Liam Gallagher / Oasis Melody Maker Magazine Framed - You Lookin At Me Pal?

Liam Gallagher / Oasis

Melody Maker, March 23, 1996

Magazine cover
19½ × 15 inches (49.5 × 38.1 cm)
Framed

March 1996. Oasis had just finished their first proper American tour — the one that confirmed them as either the biggest band in the world or the most belligerent, depending on who you asked. Melody Maker put Liam on the cover with a Heineken in hand and a headline that needed no elaboration: You lookin' at me, pal? It is a perfect document of a very specific moment in British cultural history, when Britpop was still ascendant and Liam Gallagher was its most photogenic liability. The photograph — black and white, slightly grainy, taken somewhere that looks like a hotel bar — does exactly what the best music press photography always did: it makes the subject look like they invented something. Thirty years on, the cover reads less as artifact than as portrait. Framed.