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Velocity Boys

British pop history is littered with strange people who’ve spent their lives punching above their weight. These are the characters who exploit the pressure-cooker music-biz landscape to turn the temperature knob up to whatever the temperature of...

Photo by Valerie Hicks

A Jesus and Mary Chain gig at Ziggy’s nightclub in Plymouth in early 1985. From left to right: Jim Reid, Douglas Hart and Alan McGee. “This was at Ziggy’s nightclub in Plymouth early in 1985,” says Valerie Hicks. “[Future Creation employee and Heavenly Recordings boss] Jeff Barrett promoted bands there for a while.”

British pop history is littered with strange people who’ve spent their lives punching above their weight. These are the characters who exploit the pressure-cooker music-biz landscape to turn the temperature knob up to whatever the temperature of widespread hysteria is. Just past his 50th birthday, it’s about time Alan McGee was allowed to nuzzle up to svengalis such as Brian Epstein, Malcolm McLaren and Tony Wilson in the nation’s affections; men who—like him—seem possessed of an innate ability to twist Britain’s pop zeitgeist around their little fingers. Ten years ago, as a full-time “rock writer” at the NME, I would spend hours on the phone with both McGee and Wilson, gleefully writing down the hilarious derogatory things they’d say about each other. One of my favourite McGee quotes was: “Tell Tony Wilson that his In the City conference is the urinal that the music business has been pissing in for years.” This month sees the release of a film called Upside Down which documents McGee’s time as the daddy of Creation Records’ “fucked-up family” of bands including My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain and Oasis. His PR girl got in touch to see if we could plug the film, and so I did this interview, hoping it would bring back memories of those glorious NME days. Vice: Hi Alan, what’s up?
Alan McGee: Hi Andy, I’m okay. Japan just had another earthquake, though. Yeah, I saw. A 7.4.
I think that’s as big as it’s been. The last one was 9.2, I guess.
Yeah, but these are the aftershocks. They’re different, I think. I was in an earthquake before. It was back in ’94, January. It was 6.6 and absolutely fucking mental, you know what I mean? It was the equivalent of being in a room and it’s cardboard and a big giant is kicking the fuck out of the room. Who were you with?
I had been up for three days doing gear. Are you sure it was a 6.6 earthquake?
Hahaha. I woke up at about four in the morning and I was bouncing up and down on the bed like a fucking rag doll. I didn’t know what was going on, and then suddenly I realised—“Fuck, it’s an earthquake!” Anyway, did you watch the film? Yeah!
Did you like it? Yeah, it’s good. I liked the footage of the Mary Chain at the university when everybody’s trying to kill them. I wish there was more actual footage of stuff like that, and of the debauchery you guys are talking about the whole way through. I was like, “Fucking show me it then!”
Well, it definitely exists. Loads of it. I think [former Jesus and Mary Chain bassist] Douglas Hart spent a lot of time roaming about with a camera on the Screamadelica tour. I would be frightened to find out what was on his tapes. You wouldn’t want to watch them, would you? It might turn out like that film The Ring, except instead of a Japanese zombie girl coming out of the TV screen it’d be Bobby Gillespie throwing one out of a hotel window and then leering at you from the wreckage.
I think Bobby is the star of the film. I give him the credit he deserves. People say, “Oh, McGee found this band,” but I own up. It was Bobby who brought me the Scream, the Mary Chain and the Fanclub. He wasn’t just a person in the band, he was a brilliant A&R man. I think he was a bit shocked when I gave him credit for that. What I thought was a good point was when Noel [Gallagher of Oasis] talks about the end of Creation Records. I remember talking to people who worked for the label the day you shut it down and it seemed almost everybody, aside from you, was like, “What the fuck are they doing? This is so unnecessary!” Do you ever look back and think, “Shit, maybe I should have kept it going”?
Not at all. See, the last ten years have been really interesting for me. There’s no way I’d have ended up doing what I’m doing now if I’d have kept Creation going. You don’t learn anything unless you go down a different path. You could look at that decade and go, “Well, he managed the Libertines, signed the Hives, signed Glasvegas and sold millions more records”—you could go on about all that shite, but I’ve learned a lot more about life in the last decade than I did in the one before it. I think you learn more from getting stuff wrong than getting stuff right, too. Between 1990 and 1994 we really got it right artistically, and from ’94 onwards we really got it right commercially. We could have just rolled on if we were only in it for the money. We could have hired a staff of six or seven people and loads more bands, but you know what? Creation was an idea that Joe Foster and I had in 1983, and by ’96 we had achieved that idea, but back then my ego was too big to let it go, so I continued to ’99. It got to a point where it was just really drudgey—like we’re all sat around off our faces, waiting for the next Oasis album so we can be number one again, waiting for the next Primal Scream album so we can be number two again, you know what I mean? It was time to get out. You had the big drug heart attack on the plane and then gave up partying during the time that Oasis were going bananas with the second record. Did you ever go to NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings?
I went once or twice, but I think I went to the wrong places. I went to the Peckham one and I remember people talking about shooting people. So it was never that appealing. I just did it one-on-one, sort of. And it’s okay now. I see people like Gillespie and the guys who are probably slightly damaged goods now because we all did a lot of drugs, but it’s all okay. Gillespie is straight-edge now, right?
Yeah, yeah. And we’re probably a little bit damaged—but anybody that is 50 and did a lot of drugs is going to be a bit damaged. You’re probably going to be a bit damaged when you’re 50, Andy, you know what I mean? Errr… haha.
Haha, you fucking are! I have a theory that there has been a massive rise in cocaine use in this country…
It’s probably got a lot worse quality… And I have a theory that people like yourself and Noel Gallagher are personally responsible for that rise. What do you think about that?
Haha. I think it’s an interesting theory. All of a sudden, after Definitely Maybe, it seemed that everybody in the country was suddenly doing more cocaine. There was never really a band on the radio all the time that promoted cocaine use as much as Oasis. And I am being serious, too.
Well, I think I am being serious back. I think drugs are endemic in society. People think drugs are rock’n’roll, but everyone does drugs. Not to do drugs is probably more rock’n’roll. Literally, the guy that comes and fixes my cupboard in my house, he probably goes out on a Friday and comes back on a Sunday. You know what I mean? I think there was a point in the 90s when Noel said “drugs are like having a cup of tea” in the toilets at some party somewhere. It took us six months to get over that one, off-the-cuff remark. Not that we’re just going to sit around talking about drugs all day, but it was a big thing, and some would say a driving force in Creation, right?
Being honest, I probably lost interest in the music business when I came off drugs. I don’t mean I lost interest in music, I still love the Beatles, but I lost interest in the music business in 1994. But I still went on and sold 60 million records and fucking made a load of cash. They don’t necessarily meet up: having a good time and making a load of money. As for me having a good time, from about ’88 to ’94 I was out of my mind and had a great time. How much a day?
Andy, it was mainly ecstasy to be honest. Then ecstasy got shit and we started doing loads of coke. How many a day?
We would buy six or seven grammes but we would share them. I don’t know how much anyone would do a day, definitely a few grammes a day, you know what I mean? We were out of our fucking minds. We used to fly to Brazil at the weekend and go mental. Dick Green [Creation co-founder] is right in that film when he says that it all ended when I got sober. Even though I was sober and even though I helped facilitate things for Oasis to go and sell a lot of records, if you talk about me personally enjoying that, being at Creation and enjoying that, it probably ended about 1994. It was when you “became a part of the establishment”?
Well, I sold a lot of records and I would have been an idiot to walk away from that. We were having it, you know. Of all the groups, which one was your favourite?
Probably Oasis. I still absolutely, totally love them, but I don’t think personally they were the flagship band—the Scream were the band that made people want to sign for Creation. The Scream are still amazing. I met Gillespie in the street the other day and he was like, “We’re on fire, we’re better than we’ve ever been.” And he was beyond serious. What do you think of the recent re-emergence of Kevin Shields?
Yeah, well, I wouldn’t call us friends, but we’re not enemies. One of the good things about the film was that it gave us the opportunity to clear up any bad blood. There was a bit of that between Kevin and I—there’s loads of fucking stuff we both said that was, in retrospect, total bullshit—but at the end of the day, he made a great record for us. People still love him. I do love My Bloody Valentine. There are those stories about how he chose song titles like “To Here Knows When” and even album names like Loveless in reaction to you begging him to deliver the record because the running costs were sending you bankrupt. I asked him about that, and he was like, “Oh no, not at all.” But I didn’t really believe him.
I really don’t know. I would say that knowing Kevin those stories probably are true, even if he was just doing it subconsciously. He told us three years ago that he had a new album ready. Is he telling lies again?
Ah, Kevin has a finishing thing. He can’t finish stuff. Honestly, I have no bad blood with the dude, but I am 50, man, it’s over. Good luck, Kevin Shields: get on with it, man. The funniest story is when the Strokes was happening and he took on some band that sounded like that new garage rock sound called the Beatings. By the time he had finished their album, the genre had passed. It took him three years to make it and by the time the record came out Chris Martin was the biggest rock star in the world. Do you think you helped Coldplay’s career at all with those comments you made about them being “music for bedwetters”?
I don’t know. But this is a good example of satire done well being the greatest form of cruelty. I’ve never actually met them! I’ve never met the guy. One of my favourite scenes in Upside Down is when you’re on a TV show with Tony Wilson and you’ve got a Spacemen 3 shirt on, and Wilson says something like, “This guy with the funny hair is Alan McGee and he’s from Glasgow and he’s just moved to Manchester. Alan, why?” And then you say, “It’s a better class of drugs, Tony.”
I loved Tony. We always were big mates. I think he was a bit pissed off with me by the end because I had stolen a Manchester band and sold loads of records. That wasn’t my fault—he turned them down, but he chose to forget that part. Creation would never be Factory. Factory was a better label because of Joy Division; we would never live up to that. But what we did take from Factory was the way they did business and their spirit. We took that, and if you take that you take a lot of it. Wilson was a massive hero of mine. He was my newsreader as a kid and then with Factory and the Hacienda and all that. We got him to come to the Old Blue Last once and it was a really proud moment for me to get his blessing of sorts. He was a massive inspiration in starting Vice in this country. But who and where are those people, the Factories and Creations of today?
I think it’s got to be Domino. If you are talking about musical output, which is what it’s all about, then it’s got to be Laurence [Bell, Domino Records co-founder]. He puts out excellent material. If a band like Happy Mondays came along right now, not a single record company would touch them. Not with a barge pole.
Well, the thing is the record business changed because it’s not about the bands now, it’s about the record companies. I think really the context has changed. Rock’n’roll bands are not really signed to major record companies, and that is really a massive difference to the period between the 60s and the 90s. There were loads of bands on majors, I mean even Nirvana were on a fucking major. Liam’s new band, Beady Eye—I think he’s putting that out himself around the world on indie labels. He was saying, “I am thinking about going DIY,” and I think that’s brilliant. It’s like what you did with the magazine: you start off DIY, no one sees you coming, and now you’ve got people investing millions in your business. It’s like, Creation, nobody saw that coming, and those are the kinds of things that work. Upside Down is out now on DVD and in selected cinemas nationwide.