Iconic Moments in Music: The Afternoon in Fallowfield That Introduced the World to Oasis
, by Behind The Gallery, 12 min reading time
Some photographs document what a band became. Others capture who they were before anyone was watching.
Supersonic had been out for a matter of days. Floyd had already heard it on the radio that week and liked it, though he had no idea who it was by.
"I had absolutely no idea who it was by, and I certainly had no idea it was by them when I met them."
He spent the afternoon with the band behind a song he already knew, without realising it.
The image Chris Floyd made on a May bank holiday Monday in 1994 belongs firmly in that second category. Shot for Loaded magazine, it is a document of a band at the precise moment before everything changed, when Liam Gallagher was still chasing Arsenal fans into back gardens and Noel was rifling through a pocket-sized address book looking for his brother.
Nobody knew who they were. Including the photographer.
A Hotel in Fallowfield
Chris Floyd was in his mid-twenties, early in his career, and had been given an assignment he knew almost nothing about.
"A trip to Manchester on a May bank holiday Monday to photograph a band I'd never heard of called Oasis. I'd been told to ask for a Noel Gallagher at reception."
The hotel was one of those once-grand Edwardian houses that had long since given up on grandeur - tired, resentful at its diminished status. Floyd was directed down a hallway and knocked on a door.
He assumed Noel Gallagher was the band's manager.
The room told a different story. Push the door as far as the hinges would allow and it would hit the wall on the other side. A single bed. A strip of carpet so narrow it could be cut in one shove of a lawnmower. Football on the TV, First Division play-offs.
They both stared at it.
"I went down the hall and into the room," Floyd recalls, "and he said, 'I've just got to watch the end of this match, it's not long.' So I just sort of sat there while he watched the football, and then we started talking."
Then Noel began working through a pocket-sized address book, calling every number in it. Every conversation went the same way.
"Alright… seen our kid?… [pause]… Alright, cheers, see ya later."
Floyd sat there, feeling like a spare part.
"I did what I always do in awkward situations, which was reach for my camera. As much for something to do as anything else."
The resulting photograph, Noel on the bed, address book in his lap, mid-call — is one of the earliest images of Oasis in existence. Unremarkable in the moment. Irreplaceable in retrospect.
Our Kid
Floyd is from suburban Surrey. The numerous ways that someone in Manchester can be classified as "our kid" were not immediately clear to him. As the actor Paul McGann, one of four brothers, once described being approached on the street in Liverpool: "Alright mate. Are you you, or are you our kid?" It needs a flow chart.
In this case, Our Kid was finally located. Noel explained they were going to meet him on a street corner nearby. As he put his jacket on, he turned to Floyd.
"What do you think of Blur?"
"They're alright. I quite like them."
"Yeah. Second best band in Britain."
At the corner, four lads came bowling towards them. The leader was clear from a distance — red bomber jacket, blue Adidas trackies, Adidas trainers.
"Alright mate, Liam, whassyername, Chris yeah? Who d'ya support?"
"Arsenal."
"Gooner? I can't talk to ya then. I don't even wanna look at ya."
And with that they were off, carried along by the relentless energy of Liam Gallagher.
Maine Road
The afternoon took them through the streets of Fallowfield and eventually to Maine Road, the Manchester City stadium. Liam narrated the whole way. The story he chose to tell was about an Arsenal fan he'd once encountered after a City game, chased into a back garden, cornered, when a man came out of the house wanting a turn.
"Got this geezer, Gooner geezer, right, into this garden, and I'm giving him a kicking when this other geezer from the house comes out and stops me because he wants to have a go as well, so I said fair dos mate, it's your gaff and I left him to it."
From somewhere just behind them, barely audible, came Noel's response. "Twat."
One word. Delivered under his breath, almost to himself. Floyd had spent enough time around bands to know that sibling dynamics could fill a room. This one landed differently, the economy of it, the precision. A full character study in four letters.
Then Liam turned to Floyd with a proposal.
"You get down on the floor. I'll run up and boot ya."
Floyd lay down on his stomach. Liam promised to swing his leg just short.
"Not at all, it was all perfectly civilised and well planned out," Floyd recalls. "He promised not to connect with my head and I believed him. He's a man of his word is Liam."
They did it three or four times. When Floyd got the film back after processing, the third frame was the best. A future icon, boot raised, caught mid-swing above a photographer who'd only learned the band's name that morning.
On the Train Home
Walking back towards the hotel, Liam told Floyd he'd put him on the guest list for the band's next London gig, the Marquee Club, 8 June.
On the train home, Floyd had one clear thought.
"I've no idea if that guy can sing, but if he can then he's going to be absolutely massive."
He kept the guest list ticket. Liam kept his word.
"That Marquee gig was absolutely gripping," Floyd recalls. "The venue was packed, the crowd were up for it and so were the band."
Everything he'd sensed in Manchester was confirmed.
When the Myth Caught Up
For the next two decades, the photographs existed quietly, known within the industry, but not yet carrying the weight they would come to hold.
That changed in 2014.
"Vice magazine interviewed me about that period and that article kind of mythologised it, as much for me as for anyone who might have read it."
It was the moment Floyd understood what that afternoon in Fallowfield actually was. Not just an early assignment. Not just a lucky break with a band that turned out to be massive. A document of a specific, unrepeatable moment, before the first single, before the albums, before Knebworth, before any of it.
The address book. The streets of Fallowfield. A photographer on his stomach while a future icon swung a boot just short of his head.
Wembley, 2025
Thirty years on, Floyd watched Oasis play Wembley Stadium with his seventeen-year-old daughter beside him.
"They're all huge fans. It was so great to be there with her and watch her singing along."
A band he'd never heard of in a cramped hotel room in 1994, now filling the biggest venues in the world, witnessed this time with the generation that inherited the mythology rather than the moment.
The distance between those two experiences is what the photograph holds.
Because what these images also represent, what no photograph made today could quite replicate, is the texture of a pre-social media world.
"That period and those pictures represent a pre-social media era. A time when you could have a night out and not be judged remotely by a disapproving audience the next day."
An afternoon where a photographer could lie down on a pavement in Fallowfield while Liam Gallagher ran at him with his boot raised, and the only record of it would be whatever came back from the lab three or four days later.
Frame three was the best.
Why Collectors Are Drawn to the Chris Floyd Oasis Photographs
What draws collectors to this photograph is its position at the exact point before Oasis became Oasis. Shot in May 1994 before a single had been released, before the mythology had formed, it documents a band in the last weeks of anonymity, accessible, unguarded, and entirely unaware of the scale of what was coming.
For collectors, that timing is everything. This is not a photograph of a band at their peak. It is a photograph of who that band actually were, on the streets around Maine Road, in the precise moment before the story began. The image was never planned, never staged, never intended as a defining frame. It came from a photographer lying on his stomach on a Fallowfield pavement because a twenty-one year old Mancunian told him to get down on the floor.
That's what makes it irreplaceable.
Why This Image Endures as a Collectible
· Shot in May 1994, before Oasis had released their debut single
· Among the earliest existing photographs of the band, captured for Loaded magazine
· Unrestricted, unguarded access at the last moment before fame changed everything
· A spontaneous, unplanned image, a moment that happened
· A document of a pre-social media world, irreproducible by the conditions that exist today
· Their cultural weight renewed by the Oasis Live 25 reunion, introducing the images to a new generation
Limited Edition Significance
While Oasis became one of the most photographed bands in British music history, this image exists outside that archive entirely. It was made before the cameras multiplied, before the access tightened, before Liam Gallagher became someone whose every movement was documented.
Limited edition prints return the photograph to its origin, a May afternoon in Manchester, a boot raised just short of a photographer's head, and a band with everything still ahead of them.
See Chris Floyd's Collections Here