It’s 1994 and Alan McGee is in a taxi on his way to the airport for yet another London to Los Angeles flight. Thanks to Oasis, Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine, McGee’s label, Creation Records, is riding high. McGee is unbeatable, arrogant and cocky, a man on a permanent drink and drugs bender, all the classic ingredients for a fall.
That taxi to the airport is where McGee opens Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label. This was the Los Angeles trip which ended with McGee carted out of his hotel by paramedics. Just as Creation Records was beginning to take over the world, its boss, the self-declared president of pop, hit the wall when it came to drink and drugs.
Looking back now, McGee says he'd pushed it too far because of work. "I had a partner at Creation – Dick Green – who had to look after his kids so I ended up looking after the business side of things, which is not my forte, which is why I think I ended up overdoing the drugs. I was medicating against anxiety."
That breakdown and subsequent recovery is just one story from the pages of his open, honest, colourful and occasionally very funny autobiography.
“I’ve been asked about 20 times to do a book and I don’t know why I did it this time,” he says. “It took three years. It started off with a ghostwriter, but he went missing after handing in one chapter and he got the sack. I then hired Luke Brown as an editor and he came to Wales and we did it really fast. I’m still remembering stories that I didn’t put in the book.”
'Semi-good-looking girlfriend'
Starting out, McGee had very simple ambitions. "I wanted to be famous in Glasgow. When I say famous, I mean in the punk scene and I mean famous enough to get a semi-good-looking girlfriend. That was it. I never thought at any point that there was money in it. I thought if I could become a bass player in a punk band then that would be cool."
It took a move to London for McGee to discover that he was good at organising people, persuading them to do what he wanted and making things happen. Enter Creation Records. “The first 11 records lost money, but we were running a club [The Living Room] so it didn’t really matter because we were making money from that.
“The first five years was about avoiding work and having to get a real job. It was only when the House of Love album went gold and My Bloody Valentine were selling loads of records and people were starting to take me seriously that I realised that we were a real record company.”
By the early 1990s, Creation was truly in its pomp, thanks to Primal Scream's Screamadelica and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.
“I was really pleased for Primal Scream, because it was an amazing album,” says McGee. “When they came back and toured the album 20 years on, they killed it, and they were playing to the audiences they should have been playing to the first time around.
“But, by the end of 1991, they were smacked off their tits so they couldn’t tour for a few years after that. They couldn’t tour until 1994. I then booked them a world tour and put them on the road in the States with Depeche Mode for 16 weeks. I didn’t know what Depeche Mode were like. Remember I wasn’t that well myself and they thought I knew what I was doing.”
McGee's relationship with My Bloody Valentines leader Kevin Shields was infamously fractious due to the time and money the band took to finish their most infamous album.
'Cacophony of noise'
"Kevin views things through a cacophony of noise, so it doesn't matter if you shout or whisper because he's not going to care or hear you and he's going to do what he wants to do.
“But the way he came back and did his new record was an amazing and anarchic way of doing things. Everything he said to me privately about f***ing the record labels and the music industry years ago, he actually did, and he did it with a website.”
When McGee returned to Creation in 1995, after his breakdown, it took time for all to adjust to the new, clean, sober boss. “I was back in body, but not in mind. The Creation staff were all little rock’n’roll kids and I was like weird Uncle Alan. They found it really difficult to deal with me and I found it difficult to be in the building for a long time.”
Thanks to Oasis, the label was then firing on all cylinders. "There was a point where Oasis were so big that anything with their name on it would sell millions. We had become the mainstream, Oasis were everywhere. It got to the point where everybody began to look like Liam Gallagher. I used to talk to people and tell them things because I thought they were Liam."
A flying lunch
McGee did enjoy some of the trappings of success, especially at the expense of his new partners at Sony Music. "Sony hated me because I was horrible and took the piss all the time. Because of Oasis, we had so much power over them that I could take their helicopter. I used to fly by helicopter to Dublin quite a lot to have lunch. I was having a laugh."
Creation's success also meant McGee got to hobnob with Tony Blair and New Labour.
"We thought we were just getting the Conservatives out. We were naive and obviously hadn't read the New Labour manifesto. We thought we were getting a Jim Callaghan and it was nothing like that. It didn't really matter that we ended up being used because we wanted to get rid of the Tories.
"What fell out of that was Blair and the Iraq war and Dr David Kelly, which was all f***ing terrible.
"It put me off politics. I look at it now like the X Factor. They've all got the same suit on with different ties and stand on a podium and say basically the same thing. I thought Russell Brand was brilliant when he said 'don't vote'."
Creation closed in 2000 and McGee went on to run a new label, Poptones, and manage The Libertines: "They were the ones that got away. Even for me, who is pretty good at dealing with loonies, Pete Doherty was too much."
By 2008, he’d had enough of the music business and took five years off to stay at home in Wales and read books.
Now, though, McGee is back. There’s this book and the new 359 label and he’s got his swagger back. “I actually get off in watching young people with talent make music, so if I can help with that, that’s my kick. Do I think we’ll make a penny? No. Why am I doing it? Probably because I’m a bit mad and I’m old, so why not?
“But I’m not that bad a businessman. I’ve got a load of property in London that my missus deals with. Our life was paid for by Britpop so that’s all sorted. I do music because I want to do it and not because I have to make money from it.”
Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label is published by
Sidgwick & Jackson
