"It’s going to be weird how that’s perceived, having a Hollywood star on the album," Noel Gallagher mused in 1997, discussing Johnny Depp's appearance on Fade In-Out, the bluesy seventh track on Oasis' soon-to-be-released third album, Be Here Now.
Not that Gallagher really cared what anyone thought: having sold over 20 million copies of his band's second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, he considered Oasis "bigger than fucking God" and was sufficiently confident about the success of its follow up that, during interviews promoting the record, he would admit that some of the songs were "fucking shit".
Besides, by 1997, Depp's credentials as a genuine music fan - and as a proficient guitarist - already were well established. In fact, he and Noel Gallagher had already recorded together two years earlier, appearing on a cover of The Beatles' Come Together, credited to The Smokin' Mojo Filters, a one-off supergroup also featuring Paul McCartney, Paul Weller and more. laid down for the charity record The Help Album. Not everyone might have known that the actor had been signed to Geffen Records a decade earlier, as a member of Rock City Angels, or indeed that he'd recorded a terrible album alongside Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes as a member of the 'supergroup' P, but he'd been on Top Of The Pops with Shane MacGowan, and if the ex-Pogues singer had his back, then Depp's rock 'n' roll credentials needed no further authentication.
Depp recorded his slide guitar part for Fade In-Out during the spring of 1996, when Gallagher and his wife Meg Matthews joined the actor and his supermodel girlfriend Kate Moss on holiday on the Caribbean island of Mustique. Actually, for clarity, Gallagher wasn't there for a holiday, as such: he wanted a change of scenery to work after experiencing a new and unwelcome feeling for the first time in his professional career: writer's block.
"In London the phone was going all the time or there was someone knocking at the door or our kid comes round, 'Are we going out on the piss or what?'" he told Q magazine's Phil Sutcliffe in 1997. "Nailing a song together, finding the missing chord that gets it all flowing into one, that takes a lot of peace and quiet."
"The first part of [Fade In-Out] is from the Mustique demo with Johnny Depp playing slide guitar," Gallagher revealed. "I like it because it’s the first blues song I’ve ever done and Liam does the best singing I’ve ever heard from him.
"The scream near the end was the last bit we did. Me and Meg went back to Mustique over Christmas and I took the rough mix with me. It needed something and it was bugging me. Meg woke up one morning and there was I in bed beside her with the Walkman on, screaming. She thought I’d gone into my drug psychotic phase. Oh, sorry, I’m just filling in a bit of the record.
"So I don’t think 14-year-old girls will be skipping about to this one. [Cockney] ‘’Ere ’Shelle, wind that one on will yer!’ Until they find out Johnny Depp’s on it... If he hadn’t been around, we’d have had to get some fat old geezer who’d be telling us about how he played with Clapton in ’76 and took a slide solo that lasted for fucking months."
Be Here Now sold an astonishing 424,000 copies in a single day in the UK upon its release in August 1997, and went on to sell 1.47 million copies in the UK alone in 1997, making it the biggest selling album of the year in Britain. The album also topped the charts in 14 other countries, but missed out on topping the US Billboard 200 chart by a mere 771 copies.
