to do with the book was to chart their progression during their first year, which, you know —Well, as I say in the intro, I’m talking about how I was commissioned by Creation [Records, Oasis’ first label] to try to photograph them under different conditions. They weren’t used to being photographed. And so it was partly to get them at ease and get them used to being photographed, and then to try different lighting setups, or to take pictures around Soho and different parts of London. And then when we decided what would work best, the idea was then to maybe move on and do something else similar. So that was the idea. I mean, everything kind of spiraled out of control with Oasis, as you might imagine. By April of that year [1994], they were playing gigs that were already too small for them, so it was quite difficult.

One of the things that really strikes me about these photos is just how young the guys look.
Yeah. And there’s a real innocence to it. And they were kind of — you know, we were put together because their record company said, “We want somebody to shoot them who we think will get on with them. And you photograph their favorite bands, and you’re from Manchester, and you all support the same football team.” So I wasn’t an intimidatory presence. You know, they were aware of my work, and they loved Joy Division, and they grew up on the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and so on. So, you know, they were aware of all the work I’d done, but we could sit and chat about football and they were at ease a little bit, I think…

I mean, American bands are very different. They’re very careerist, I think. And there’s a lot more innocence to it here in the U.K., They turn up on their own. They’re wearing the clothes they’ve woken up in. That’s what you’re photographing them in. They didn’t bring a change of clothing. Everything in that book is — they’re wearing their own clothes, bar on two occasions. One was when I gave them the football kits to wear for the Man City “brother” shots. And the other one is the picture that’s on the cover of the book. Liam had a maroon shirt on that day, and I took some with him in the maroon shirt, but I felt it’d looked better if they were both wearing blue. And I had a new Armani denim shirt that I’d just bought that day. And I said to him “You can wear this.” And he said, “Oh, great. I’ve never had an Armani shirt.” And I said “You still haven’t. You’re giving it back as soon as we finish the pictures.” So they’re the only clothes that aren’t their own and aren’t the clothes they turned up in. They didn’t have a lot clothes, you know? They weren’t styled.

There’s a great close-up of Liam’s face in the book, and you write that he had “an angelic face back then. It was a perfect look for the British music magazine market.” What did you mean by that? What made it the perfect look?
I think for the NME particularly, we always wanted — I wanted to kind of build iconography with bands, and I wanted the pictures to be the kind of thing people would rip out and put on their bedroom wall. But by the time we were doing those shots, there were other magazines like — you know, teen magazines were looking at them and getting interested in them. And that was a perfect picture for a teen girl magazine, because he looks beautiful in it. He really does, I think. And he’s unsullied by the life that was about to hit him. I mean, I think with Oasis, I don’t think they were aware of what the next couple of years were going to be like, really, and they played up to that a little bit.

Was one of the brothers a better photo subject than the other?
Well, Liam’s the front man. And, you know, lead singers spend a lot of time looking in the mirror and deciding how they look best. So they’ve already got a couple of poses ready for you, whereas some bands, the rest of the band aren’t really bothered. They see themselves as the engine room. Like, even with the interviews that we did with Noel for the book, he would say to me, when I’d talk to him about clothes, he’d say, “Oh, you need to ask Liam that, I’m not bothered.” Whereas, he is bothered, but he doesn’t like that to be part of his image.

You’ve also taken photos of both Noel and Liam in their respective solo careers. Tell me a little about the difference in shooting them solo versus together in Oasis. 
Shooting them separately is — well, I’ve worked with Noel a lot more than Liam. I did Noel’s last album [2023’s Council Skies] sleeve. And I see Noel at football. We go to football with the same group of friends. Liam’s more challenging, but Liam is a lead singer, like I say. So Liam has the pose he wants to project, whereas Noel pretends he doesn’t. He’s very in control of how he wants to look. So whenever I photograph him, he’s very studied, and he knows what he wants to look like on picture. Whereas Liam is a lead singer. And last time I photographed Liam was for Adidas, and he said to me— because I’d recently shot Noel’s album sleeve as well — he said, “I bet you’re buzzing photographing me instead of our kid, aren’t you?” [“Our kid” is Northern English slang for a sibling.] And Liam’s attitude is: how do you get a good picture of Noel? You know, that’s kind of how he looks at it. Never come between two brothers. You’re always going to be the worst off in that.

What else would you like people to know about Oasis and these photos you took of them?
Well, when I photographed them in Man City shirts, you know, I’d often tried to get — football wasn’t fashionable back then, like it is now. It’s a huge global sport. The Premier League in England is the biggest league in the world, but then it wasn’t. But Man City was sponsored by a Japanese electronics company called Brother. And for me, with Noel and Liam being brothers, it was absolutely perfect to photograph them in that and have this kind of visual pun on the shirts, and it was our football team. And those photographs have been used worldwide. They’ve been on probably 250, 300 magazine covers…

And those pictures kind of helped them in their breakthrough year, because it gave them a kind of identity to their home city and to the football club. But the “brother” brought them together, if you can understand how I mean that. Because I think when I was photographing them, it quickly became apparent that the strength in the band was Noel and Liam’s relationship and they looked great together. So I think, you know, the “brother” across the shirt cemented that really.