by Paolo Hewitt
The interviewer’s eyes widened, like a shark smelling blood. ‘So are you being paid for any performances?’
‘Well,’ Liam had to admit, ‘we haven’t done any yet. But we will.’
‘Okay then, but until you do I think you should seriously apply for what we call a proper job. I have to tell you, failure to do so will mean your benefit is cut off. Do you understand, Mr. Gallagher?’
Do I understand? Do I fucking understand. Who is this cheeky bastard? Liam felt his temper rising. He badly wanted to smack this guy right in the mouth. But he held himself in check. Instead, he coldly asked, ‘What job you got in mind?’
‘Well, there’s a vacancy at a factory in Stockport. It’s good work, good wages. I think you should go for it.’
That was it. He’d tried to be civil to this wanker but it hadn’t worked. It never did with their kind. They understood absolutely nish. Where did these people come from?
Liam leant over the man’s desk and said, ‘Here are, I’ve got a better idea. You think that job is good, yeah?’
‘Yes, I do, Mr. Gallagher.’
‘Okay, then why don’t you go and do it? Uh? I’ll tell you what, you give me your job and if you think this other job is so great, you go and do that and I’ll do yours. How about that?’
Then Liam Gallagher got up and walked out.
Liam spent most evenings with Bonehead, Guigsy and Tony McCarroll. He wasn’t enamoured with McCarroll, but he was the best musician out of the lot of them and drummers were always the hardest to find.
Oasis rehearsed for four months and in that time they wrote four songs. Liam, after hours and hours of painful struggle, would come up with the words and Bonehead put music to them.
The other three members of the band were all working, Bonehead as a self-employed plasterer and Guigsy for British Telecom. It was through these jobs that Oasis managed to buy equipment, usually from a local music shop called Johnny Roadhouse.
Eventually the band got a booking, a gig at the Boardwalk in Manchester. It was scheduled for 18 August 1991, and they were due to support another local band called Sweet Jesus.
Noel found out about the gig through his mum. When he was away with the Inspirals he always called home on a regular basis. Peggy told him that Liam was due to appear on stage soon.
Noel checked his diary. He would be home from America by then. He would go and see them. If nothing else, it should be a right laugh.
Nine
It is getting near dawn when Noel Gallagher reaches over and picks up a battered acoustic guitar in Creation head Alan McGee’s living-room. He strums a few chords to ensure it’s in tune.
‘Here are, Alan,’ he says. ‘Tell us what you think of this song.’
His left hand forms a C-major chord and his right hand starts strumming the strings. After a few bars of this, Noel starts singing.
‘I’m older than I wish to be / This town holds no place for me / All my life / I’ve been trying to find a way back home...’
The song finished, Noel rests his arms on the guitar’s body and says, ‘It’s called “Rockin’ Chair”. What do you think?’
Alan McGee tries to focus on Noel’s expectant face but it’s useless. Everything in front of him has been transformed into a blur, as if his eyelashes are slowly wiping his eyes. McGee is drunk, pilled-up and wired. Actually, that’s wrong. He has shovelled so much up his nose and down his neck he isn’t sure what the fuck to call his high.
‘Noel,’ he finally replies, in a slurred Scottish brogue, ‘I can hardly see you, let alone hear you.’ Then he slumps back on to the sofa.
There have been many nights like this for McGee over the last seven years. They usually begin in a bar or at a gig with sizeable amounts of alcohol and cocaine being consumed, and, if there are any around, Ecstasy pills.
The bar or club finally closed, McGee likes to invite people back to his flat in the Docklands area of London. There, he will get out his records and try to convince people such as Noel of the greatness of the groups he adores.
‘You got to hear this song, Noel,’ he’ll passionately say. ‘ After this, you cannae tell me you dinnae like Big Star.’
Noel will smile to himself, as if to say, come on, I’m listening and then McGee will put on ‘Thirteen’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘September Gurls’. After about a minute, McGee will exclaim; ‘How great’s this record? Listen to that drum sound, fucking amazing.’
Suddenly, another tune will spring to mind and he’ll pull out another record and put it on before the first record is even half finished. ‘Noel, just listen to this man’s guitar.’
Noel could never make up his mind about McGee’s taste in music. He never heard enough of it to form an opinion.
And McGee loved music. It was something that never let him down, there was always another new album to buy, another group to discover. For McGee, as it was for Oasis and so many people around them, music was a bottomless ocean that you could spend a lifetime exploring. This McGee intended to do.
He had been smitten at an early age. Noel had asked him once, ‘What was the first record you bought?’ and McGee replied, “’Get It On” by T. Rex.’
He had bought it in Glasgow when he was eleven years old and it had transformed him. Glasgow was McGee’s home town. He had been born there in 1960. He attended primary school and then went on to King’s Park secondary.
McGee didn’t have too much of a bad time at school. He was an average student, not very good at sports, yet he was popular. He had plenty of friends and an abiding passion for music. He would often be seen around school with albums under his arms. One boy who noted him was a skinny kid in the year below. His name was Bobby Gillespie.
McGee spent hours in his bedroom playing records, dreaming of being in a band, becoming a star.
‘I got into music because I had nothing else,’ he says. ‘It made me feel part of something at last.’
But there was one problem. To be in a band you had to play your instrument well. In fact, very well. In the mid 1970s, musicians were judged on the length of their solos, not the quality of their songs. Musicianship was in, and pop music, along with black music, was for the frivolous and the stupid.
McGee was sharp enough to know his own limitations. He was not a natural musician. He put aside his rock star dreams. But he never left music.
First he adored T. Rex. Then it was Slade. But, like all the young dudes who hit their teenage years in the early 1970s, there was no escaping David Bowie.
McGee remembers first seeing Bowie in glitter-type clothes on Top Of The Pops performing ‘Starman’. He was dumbfounded.
‘I hadn’t seen anything like it before,’ he recalls. ‘I remember it being my holidays and Bowie had a blue guitar. I became a Bowie fanatic.
‘See, by the time I was about fifteen,’ he explains, ‘I realised that I was never ever gonna be very successful with women. You get to that point when you’re about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when you’re kind of invisible, and that’s how I got into music.
‘It’s ironic because once I got into music and started doing music I became visible to women. But up to that point I was this kind of invisible, freckly, red-headed creature. So music was my escape into some kind of other world.’
Sometime in 1976, McGee received a phone call. When he answered, Bobby Gillespie came on the line. McGee had never previously spoken to the young skinny boy whose father would one day run as MP for his local constituency.
‘See,’ Gillespie explains, ‘I was more into football than music. But then “The Boys Are Back In Town” by Thin Lizzy came out, and that was the first record which really made me want to go and see a group. Thin Lizzy were playing in Glasgow and I didnae want to go on my own. I remembered Alan from school because he wasnae punching people out but walking round with records. I looked him up in the directory and then I phoned him, said, “Do you want to come along?”’
Aye, McGee said, aye I do. It was the start of a close friends
hip that has lasted to this day.
The next year punk happened and the boys grew even closer together. In April 1977 McGee heard’ Anarchy In The UK’ by The Sex Pistols; it took the ground from under him.
As the encouraging message that anyone could and should be in a band started to infiltrate young minds, McGee reactivated his rock-star aspirations. The Sex Pistols had made that possible and McGee loved them for it. So did Bobby. To them, Johnny Rotten was a true hero. He had encouraged them to do something interesting with their lives. For that alone, their hearts would always be with punk.
Significantly, McGee also dug the group’s manager, Malcolm McLaren. As they both had red hair, soon McGee was aping McLaren’s clothes and spouting his philosophies. Already, McGee was casting himself as the power:..broker behind the scenes.
The boys never got to see the Pistols but in that event-filled year of 1977, they saw The Clash and The Jam. They were concerts neither would forget. But then, there were so many memorable concerts around that time. It was a truly exciting time for both music and Britain’s teenagers. McGee and Gillespie had a lifestyle now, one that gave them musical principles, fashion and the chance of some top nights out. Plus, the barriers that McGee had previously faced about being a musician were now broken down. Anyone, said the punk manifesto, can be in a group; everyone should be in a group.
So McGee and Gillespie joined groups. McGee’s first group was The Drains, where he played bass. The guitarist, who they secured through a radio advert on a sympathetic Radio Clyde show, was Andrew Innes. The group soon folded. McGee and Innes then invited Bobby to form a group with them.
This was at McGee’s suggestion. He was far closer to Bobby than he was to Innes.
‘Bob is much more my soulmate,’ he reveals, ‘whereas Innes was more like the guy I was in bands with. It’s only recently that me and Innes have got on, to be honest.’
Their band was named Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, after the TV series.
‘We never used to do anything,’ McGee reveals. ‘We’d just go round to Innes’ s every Friday night and drink beer, and Bobby would roll around the floor and do Sham 69 songs, because Bobby used to love Jimmy Pursey. He loved the working-class thing. He still loves all that.’
The group never went anywhere. But after its demise, Innes and McGee were asked to join a group called H20.
‘This is before they had a hit or anything and the idea was that we were gonna become like The New York Dolls. Me and Innes were wearing make-up and glam-rock trousers.’
Again, the band didn’t work out. But their soldiered on with their dreams.
Their next outfit was called Newspeak. This was at the end of 1979, and McGee was now seeing the girl he would soon marry.
Her name was Yvonne. McGee was in love and basically content with life. But Innes was constantly bugging him to get out of Glasgow and move down to London. If they were going to be serious about making it as musicians, that was the place where it would happen.
‘If Innes hadn’t made me come to London, I probably wouldn’t have made it,’ McGee points out. ‘I’d probably be fourteen and a half stone with three kids and living in Glasgow right now. So we came to London and formed a group called The Laughing Apple.’
Once there, Innes caught a bad case of hepatitis and McGee joined British Rail as a clerk. Soon after, he realised that he wasn’t cut out to be a major songwriter, or a minor one, come to that. Yet this final realisation in no way diminished his passion for music.
This is why one day McGee is to be found reading a fanzine called Jamming. In it, the editor, Tony Fletcher has written an impassioned article about punk’s failure, the betrayal of certain bands of the punk ethos and the subsequent stagnation of the music scene. The article truly fired McGee’s imagination. ‘It was saying, you’ve got to get off your arse and how nobody had any morals or beliefs anymore. Everything he said was right.’
McGee decided to join Fletcher’s crusade. He found premises at the London’s Musician Collective in Gloucester A venue and started the Communication Club. The first band he promoted was Fletcher’s own band, The Apocalypse. For the first eight weeks, McGee would lose about £70 a night. His weekly wages from BR amount to £72 a week. His wife Yvonne wasn’t too happy.
A year later, his luck changed. Using a sizeable amount of an unexpected tax rebate, he found a room above a pub in London’s West End called the Living Room and booked a band named The Nightingales. The following week it was The TV Personalities.
Much to his amazement, people started to show up in large numbers.
‘By this point, music had turned round and people wanted to go and see bands,’ McGee points out. ‘Suddenly, I was getting like 200 people and I started earning £700 ’cos I was doing the club about three times a week. In the first few weeks I got completely plastered every night because I thought it would all stop. But it didn’t.
‘I realised it was there for keeps. I thought, fucking hell, I can make a living going out and spotting bands for the club. So I chucked my job in at British Rail.’
As the club grew, it was inevitable that McGee’s feverish mind would one day hit upon the following thought; if he could spot bands that people in his club genuinely liked, then the next step, surely, was to record them. Start a label.
That’s what he would do. A label. It would release records that mirrored his two main musical loves: psychedelia and punk. In honour of one of his favourite groups, he would later name it Creation Records.
Alan McGee bends down with a $50 note in his nose and places it above the gleaming white particles of cocaine. He sniffs hard and the powder shoots up his nose and into his eyeballs. He sits down on his bed in this plush Los Angeles hotel room and takes a sip of Jack Daniels and coke. Then he absent-mindedly rubs his stomach.
It fascinates and repulses him how misshapen his stomach has become through boozing. He remembers how skinny he once was. Especially in the late 1980s when the Ecstasy pills were unbelievable and you didn’t need alcohol because, according to rumour, it killed your high. Those days were gone now and McGee had turned to alcohol as one of his main ways of getting high. He now weighed fourteen stone.
Alan feels the coke starting to take effect. An urgent need springs to his brain. Music. He must have music. He looks over at the tapes he has brought with him.
He selects the one that has written on it ‘Rocks, Primal Scream demo’, and he inserts it into the machine. A thumping Sly Stone drumbeat comes stomping out of the speakers, followed by some raucous Stonesy guitar licks.
Then Bobby Gillespie starts singing. ‘Dealers keep dealing / Whores keep a whoring...’
Proper. He loves this song. It’s an anthem for the times. Decadent, rocky. This is the first single of 1994 from Primal Scream. It comes from their third album Give Out But Don’t Give Up, the crucial follow-up to their critically acclaimed Screamadelica album.
That LP made the band. It scaled the charts, found wide critical acclaim and even gained the band an extra £20,000 when it won the 1992 Mercury prize for Best Album Of The Year.
McGee laughs out loud. Now he is remembering how the day after the band’s win, no one could find the cheque.
‘I thought you had it, Bobby.’ ‘Nah, man. I didnae.’ ‘Well, where the fuck is it?’ ‘Dinnae ask me man, I was fucking oout of it.’
The song finishes. McGee rubs his stomach again and forces his mind to focus. He has been willing himself to stay one step ahead in America because to be honest, he is currently walking something of a tightrope. In September of 1992, Sony, the huge multi-national, bought 49% shares in his label. It was an inevitable deal.
Running an independent label in a market which is dominated by the multi-nationals is a huge financial and personal risk. You can sign the best band in the world ever, but if you don’t have good distribution and marketing resources at your disposal, your records don’t get in the shops. You’re stuck with them. Piles of the fuckers.
The personal stra
in is tremendous. One minute you’re dealing with bands screaming for more money, the next minute you’re desperately trying to collect on money owed you. It also doesn’t help when you’re, as Alan McGee is, firmly attracted to musicians who you happily view as ‘dysfunctional’.
‘I thought all musicians were like that. You’re fucked up, you must be really special. Then I found it’s not exactly true,’ McGee ruefully relates.
When McGee started Creation, the first single he released was by The Legend. It was called ‘73 In 83’. Then came Innes’s band, Revolving Paint Dream, followed by groups such as Biff Bang Pow!, Jasmine Minks and The Pastels. McGee found many allies in the music press, but the music was of varying quality. His first major success would come with his discovery of a group dominated by two warring brothers, The Jesus And Mary Chain.
They had played McGee’s club in July 1984. Straight after the gig, McGee went backstage and said to the brothers who had formed the group, ‘I’ll manage you.’
The brothers were Jim and William Reid, and their relationship was, to say the least, tempestuous. ‘They were either gonna kill each other or smash the club up,’ McGee recalls. ‘They were a complete mess but they looked amazing. Plus, they played “Vegetable Man” by Syd Barrett and I love Syd Barrett.’
In November of that year McGee put out ‘Upside Down’ by the band. This single sold 50,000 copies in a month. McGee quit the club to concentrate on his label.
Creation was soon established as a hip, favoured label by the music press. They were independent, signed non-mainstream groups and were seen to keep the punk ethic alive, a notion that remains vitally important to music writers even to this day. Later signing would include My Bloody Valentine, House of Love, Ride and Primal Scream.
Yet it seemed to escape everyone’s attention that many of the groups McGee had spotted, he then signed on to major American labels; it was the only way he could keep his label afloat.
‘How Creation survived the first ten years,’ McGee reveals, ‘is because basically I’m a barrow boy. Up until I did the deal with Sony, I used to take my tapes to America and they would be of groups such as Slowdive, Swervedriver, Teenage Fanclub, and I used to go round the record companies and say, “Give me £250,000 for the Fanclub or give me £120,000 for Slowdive.” And that’s how I used to pay the bills, by being a market-trader.
