These photographers all worked with Oasis before they split - here's what they had to say about Noel and Liam

It was a cold, typically rainy Manchester evening, October 1993, when Michael Spencer Jones set out to meet a new guitar band he had been commissioned to photograph.

The weather was miserable, he didn't know their music, wasn't totally in the mood. "I had to drag myself from home, thinking: is it going to be worth the trouble?" On the drive to the Out Of The Blue studio in Ancoats, on the outskirts of the city centre, a song he'd never heard before came on the local radio station.

"It was like, wow, what is that?" The track was Columbia, by Oasis, the band he was on his way to meet. He started to get excited.

Spencer Jones had previously met Noel Gallagher during the musician's time as a roadie for fellow Manchester band Inspiral Carpets. But not Liam.

"As a photographer, obviously, the aesthetic of a band is massively important," he says as he recalls that first shoot. "I'm just looking down the camera lens with a certain amount of disbelief." In front of him was a 21-year-old, months before the start of the fame rollercoaster that lay ahead.

And yet. "I was looking at a face that just seemed to embody the quality of stardom." 'Success was inevitable' It was the start of a partnership that continued throughout the band's heyday, with Spencer Jones shooting the covers for their first three albums, their most successful records, and the singles that went with them.

"You work with bands pre-fame and there's always that question: are they going to make it? With Oasis there was never that question. Their success was inevitable." There was a confidence, even in those early days.

"Incredible, intoxicating confidence. [They were] not interested in any kind of social norms or social constraints." It wasn't arrogance, he says, of a criticism sometimes levelled at the Gallaghers.

"They just had this enormous self-belief." Spencer Jones was one of several photographers who followed the band, capturing the moments that became part of rock history. 'Noel had an uncanny intuition' Jill Furmanovsky, who started working with Oasis towards the end of 1994, a few months after the release of debut album Definitely Maybe, says Noel always seemed aware their time together should be documented.

"An uncanny intuition, really, that it was important," she says. "I think Noel has been aware right from the start, because for him that's what he used to look at when he used to buy his Smiths records or Leo Sayer or whatever, he would stare at the covers and be fascinated by the pictures." Contrary to popular belief, Furmanovsky says the brothers got on fairly well most of the time, "otherwise they wouldn't have been able to function".

She picks one shoot in 1997, around the release of their third album, Be Here Now, as one of the more memorable ones. Noel had shared his thoughts about the band on a chalkboard and "they were having such a laugh." But when things did erupt, it became significant.

"There were tensions in some shoots but they never started hitting each other in front of me or anything like that. I used to complain about it, actually - 'don't leave me out of those pictures where you're really arguing!'." In Paris in 1995, tensions had boiled over.

"It's one of my favourites," she says of the shoot. "It reflects not just the band but the family situation, these brothers in a strop with each other." What is notable, she says, is that they were happy for photographers to take candid shots, not just set up pictures to show them "looking cool".

Pictures that on the surface might sound mundane, showing "what they were really like - tensions, mucking about, sometimes yawning... This was the genius of Noel and [former Oasis press officer] Johnny Hopkins." Furmanovsky also notes the women who worked behind the scenes for Oasis - unusual at a time when the industry was even more male-dominated than it is now - and how they kept them in line.

Read more on Oasis:A high-five and the briefest hug: Oasis - the first reunion gigCool Britannia: Life in the UK in the '90sIt felt like it would never happen - but now, finally, Oasis are back "They got on well working with women," she says. "Maggie Mouzakitis was their tour manager for ages and was so young, but she ruled.

For a band one could say were a bunch of macho Manchester blokes, they had a lot of women working in senior positions." This is down to the influence of their mum, Peggy, she adds. "Absolutely crucial." Furmanovsky has been working with Noel on an upcoming book documenting her time with the band, and says she initially wanted to start with a picture of the Gallagher matriarch.

"Noel said to me, 'Jill, you do know she wasn't actually in the band?'" Touring with Oasis - 'the journalist had to take a week off' Kevin Cummins was commissioned to take pictures when Oasis signed to Creation Records, and it "kind of spiralled out of control a little bit.