Confessions of a rock photographer: ‘Pink Floyd played faster so they could watch Match of the Day’
The first time Jill Furmanovsky met Oasis, it was intended as a full-stop, not a beginning. The photographer, born in what was then Southern Rhodesia, had been a published music photographer from the age of 18 while a student at London’s Central School of Art and Design. Back then, her 1972 shot of Roger Daltrey on stage at Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre, jacket tassels and poodle curls flying as The Who performed Tommy, made it – uncredited – onto the cover of Melody Maker.
Within three years she had shot Stevie Wonder for the weekly music paper, embedded with Pink Floyd for six weeks on the UK tour for The Dark Side of the Moon, and joined the band in the studio to document the 1975 recording of Wish You Were Here.
So, by the time December 4 1994 rolled around, Furmanovsky was two decades deep into her career. Now she was looking for a new band to shoot to close her book, The Moment. It was a collection of images that began with The Beatles – schoolgirl Jill snapped Paul McCartney outside his St John’s Wood home – and went on to include genuinely iconic images of Charlie Watts, Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Bob Marley, Sinéad O’Connor and multiple others. A journalist friend suggested Oasis, who’d released debut album Definitely Maybe three-and-a-half months earlier. “So that’s when I went to Cambridge Corn Exchange, met them and took a load of live pictures.”
Does she remember her first impressions of Liam and Noel Gallagher? “Absolutely. That’s an easy one: I was mesmerised and baffled,” replies a woman who was 41 at the time and generally “unfazed” by rock stars and their ways. “I thought: there’s such an atmosphere. This music is so good. But nothing is happening on the stage whatsoever. What am I going to do? There was this marvellous singer with such–” – and here Furmanovsky, a bespectacled 71-year-old dressed for autumnal comfort, growls in an approximation of the younger Gallagher’s swagger – “punk stuff going on in him. But he didn’t do anything. He stood there with his hands behind his back. I hadn’t at this point twigged that he was doing Ian Brown impressions…
“Then the guitarist was really great, and smiling at me, very friendly. The other three were like ‘we’re the backing band’ – stiff and statues. And the audience was going absolutely bonkers. I just thought: what an extraordinary combination. How am I going to show this? It was a challenge.”
But show it she did, sufficiently impressing the Gallaghers, and their record label Creation, that she became the court photographer for the next 15 years of their existence, right to the bitter – very bitter – end.
The last time she shot Oasis? In East Yorkshire on August 20 2009, at what would be their final gig in their own right, a warm-up ahead of a headline slot at V Festival two days later. Liam might have appeared on stage singing, “Tonight, I’m a rock ’n’ roll star and I’m at Bridlington Spa”. But within eight days, the rock’n’roll dream was over, the band splitting backstage in Paris ahead of an appearance at the Rock en Seine Festival.
“It was very tense in Bridlington,” she remembers of that, the last of her 50-plus professional engagements with the band – so far. “I was just thinking: this is not good.”
We’re talking over mugs of tea in Furmanovsky’s office and archive in Kentish Town, North London. The jam-packed space bristles with visual mementoes of her rock’n’roll life, much of it Oasis-centric.
There’s a copy of the latest edition of Japanese magazine Rockin’ On, recently arrived in the post. A Furmanovsky shot of Liam and Noel illustrates a cover feature on the 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe. A typed list of her encounters with the band is taped to the front of a ceiling-high filing cabinet, the better to help with the myriad requests she receives for archive images. And on the floor is a giant, framed collage of individual photographs of the band, captured in the famed Studio 2 at Abbey Road. It’s wrapped, ready for packing and shipping back to the location of the shoot, ahead of Furmanovsky receiving an award that acknowledges the two most significant professional relationships in her career.
At this week’s ceremony for the 2024 Abbey Road Music Photography Awards, instituted by the studio two years ago to recognise just that, Furmanovsky is being given the Icon honour. Ask her what that means to her and she replies, squirmingly, “Um, slightly embarrassing?” So, nothing to be taken too seriously by this somewhat shy woman, “but the fact that I’m getting something from Abbey Road means a huge amount to me”.
That’s because the recording studios that were ground zero for The Beatles have played a key role in her career, too. Furmanovsky first passed through the hallowed doors for that ’75 Pink Floyd session, documenting the fractious making of Wish You Were Here. She returned in 1996 to document the even-more-fractious recording of Oasis’s Be Here Now, a record-breaking album to which history has been unkind and it’s songwriter even unkinder, viz: “It’s the sound of… a bunch of guys on coke, in the studio, not giving a f___,” Noel later said. “All the songs are really long and all the lyrics are s___ and for every millisecond Liam is not saying a word, there’s a f______ guitar riff in there, in a Wayne’s World style.”
Undaunted, Oasis and Furmanosvky returned to Abbey Road, in 2007, for the recording for their seventh album, Dig Out Your Soul. The relationship between photographer and band had remained staunch – considerably stauncher than that between Liam and Noel – because, in Furmanovsky’s estimation, “I don’t think I ever tried to be part of the gang. I’ve always stepped back from that.
“Also, according to Noel, I’m quick and I don’t hang around. When they started to get very famous and they had to do sessions with the Annie Leibovitz of this world, and they were supposed to go with the stylist for the day, they were like: ‘F___ this, we’ll give you 10 minutes and we’re gone. I mean, [Jill] does it in 10 minutes – why do we need longer than that to take a picture?’”
But by 2007 the writing was on the wall; Oasis would never make another album. At time of writing, anyway. But when I ask her to describe the in-studio vibes, all she recalls are “working vibes. I know that Kasabian popped in. I think Weller popped in a couple of times.”
Later still, in 2018, Furmanovsky was Abbey Road’s Artist In Residence, and in 2022 was a judge at their first Music Photography Awards. All of which means that this year’s gong is a fitting capstone to a connection that began with her day-and-a-half shooting Pink Floyd as they struggled, over six taxing months, to make the follow-up to The Dark Side of the Moon.
Even in the narrow window afforded her by the band, Furmanovsky remembers “a lot of tedium… A lot of yawning and drinking tea and cigarette smoking and reading magazines, and not a lot seemed to be happening. And then you sort of got the rhythm: David [Gilmour] would go in and do a bit of guitar. Then Rick [Wright] did a bit of keyboards…The one person who was just sitting there solidly was Roger [Waters], sort of directing things.”
There had been considerably more activity the preceding year, when Furmanovsky joined Pink Floyd on the road to take pictures for a mooted book about The Dark Side of the Moon tour. The band were hospitable, if hardly enthusiastic.
“They were indifferent to it. The thing about Floyd is they didn’t have record company people backstage. They didn’t have support bands. They were in a kind of – as [drummer] Nick [Mason] has said to me – a bubble. They had their own sort of weather patterns, and their gigs were booked according to sports facilities. A good squash court, or golf course, and cricket in the summer. That was pre- having video recorders. So if Match of the Day was on and the concert overran, they’d probably speed up the last song to make sure they got to watch it!
“They were sporty types,” she adds, “which was a surprise to me. I thought they’d be spliffing away. But I didn’t see any of that. They were forever off playing some sport, or playing backgammon.” Her access-all-areas freedom, however, ended up backfiring. “The book apparently was too revealing, and it got shelved. So the pictures ended up as press pictures, and others just went into a cupboard for a long time.”
Oasis enjoyed recreational pastimes of a different shade. By autumn 1996, they were in their pomp, with their epic shows that summer at Loch Lomond and Knebworth already the stuff of Cool Britannia legend. But ahead of their rolling up at Abbey Road in October to begin recording their third album, Liam had refused to sing at an MTV Unplugged concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, and had failed to join Oasis for the first leg of an American tour, citing his need to buy a house for him and girlfriend Patsy Kensit. It was a perfect tabloid storm – one in which their in-house photographer found herself embroiled.
“They’d come back [from the American tour] in a higgledy-piggledy heap, and it wasn’t certain where they were, actually. They’d sort of disappeared. That’s when I was living next door to [paparazzo] Dave Bennett in Golders Green, and he thought I had them hidden in my flat.”
Then, within a month of the start of recording, Liam was arrested for cocaine possession after attending the Q Awards.
“I do remember there was a problem,” says Furmanovsky, diplomatically, of those first weeks in Abbey Road. “It was a question of who was in the studio when, really. When I look back at the pictures now, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of pictures of everybody in at the same time.” What she does remember is having to take some proof-of-life photography, to scotch persistent rumours of a split. “I had to do a band shot at some point, just to show that it was business as usual.”
Generally, she insists, the band were in good humour. “I remember Liam went and played the whole album to Teenage Fanclub, who were in the next studio – he performed the whole album for them in mime. I think he did the same when they were with U2 as well, [supporting them the next summer] on the Popmart tour [ahead of the album’s release].”
So she didn’t see mounds of cocaine on the Abbey Road mixing desk? “I never saw any cocaine on any mixing desk. I never saw them hit each other. I used to complain about it as well: ‘Why has [rival photographer] Kevin Cummins got pictures of you fighting and I don’t? So if you fight, you must let me know in advance, because I need to be there.’” She’s joking, but also not.
Indeed, by the following spring, ahead of the album’s release in August 1997, Furmanovsky remembers high spirits that were less narcotic than, well, democratic: doing a two-day photoshoot that straddled New Labour’s landslide victory in the General Election, “there was a euphoria… I remember somebody plugging in a cassette of the new album. Because Oasis used to play their own music in the dressing rooms, which was most unusual. On this particular shoot, there was a cassette of Be Here Now, and Noel was doing air guitar to it and Liam was [singing along]. They were really pleased, or they were happy generally.”
Her ongoing affection for the band is palpable. So much so that she characterises their blockbuster 2025 reunion as “the icing on the cake”. Yes, she tried to get tickets, “but I couldn’t! I got right to the end of the queue, and then it said I was a bot.”
She’s in the midst of making a documentary about her career and, in the same way that The Moment ended with Oasis, she’d like the film – titled, in a nod to her unassuming nature, The Invisible Photographer – to finish with them, too. “So hopefully they’ll let me take another picture of them on the new tour. I’m going to be very upset if I don’t… I don’t want to go on the whole tour. I just want to come and celebrate.”
To do so, she’ll happily enlist another key elder stateswoman in the life and times of the brothers Gallagher. Jill Furmanvosky met their indomitable mum Peggy several times over the course of her time with the band. “An amazing woman, I absolutely loved her… [So] I want to see those two standing next to each other. And I want to see Peggy there, that would be really nice.”
She hasn’t yet had the call, “but they’ll be in trouble if they don’t let me in. I’ll be on to Peggy – Peggy will smuggle me in. Although she couldn’t get tickets either, I believe!”
The Abbey Road Music Photography Awards takes place on October 3; Jill Furmanvosky will collect the ICON Award at the ceremony