1995 · album cover
Brian Cannon’s early-morning Soho scene places two passing figures on a real record-shopping street.
The cover of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? makes a passing encounter on Berwick Street into a small mystery. The figures are Brian Cannon and DJ Sean Rowley, rather than Liam and Noel Gallagher. Cannon’s account returns the familiar sleeve to an unusually quiet morning in London’s Soho.
Markers identify buildings or documented location references. They do not mark an exact recording room, stage position or camera angle.
Cannon told the Big Issue that the idea involved two men passing without revealing who they were or what they might have said. Berwick Street, associated with record shops, supplied the setting. The image leaves its encounter unresolved. A viewer can identify a street and two bodies moving through it, while the reason for their meeting remains withheld. That uncertainty is part of the cover’s construction, rather than a gap that needs an invented conversation. [1]
Cannon recalled setting up around five in the morning and finding the street unexpectedly free of traffic. He stood in for one of the intended figures alongside Rowley; producer Owen Morris is also visible farther back with the master tapes. A busy city street briefly offered the space needed for the composition. The place’s ordinary activity had paused just enough to make the staged encounter appear isolated. Looking at Berwick Street through the sleeve means noticing that temporary condition as well as the buildings. [1]
Soho, London
For the album released in 1995
The Morning Glory cover was photographed on Berwick Street in Soho, with Brian Cannon and Sean Rowley as the two foreground figures; Cannon recalled an early-morning shoot around 5am. [1]
Berwick Street is a working public street. Keep pavements and shop entrances clear, and do not step into traffic to reproduce the image. No exact camera position or promise of unchanged shopfronts is supplied.
