It is difficult to think of Oasis without thinking of Manchester City. Both Liam and Noel Gallagher’s support of their beloved club is synonymous.
The brothers have never been shy at promoting City – Noel has designed a kit for the team while Liam has recorded a version of the club’s anthem Blue Moon.
Before the Premier League and Champions League trophies and star players, the Manchester City name was associated more worldwide with the Gallagher brothers than the team on the pitch. Of course, the team has caught up in the last 15 years, but the links between City and Oasis – especially in the 90s – were beneficial for both parties.
‘I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to get Man City in the NME’
Noel went to his first Manchester City game at Maine Road in 1974 and dreamed of following in the footsteps of his childhood idols Colin Bell, Francis Lee (who scored over 100 goals for Manchester City) and Mike Summerbee.
Two and a bit decades later and he did follow in their footsteps – sort of – by performing at Maine Road with Oasis for two memorable nights in front of thousands of adoring fans.
Creating the early link between the band and the football club was the masterplan of legendary music photographer Kevin Cummins.
Cummins previously worked with Manchester bands Joy Division, The Smiths and The Stone Roses taking many iconic pictures that graced the cover of the NME for years but it was his early work with Oasis that helped put the band and his beloved Manchester City on the map.
In one of Cummins’ most famous images he shot The Stone Roses covered in sky blue paint – just to get the City blue into the weekly music magazine.
And when he was commissioned to shoot England’s 1990 World Cup song ‘World in Motion’ with New Order he insisted that singer Bernard Sumner wore the light blue shirt third rather than the red away top for the very same reason.
But when it came to working with Oasis there was to be no protest from the band when he suggested they wear City kits for what some might say is one of their most famous photoshoots – even though in 1994 it was not fashionable for bands to be associated with football.
Cummins tells FourFourTwo: “After they signed to Creation Records, the label got in touch and asked me to help develop the identity of the band. They said, ‘you’ll get on, you’re all City fans, so it’ll be easy for them’.
“They thought that helped them relax. Some bands are quite abrasive when you first meet them but Oasis were compliant and we did talk about football when we first met and that did help break the ice.
“It was my idea to put Liam and Noel in Manchester City shirts. I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to get Man City in the NME.
“It was an absolute gift because City were sponsored by Brother (the Japanese electrical company) at the time and we made that the strength of the shot. It was perfect really.”
The pictures were supposed to be Oasis’ first NME cover but the editor at the time was not so sure that a band on the rise should be associated with a football club on the decline.
Hard to believe now, but back in the mid-90s City were battling at the wrong end of the Premier League table.
Cummins said: “My editor at the time – a Southampton fan – decided against using the session on the front cover, saying he didn’t want the paper to be associated with ‘losers’.
“He thought we made them look a bit yobbish and he wanted them to look like the Beatles.”
The pictures did eventually end up on the cover of the magazine in 2010 after the band split but the images were quickly used at the time all around the world with the Umbro Manchester City shirt being worn by fans as far a field as Asia – many of whom had never heard of City.
Cummins added: “I think it’s very difficult for people to understand given how big football is now, that the Premier League wasn’t global then. And so Oasis would go to America or Japan and nobody really knew what the shirt was.
“I used to get messages from people saying, ‘are they a brotherhood? What does it mean?’. I would tell them it was a Japanese electrics company. And they didn’t understand that at all.
“Even in Japan it was very difficult to get Man City shirts or any Premier League shirts at that time. But when they first played Japan, the first four or five rows were all girls and fans and they were all wearing Man City shirts because they’d seen my photos.”
Cummins worked with the band a lot in 1994 which is documented in his new book Oasis: The Masterplan which features 75 per cent of previously unpublished photos across that first year at the beginning of their supersonic rise.
In July 1994 Cummins shot Oasis in various locations around Manchester including Piccadilly Gardens and the Arndale Centre, eventually ending up at Maine Road.
“We went to Maine Road because I just wanted some pictures of them in and around the stadium just to continue the link to the club,” Cummins said.
“The ground was being redeveloped at the time so the gates were open, so we just wandered in and we sat in the North Stand and took some pictures.”
And the nods to Manchester City did not end there with one of the players at the time proving inspiration for a later photoshoot in London.
“I was going to do a shot in an alleyway near the Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane,” Cummins adds. “It’s a very narrow alleyway and it works really well for band shots and portraits.
“But because we were up at the Oxford Street end of Soho at the time, I knew Flitcroft Street was nearby, so I said to the band we’d do it there instead.
“It was a nod to City midfielder Gary Flitcroft and the band loved the idea. Even if we didn’t get a road sign in the picture, we knew it was taken there.”
After having their pictures taken in an empty Maine Road in 1994, they sold the stadium out for two successive nights two years later in what are largely considered to be two of their most iconic gigs.
Nine years later, they played three nights at the City of Manchester Stadium.
In 2009 Oasis split after a fight backstage at a gig in Paris between Liam and Noel. Both brothers went on to have successful solo careers and each has shown their love for City on stage. Liam with a Manchester City flag and Noel with a life-size cutout of Pep Guardiola on stage with him.
With the long-awaited Oasis reunion happening this summer don’t be surprised to see Manchester City represented on stage, but the public association between band and club is all thanks to Cummins and photographs from 1994 that will live forever in fans’ minds.
