The final Oasis image in Jill Furmanovsky’s Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere – her hefty new book covering her 16-plus years, three-decades-spanning gig as the band’s court photographer – doesn’t feature Oasis. Taken on 27 May 2025, it’s of a cavernous rehearsal space in Twickenham, southwest London. It’s empty, bar some flight cases and musical equipment.
Ahead of Cardiff, Heaton Park, Wembley and the rest of Live ’25’s stadium-scale love-ins, this was, if you like, the pre-union.
Over breakfast tea in her North London studio, multiple archive photoshoots of Oasis papering the walls, the 72-year-old explains how she captured that exclusive image. With her publisher’s deadline looming, and in need of an up-to-date visual full-stop on a book that begins in 1994, the band’s first year of releasing music, Furmanovksy contacted the man billed as her co-author on this blockbuster anthology of 500-and-then-some images.
“Look,” she said to Noel Gallagher, then in the depths of final preparations for the Live ’25 tour, “it’d be good to have something that alludes to what’s going on now.” But in late spring, “they were only a week or so into rehearsals, and at an absolute lockdown – there was no question of anybody coming [in for a shoot]. I don’t think Liam had even started rehearsing.”
Noel had a typically quick-thinking solution: shoot the room. It let Furmanovsky – a collaborator who’d been at the centre of their whirlwind 90s – capture the calm before the comeback storm. Then, once the tour was up and running in July, the elder Gallagher invited her to join the circus again, just as she’d done on multiple UK, European and American tours, from year zero, at Cambridge Corn Exchange on 4 December 1994, to 20 August 2009, the date of Oasis’s final UK tour date, pre-split, at Bridlington Spa.
Noel’s first impressions, that night 31 years ago in Cambridge, of the woman who’d go on to become his band’s image-maker-in-chief? Not, you might think at first blush, super complimentary: “She kind of reminded me of a dinner lady.”
But as the musician hastily adds in his introduction to Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere (a title he came up with), “that’s not an insult. It’s a compliment because my mother was a dinner lady! Then, during the gig, I’m kinda f**king rocking out and there in the pit is the dinner lady with a professional camera… After that initial shoot, she appeared at everything we did.”
Trust was forged, and forged quickly – thanks, in no small part, to the respect afforded to her by the age difference, and by Noel likening Furmanovsky to his and Liam’s mum, Peggy. “There was a sweet spot, age-wise. There’s 15 years between me and Noel, 19 years between me and Liam. Then, I’m 10 years younger than Peggy. So I was sort of a much older sister, possibly an auntie,” she says.
Within a month of that initial shoot, Furmanovsky was on the set of the “Live Forever” video, being “tested” by Liam. She admits that she was using the “photographer’s banter” that she’d been deploying throughout the 70s and 80s while working with Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and many more.
“I was saying: ‘Oh yeah, I saw you, I was really impressed, you weren’t doing much with the audience…’ He just looked at me like: ‘What a load of old tosh that is.’ I thought, ‘I won’t be indulging in that kind of photographer’s crap again with you!’ But you didn’t have to, because Liam was always on it. He was a playful subject.” Also a quicksilver one. “He’d do a quick pose and you’d pull your camera out, but he was gone.”
Within another month, Furmanovsky was on the road, embedded with Oasis on a North American tour. For Noel, it was a professional marriage of convenience. “I hate photoshoots,” he writes. “I can’t stand them. I much prefer a photographer to follow me around for 18 hours, snapping away. I’d rather do that than stand for eight minutes posing.”
“Which is unusual – not many people like that,” says Furmanovsky, whose professional career stretches back to 1972, when the 18-year-old landed a shot of Roger Daltrey on the cover of Melody Maker. “But I heard exactly the same description from Al Wertheimer, who was the photographer for Elvis. He said, ‘Elvis permitted closeness.’ I think he only once asked Elvis to look at the camera.” The rest of the time, he just hung out with him. “Elvis and Noel had the same vision: they knew it might be important to record what was going on. For historic purposes, if nothing else.”
Within another few months – again, with unprecedented access – Furmanovsky was there for the release of second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which is being reissued in a deluxe, 30th-anniversary edition early next month. There are fly-on-the-wall shots from the “Wonderwall” video shoot in September 1995, and images of the band horsing around on Vespas before their shows at Earls Court in early November.
But less than three weeks later, in Paris, the atmosphere was much darker. Having pulled a boozy all-nighter, Liam didn’t rendez-vous as planned in Noel’s hotel room for a shoot.
“Eventually, he was located at the bar, where it appeared he hadn’t been to bed… We had two mini-buses to take us to a location down by the Seine, and we were being followed by paparazzi. Noel was pretty pissed off, and Liam was very drunk still. He was clutching a bottle and a glass of wine. I thought the session was going to fall apart, so I said to Noel, ‘Look, just take no notice of him. You stand here on the bridge, and when he comes into shot, I’ll click the shutter’.”
The results, paradoxically, are some of Furmanovsky’s favourite images: a hacked-off Noel in his hotel room, a group shot that made it into the National Portrait Gallery, and the close-up of the brothers that features on the cover of the new book.
Little wonder that she classifies it as “a key shoot in my archive of Oasis” – not least because “it was the only time I was witness to the brothers being out of sorts with each other. Strangely enough, I didn’t see a great deal of them fighting in all my time working with them. I saw mainly the cooperative side, working together as musicians”.
Furmanovsky hopes to be in attendance again, camera in hand, at Wembley this weekend, for Oasis’s final (for now) UK shows. But whatever shot she gets, she acknowledges that the classic shot summing up the heart of Live ’25 is already out there. It was taken at the first show, in Cardiff, by the band’s tour manager – on his iPhone.
“It’s this incredible shot, taken from behind, where Liam has his arm around Noel in a very protective way. He’s got his maracas up, and they’re walking onto the stage for the first time. That, to me, was the shot that summed up the journey that had been made – a journey that was, I think, incredibly difficult, especially for Noel, who always carries everything.” To her, Liam’s gesture says one thing: “Okay, brother, I’m here. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna let you down.”
“It’s carried on in that vein,” concludes Furmanovsky. And if rumours, are to be believed, will carry on all the way to multiple nights at Knebworth next summer. Having shot Oasis there in 1996, and Led Zeppelin there in 1979, is Furmanovsky up for being embedded in a 125,000-capacity residency?
“Well, it would be nice to be invited.”
Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere (Thames & Hudson, £50) is out now. Oasis play Wembley on 27 and 28 September. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) is released on 3 October (Big Brother Recordings)
