IF (What's The Story)… was the difficult second album, then Be Here Now was the cocky, half-baked, audience-splitting third.

Noel Gallagher famously said it was the sound of "a bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving a ****", and listening back to it almost 20 years on, it's fairly hard to disagree.

From the outset, D'You Know What I Mean makes it clear this is more of the same (using pretty much the exact chord structure of Wonderwall), only turned up to 11 (with grimy wah-wah guitar licks, thundering helicopter sound effects, and Liam's patented nasal whine almost a parody of itself). Noel himself has gone back and remastered the opening track, and it's definitely an improvement - though he admits he couldn't be bothered doing the rest of the album too, which is a shame.

There are great tracks here – including Stand By Me and I Hope, I Think, I Know – but they're messy, noisy, over-crowded and over-produced, and even more so than on previous albums, too bl**dy long. Only three tracks last less than five minutes, and one of them is a two-minute reprise of the nine-minute All Around The World.

York Press:

Noel Gallagher's verdict on Be Here Now: "A bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving a ****"

As always with these editions, the bonus discs are the stars of the collection, and among the treats on Disc Two are B-sides (though not as good as the previous two albums), and unreleased recordings.

Standouts include an outtake of Stand By Me with Liam reining it in and doing a great job, and a live version of Setting Sun, initially released by the Chemical Brothers in 1996 with Noel's vocals. Noel also performs a cheeky acoustic rendition of The Beatles' Help! which... really isn't all that, and the demo of If We Shadows which it’s a shame never got much further.

Disc Three is made up solely of the Mustique Demos, recorded on holiday with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, further showing the level of celebrity the band was living up to at this point. Listening back to his renditions of The Girl In The Dirty Shirt, My Big Mouth and It's Gettin' Better (Man!!), it makes you wonder why he let Liam bother at all. The demos are all well produced and nearly fully formed, and – surprisingly – almost as long as the finished versions ended up being.

Is it the worst album ever? Definitely not. Is it a bloated but exciting mess? Yup. But it's also the one that simultaneously killed Britpop, showed Oasis had started to believe their own hype, and now stands out now as a curiosity and musical landmark.