I spent years touring with Oasis – there is a person who can get them back on stage together & it’s not Noel or Liam
IF there’s anyone that can persuade Oasis to reunite, it is long-time bandmate Bonehead.
The band’s photographer, Jill Furmanovsky, says Noel Gallagher admitted the guitarist is the only man who can act as a go-between with him and Liam.
Jill says Noel once told her: “This was Bonehead’s band — he used to be a buffer between me and Liam’.”
For the past 50 years, 69-year-old Jill has been photographing rock ’n’ roll’s greatest icons, including Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.
The snapper, who was Oasis’s official photographer at the height of their fame, documented the highs and lows of the band and sometimes even got dragged into their dramas.
She now has a retrospective exhibition at Manchester Central Library.
Having captured the magic, love and turmoil between the now estranged brothers, Jill says: “Oasis is my best work because I was so experienced and they were so good to photograph. They were very generous and allowed me to get close.
“I still work with Noel now — he’s like my little brother.”
Rumours of an Oasis reunion have gone into overdrive recently.
Yesterday we revealed that Liam’s agent is said to be plotting a series of comeback shows at iconic venue Knebworth, Herts, in 2025.
It comes after their biggest Britpop rival, Blur singer Damon Albarn, revealed in The Sun last week that he is convinced Oasis will reform.
Damon said: “I can guarantee they’re going to reform. In fact, I’ve put money on it.
“They’re brothers and it would be wonderful to see them reconcile.”
But Jill knows that Bonehead would have to be the man to step in to make it happen.
In one of her pictures, Bonehead — real name Paul Arthurs — can be seen larking about with his legs in the air on a luggage conveyor belt at an airport in Holland while the rest of the band try to hold it together.
She recalls: “I showed it to Noel and we were laughing.”
Reflecting on that moment, Noel adds: “We were absolutely rat-ar*ed. We had just come back from Australia, hence the hat.
“It was the era of being p**sed all the time, it was fing brilliant.
“Bonehead was the one who always put the fire out between me and Liam. People see it as me and Liam’s band but it was actually Bonehead’s band because he invited Liam to join and Liam invited me. It’s his band first.
“Even then he would always knock our heads together for the sake of the band.”
Jill, who started collaborating with Oasis in 1994, says she only realised while working on the exhibition with Noel that Bonehead acted as a peace-keeper between the feuding brothers.
One day Liam went missing during their 1996 American tour, and a fellow photographer thought Jill was hiding him.
“It was all very dramatic,” she says.
In one of the other snaps featured in Jill’s new show, the band can be seen posing on a Paris street.
The city is where Noel wrote Don’t Look Back In Anger and where they famously broke up in 2009.
Noel says of the image captured by Jill: “That was a dreadful day out.
“I just remember Liam being in a proper f***ing bad mood.
“It was the MTV Awards that night and we were in the middle of a tour and none of us wanted to go but Liam was insistent we go.
“And we were like, ‘We’re not going. We’re not nominated for anything.’ Anyway, he went on his own. Terrible day. There is another picture of me and him on that bridge, and I can see it in my face — me going, ‘Jill, I swear to God, if you don’t hurry up . . .’
“Paris is such a significant place for Oasis. It is the place where we had some catastrophic days and nights.
“It’s the place where I wrote Don’t Look Back In Anger and it’s where the band broke up.
“It’s quite a significant place in the tale of Oasis.”
Since the band split Noel, 55, and Liam, 50, have both pursued successful solo careers but haven’t spoken in ten years.
But Jill’s retrospective is not just about Oasis — it’s about half a century of life in pictures with more than 100 framed images as well as eight photo montages.
Born in Zimbabwe, at that time Rhodesia, Jill relocated to London with her family when she was 11.
Her introduction to rock and roll came via the TV shows Ready Steady Go! and Top Of The Pops.
Captured raucous backstage moments
The first picture she ever took was of Paul McCartney in 1967 when she was aged 13.
As a huge fan of The Beatles, she spent most of her days hanging around outside Abbey Road studios hoping to glimpse the band.
She went on to study at Central St Martins and threw herself into London’s gig circuit.
But her breakthrough came during a two-week photography course at the legendary Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park.
When asked if she was a “professional” snapper, she replied “yes”, and landed a job as the venue’s in-house photographer.
“That was a life changing moment,” she says, “I just went for it.”
Aged 19, she was hired to shoot Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon tour and captured some of their most raucous backstage moments together.
Jill’s tenacity and hunger for the job took her a long way.
Reflecting on her quest to photograph Bob Dylan after hearing his 1998 track Love Sick, she recalls how she went to a very muddy Glastonbury Festival “as if I was drawn by a magnet”.
When she arrived she stumbled across Bob arriving in wellington boots, escorted by festival founder Michael Eavis.
Finding herself backstage, she thrust her 1995 book The Moment into Bob’s hand when she met him outside his dressing room.
“Ten minutes later he came out to speak to me,” she says, and asked her to give him a tour of the site.
Due to the mudfest Jill declined, but Bob didn’t give up, inviting her to photograph him on stage.
In 1992 she won the Observer’s Portrait Award for her snap of the late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who she describes as having “such dignity”.
She also spent ten minutes with Bob Marley in London in 1978 who was “very pleasantly high”, while also capturing apartheid freedom fighter Nelson Mandela on his own in 1993 after he was released from 27 years in prison.
‘Mandela picture is moment of great pride’
Mandela’s inclusion in the exhibition is important to Jill, not just because they both hail from southern Africa, but because “this exhibition is about photography, and about chronicling a period of time.”
She adds: “When he did become president, the South African embassy realised they didn’t have any pictures, so my picture of him was used in the embassy that night when he got elected. That was a moment of great pride.”
She also shared a few intimate moments with the late Amy Winehouse, with one of her pictures hanging on a wall in Amy’s home when she died in 2011.
“Amy was in a fantastic mood,” she recalls.
“Blake [Fielder-Civil, her then boyfriend] was there and she’d just written Back To Black and that night was their coming together and she was just so happy.
“She did her picture and then she asked me to photograph her and Salaam Remi, who was one of her producers on Back To Black.
“She asked for a copy of that and it was in her house when she died.”
She also compares Billie Eilish, who she photographed at Glastonbury in 2019, to Debbie Harry “in the sense that she was and is a very beautiful young girl who is playing against her beauty. I’ve always found that to be a very good sign in rock and roll.”
But she says the more famous the star, the harder it is to get access to them, suggesting younger photo- graphers should focus on uncovering new, upcoming talent.
She says: “I urge young photo- graphers to find your Billie Eilish and your Police and your Oasis bands in the early days when they are hungry to be seen and you are hungry to show them being seen, and you can collaborate and make some beautiful pictures.”
- Jill Furmanovsky: Photographing The Invisible – 50 Years of Rock Photography is at Manchester Central Library until June 24. Admission is free.
