There was also an element of reverse psychology to McGee’s behaviour as his ongoing love of fuck-the-majors rock ’n’ roll meant that any band that signed to Creation did so in the spirit of an ‘us against the world’ evangelism. ‘We never really used it to our own advantage with the bands and the deals we did,’ says Kyllo. ‘Alan was so impatient. He’d say, “Let’s just get them,” and so we ended up being very generous with the bands.’
Whatever his state or the state of Creation’s finances, McGee realised he was at the peak of a moment that was fulfilling his dreams, of running a label that would equal the late Sixties output of Elektra and Atlantic. Within the space of two months Creation had released Loveless, Screamadelica and Bandwagonesque: as high a watermark of albums as any British independent had achieved, and the afterglow was carrying him and Creation through.
‘I knew, as much drugs as I was on at the time, I knew, in October 1991, I was never going to get any better,’ says McGee. ‘I’d just put out Screamadelica, I’d just put out Bandwagonesque and Loveless and I knew that these were three classic records … and I knew that it was never going to get any better than that … If you’re talking about a moment in time … I knew that that was a moment … and it was really unspoiled.’
While the strength of Creation’s releases was irrefutable, the label’s inability to achieve the sales that McGee felt his bands warranted was continuing to be a concern. The international sales of Bandwagonesque would be stand out in stark relief compared to what Geffen had achieved for the record in America. ‘The chart positions on Teenage Fanclub and the Scream, and the structure we had with indie companies, was rubbish,’ says McGee. ‘We needed a major at that point. I was beginning to realise that, at that time in the music business, you needed major distribution. We were releasing these records that kids are now calling classics and they weren’t selling.’
*
To the artists not included directly in McGee’s day-to-day thinking, Creation was becoming a more and more remote place, which operated with something resembling a siege mentality as the creditors would ring constantly and the inner circle of bon viveurs and rock ’n’ roll animals made merry in the bunker.
Nick Currie had released four Momus albums on Creation and had grown used to managing his own affairs, with only a cursory A&R relationship with the label. His sixth LP, Voyager, was also one of his most immediate. ‘Alan summoned me down to the bunker once. He liked Voyager but he liked it way too late – I mean, like literally months after it had come out, he brought me into the office to play me my own record. He called me in and he said, “Nick this is really great.” He sat me down and he just dropped the needle on to the record and played the whole of side one, and I just sat there thinking, what is he doing? I know this record, I made this record like a year ago. But he’d just discovered it. His enthusiasm could be rekindled, possibly depending on his chemical state at the time.’
Amid the chaos and permanent fragility of Creation’s finances, the label had always somehow managed to pay its artists their royalties, something that bred a huge amount of loyalty between the bands and the label. For the bands high in the Creation pecking order it enhanced the feeling of us vs them on which McGee thrived; for artists like Currie, it had allowed him to release records and enjoy an uninterrupted, if rather frugal, career.
Currie had long grown used to dealing directly with Dick Green for discussing the nuts-and-bolts administrative side of his record deal and noticed that the long-suffering junior partner was looking a little more chipper than usual. ‘Dick would have what looked like several copies of the bible on his desk, and it would be the Creation Sony deal, and he would say, “This is going to be good for you, Nick. It’s going to be good for everybody on the label.” I had a sort of sinking feeling at that point that it wasn’t going to be good for me and it certainly would bring all sorts of conditions to bear that wouldn’t help what I do, because I deal with transgression and difficulty and all the rest of it, and at that point things were just horrifically bureaucratic but at the same time completely scatty and Alan was going AWOL.’
As McGee was about to enter negotiations with Sony, the years of hedonism were starting to take their toll. As well as becoming increasingly absent from the office, he had made a few uncharacteristic signings. ‘It was a funny phase going there,’ says Barker. ‘They had this band, Medalark Eleven, from Manchester. I don’t know why he signed them. Baggy was dead. He said it himself, “I’ve signed a fuckin’ baggy group, I don’t fuckin’ know.”’
Six months or so after McGee had been depressed by the sales figures of Screamadelica and Bandwagonesque, Sony bought a 49 per cent stake in Creation for £2.5 million. In exchange Sony acquired half a near-bankrupt record label and the rights to some of its artists internationally. In the mind of the Sony executives, the prize asset they had secured was the A&R skills of Alan McGee.
Nick Currie’s views on the Sony deal would prove prescient, but not in the manner he had originally thought. His ties with the label were severed because of an incident involving his Bangladeshi partner, Shazna, whom he had extricated from a forced marriage. ‘I did this thing which was a little bit too rock ’n’ roll for Creation at the time. When we eloped together, the ex-fiancé of Shazna appeared with her brothers at Creation demanding my address so they could reclaim Shazna, who didn’t want to be reclaimed at all. Alan phoned me up, it was the last time Alan phoned me up, he said, “Listen, we had these extremely scary people coming into the office demanding your address and we didn’t give it to them, but this just can’t happen and we were seriously thinking of getting in the very heavy drug people that Primal Scream deal with to protect the office and the staff. So sorry, but we’re not going to work with you any more.”’
Tim Abbott was one of the members of staff involved in placating what was threatening to be something of an international incident. ‘These dudes came looking for Momus with machetes,’ says Abbott, ‘saying, “He sleeps here.” “No,” I said, “no he doesn’t.”’
Although an unwanted visit from irate sword-bearing strangers was enough to make everyone sit up and take notice, the behaviour at the Creation offices remained far from the industry standard. Despite the cash injection from Sony, the label was still operating in almost permanent chaos. ‘Things were getting crazy by then,’ says Kyllo. ‘Alan was struggling to keep it together, things were degenerating.’
McGee’s next move, whatever his mental and physical state, proved to be his most far-reaching and lucrative, and the one with which he is for ever fixed in the public imagination.
While out one night with his sister in Glasgow, McGee offered a record deal on the spot to the band they by chance had just seen play – Oasis. During the glory years of Britpop – Downing Street, the Met Bar, Knebworth – the Oasis and Creation story was a key media narrative for the buoyancy of the times. Away from the PR, industry insiders quietly whispered that all may not have been as it seemed.
‘There’s so many urban myths about them,’ says Abbott. ‘What is true is that McGee did see them in King Tuts. McGee phoned us up at 5 a.m., to rant about them full-on down the phone.’ Much to the delight of Sony, McGee had come through with the kind of act that would benefit from their system. Oasis and Creation bonded on the band’s first visit to the bunker, while the band’s manager, Marcus Russell, had decided to evaluate the situation at his own pace. In a deal that still has different interpretations from its various signatories, Oasis signed with Creation in the UK and with Sony for the rest of the world.
‘Sony signed the Creation deal for Primal Scream, not Oasis,’ says Abbott. ‘What Sony wanted was Screamadelica 2 – they struck gold.’
‘Sony were all over Oasis,’ says McGee. ‘Apparently, if you’d walked past them in the street, you’d signed Oasis. I must have met twenty-five people who’ve signed that band. This guy worked for me in 1987 for three months, then he fucked off to Sony, and then two or three years ago, at the height of X-Factor,
he’s one of the judges, a huge star in Australia. He’s the guy behind Oasis. I don’t think he’s ever met Liam.’
As the word of mouth began to build around Creation’s latest signing, an air of invincibility in the band was palpable. Unlike Ride, the House of Love or many of the label’s previous non-Glaswegian signings, Oasis were from a similar background to McGee and Abbott. Noel Gallagher in particular had also been through the shared experience of Ecstasy and the club epiphanies through which McGee and Abbott had first become close. Abbott too was convinced Oasis were going to be the band that re-educated the dance music audience about rock ’n’ roll.
‘It was a fluke, it was a complete fluke,’ says McGee. ‘Oasis summed it up to me when we first met. It was, “Let’s fucking have it,” big time, that was the vibe of them and that was the vibe of me and in the middle of it all I went into drug rehabilitation.’
As the momentum around Oasis gathered at a pace no one at Creation, or in the rest of the music industry, had experienced for a generation, McGee’s exhaustion, brought on by years of partying, finally caught up with him. On a trip to LA he was hospitalised and a long painful, process of recovery began.
While McGee withdrew from the office, Creation was left in the hands of Abbott and Green. To their relief they realised that Marcus Russell was a manager with an equilibrium that avoided the growing circus around his charges and he was thinking in the long term.
‘With Oasis the press and radio took it all,’ says Kyllo, ‘and the band’s management were very professional. It made us realise we had to raise our game and be professional ourselves.’ Another factor ensured that the workload around Oasis remained high and of a sufficient quality. ‘There was a guy called Mark Taylor,’ says Kyllo. ‘He’d been working for Sony and he was put in on Sony’s payroll to protect their asset.’
Aware that he had signed the biggest band of his career McGee, despite his mental fragility, was still calling the office. ‘He would phone up when he wanted to try and run the business,’ says Abbott. ‘I just said, quite categorically, “Alan, look, you’re not very well, mate. Don’t worry about it, when you’re ready just come back.”’
Abbott had managed to ostracise himself from some of his colleagues at Westgate Street but he was firmly part of the Oasis and Primal Scream camps. However much he divided the office, he was given credit by Oasis for running the campaign of Definitely Maybe and was sufficiently embedded in the eye of the storm surrounding their ascendency to have written a book about his experiences and appear on the sleeve of the single ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.
To James Kyllo, who was less involved in Oasis and has a naturally stoical countenance, it was harder to quantify what contribution Abbott had made. ‘The only marketing activity I was ever aware of Tim Abbott doing,’ he says, ‘was taking some store buyers to a strip club.’
Whatever the claims and counter-claims to the authorship of Oasis’s success, a phenomenon that was almost uncontrollable, McGee and Abbott’s relationship came to an abrupt and unhappy end. During negotiations over the Sony deal, Abbott was given the impression that he would be accredited shares in Creation. The rapidity of Oasis’s success and McGee’s simultaneous withdrawal meant the matter was left unresolved.
Abbott brought the subject of shares up in a phone call with McGee that highlighted the different pace at which the two of them were now operating. ‘He rang up in the middle of it all and I said, “Dude, I’m trying to fucking MD your company,”’ says Abbott. ‘“We’ve got this band going through the ceiling, everything’s hunky-dory, you get yourself well, and by the way have you transferred those shares we were talking about yet?” … End of … phone down … next day, came into work and Dick went, “You’re in trouble. Alan told me that he can no longer work with you.”’
Abbott was retained by Oasis as a consultant and was responsible for shepherding Noel Gallagher back into the fold having quit the group during the first of one its many fracas in the States. ‘It was fucking fantastic, those two couple of years,’ says Abbott. ‘It was quite difficult as well, delivering all that and then getting ripped off.’
Mark Bowen was an old friend of the Boo Radleys’ Martin Carr, who would shortly be joining the Creation staff. He and Carr, along with, it seemed, the rest of the music industry, had crammed into the Water Rats in King’s Cross to see Oasis’s first official London engagement.
‘I went to the Water Rats with Martin and it was really busy and I thought, can I even be bothered to go into the front room? And I was like, “Oh, come on, let’s just go and sit out the front and drink some more.” Suddenly, by the time I started working there six months later, they’d had the biggest-selling debut and it was starting to go crazy. Alan was there that night, I bought him a Jack and coke when he came back in from the Oasis bus but that was the last time I saw him before he was off for a bit.’
* Tim Abbott remembers being at a techno night at the time, run by his brother Chris in East London, and being asked by a bouncer whether Stein, whom the bouncer had assumed was a member of the drug squad impersonating an American tourist, was to be granted admission.
18 Medicine Bottle
Red House Painters, Down Colorful Hill, CAD 2014 (Vaughan Oliver/4AD)
Alan McGee wasn’t the only label head absent from the office. By 1993 Ivo Watts-Russell was dividing his time between America and Britain, a result of his continuing and increasing frustration with the manner in which 4AD was now expected to be run. Having succeeded on its own terms with the Pixies, the label was under pressure to deliver similar results for the rest of its artists. ‘I am disappointed that I didn’t fight or resist it when the managers would say, “Where’s the hit?”,’ he says. ‘I mean, why the fuck have they signed with us then?’
The international growth of the label required a further enlargement of the workforce and a move towards a structure beyond Watts-Russell’s preferred methods of releasing bands whose music he loved and letting the records do the work. Much to his chagrin, 4AD now had a dedicated meeting room, where Watts-Russell tried to spend as little time as possible. ‘There was more of a feeling of feeding the machine,’ he says, ‘and not feeling happy about the way that machine was being fed and the fact it had become a machine.’
Despite his lingering sense of discontent, Watts-Russell made several attempts to bypass the machine. When in the office, he still made a habit of going through the demo tapes from which he had, over the years, regularly found new signings. Sifting through the cassettes now also provided a distraction from the tension of office politics. A song title that had been handwritten on one of the demos, ‘I Had Sex with God’, caught his eye. The track was credited to His Name Is Alive, an American band based on the four-track tapes of its songwriter Warren Defever. The music was primitively recorded but had a beguiling otherness. ‘I started getting more tapes from him,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘They were the same songs but he was deconstructing them, just leaving a skeleton. I liked it, but said, “Can I mix it?” I went in the studio with John Fryer and we mixed Lavonia, and I feel closer to that than to any other record we did, other than This Mortal Coil, for the obvious reasons.’ Watts-Russell once again found comfort in Blackwing, reworking a set of tapes, absorbed in the creation of another record of reflective and personal music. The resulting album, Lavonia, had an abstraction and fragility that spoke heavily of Watts-Russell’s state of mind; it also drew comparisons to This Mortal Coil. Although the songs featured the choral vocals of Karin Oliver they retained the rough edge of demos and had a harsh, fractured quality. One of the songs was entitled ‘How Ghosts Affect Relationships’– it might have been describing how Watts-Russell felt about 4AD. He had moved into a new home in London. In his increasingly solitary moments, he shared his new surroundings with Lavonia and little else.
‘I’d just moved into this flat in Clapham,’ he says, ‘the first place I ever lived in with tall ceilings. So I was just in there with a sofa that was too big to go anywhere else and sudde
nly I felt insecure about how could I fill this room with just me. I mixed the tapes and listened to them really quietly in this high-ceilinged room, so quietly that my alarm, which was a ticker, was louder than the music.’
For someone who as a child had taken solace in the music coming from his small bedroom transistor late at night, Watts-Russell had come full circle. Quietly absorbed in the Lavonia masters he cut himself further adrift from the comings and goings in Alma Road. As well as struggling to maintain his emphasis on creativity and A&R, he was having difficulties in some of his relationships. He had split with his partner Deborah Edgely and was, for the first time, starting to have increasingly fractious conversations with some of his artists.
‘I probably sequenced about 80 per cent of the records we put out,’ he says. ‘On the last day in the studio, on the last Pixies record, I’d done a running order for it. We were going to go out for supper, and Charles went, “No, I’m going to do a running order; it’s going to be alphabetical.” I ended up falling out badly with Charles and Robin Guthrie, the only two people I’ve ever fallen out with long term.’
Lavonia had shown that Watts-Russell’s affection for music hadn’t diminished but the passion with which he was able to apply himself was wavering. As a way of circumventing the expectations and pressures of launching a new band on 4AD, he started a sub-label, Guernica, with the sole motive of releasing records he liked. In the States he had discovered a new generation of bands, including Unrest and That Dog, who had self-released material which he felt could benefit from wider distribution; Watts-Russell also heard in these bands the sound of younger artists making music on their terms, away from the strictures of the industry; a sound he had almost forgotten. ‘I was driving up to Big Sur,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘listening to Unrest and feeling really connected to something. Guernica was significant in that I just thought, fuck it. I just want to put a record out that I think is good. The budget would be 5k and that’s it; we won’t release singles, and we’ll never release albums by the same artist.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 43
