section_path: History/1996–1999: Be Here Now and The Masterplan
section_name: 1996–1999: Be Here Now and The Masterplan
paragraph_text: 1996–1999: Be Here Now and The Masterplan
  
  Oasis spent the end of 1996 and the first quarter of 1997 at Abbey Road Studios in London and Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey recording their third album. Quarrels between the Gallagher brothers plagued the recording sessions. Be Here Now was released in August 1997. Preceded by the UK number one single " D'You Know What I Mean? ", the album was their most anticipated effort, and as such became the subject of considerable media attention. Footage of excited fans clutching copies made ITV News at Ten, leading anchorman Trevor McDonald to intone the band's phrase "mad for it". By the end of the first day of release, Be Here Now had sold 424,000 units and first week sales reached 696,000, making it the fastest-selling album in British history until Adele released 25 in 2015. The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 in the US, but its first week sales of 152,000—below expected sales of 400,000 copies—were considered a disappointment. Predominantly written by Noel Gallagher during a holiday with Kate Moss, Johnny Depp and Mick Jagger, Gallagher has since expressed regret over the writing process of Be Here Now, adding it doesn't match up to the standard of the band's first two albums:
  
  In the studio it was great, and on the day it came out it was great. It was only when I got on tour that I was thinking, "It doesn't fucking stand up."... People are prepared to have stand-up rows with me in the street: "I fucking love that album!" And I'm like, "Mate, look, I wrote the fucking thing. I know how much effort I put into it. It wasn't that much."
  
  For a little while, Be Here Now demanded superlatives. Its path was paved with five-star reviews, like petals thrown beneath a Roman emperor's feet. No album in history has experienced such a swift and dramatic reversal of fortune. Be Here Now was reframed first as a disappointment and then as a disaster. It burned out quickly, falling well short of the sales achieved by 1995's (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, with many copies ending up in secondhand racks. Noel himself quickly disowned it, dismissing it in the 2003 Britpop documentary Live Forever as "the sound of five men in the studio, on coke, not giving a fuck".
  
  Noel had been ambivalent about the album in pre-release interviews, telling NME, "This record ain't going to surprise many people." However, there was nobody around him to echo his reservations. "Everyone's going: 'It's brilliant!'" he later said. "And right towards the end, we're doing the mixing and I'm thinking to myself: 'Hmmm, I don't know about this now.'" When the album was released Oasis were woven into Britain's cultural fabric like no other band since the Beatles, and according to their former press officer Johnny Hopkins: "There were more hangers-on, constantly telling them they were the greatest thing. That tended to block out the critical voices." Dorian Lynskey writes, "If it couldn't be Britpop's zenith, then it must be the nadir. It can't be just a collection of songs – some good, some bad, most too long, all insanely overproduced – but an emblem of the hubris before the fall, like a dictator's statue pulled to the ground by a vengeful mob."
  
  After the conclusion of the Be Here Now Tour in early 1998, amidst much media criticism, the group kept a low profile. Later in the year, Oasis released a compilation album of fourteen B-sides, The Masterplan. "The really interesting stuff from around that period is the B-sides. There's a lot more inspired music on the B-sides than there is on Be Here Now itself, I think," said Noel in an interview in 2008.