Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER,

  BARBARA MCGEE. R.I.P.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1 GLASGOW

  2 LONDON

  3 THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN

  4 SACKED

  5 ELEVATION

  6 HOUSE OF LOVE

  7 MANCHESTER AND ACID HOUSE

  8 LOADED

  9 SHOEGAZING

  10 MILLIONAIRE

  11 GIVE OUT BUT DON’T GIVE UP

  12 OASIS

  13 BREAKDOWN

  14 RECOVERY

  15 BACK IN THE OFFICE

  16 FIGHT TO KEEP CREATION

  17 10 DOWNING STREET

  18 BE HERE NOW

  19 THE END

  20 THE LIBERTINES

  21 LOS ANGELES

  22 DJING

  23 2013

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  When you’re a drug addict there’s no such thing as jet lag. For years I’d fly two or three times a month between London and Los Angeles. The party in London would end when I dragged myself away from Noel or Liam, Bobby or Throb, and poured myself into a taxi to Heathrow. Neck some Valium on the plane, get an hour or two’s sleep, then back into the action. You get off the plane, get drugs, get pissed and the same party continues. And it is the same party. They’ve all blurred into one.

  That night in 1994 I was out with Primal Scream, who were rehearsing in a room in Waterloo. I think Oasis had left town the night before. This was before their first album was out, and they had a ferocious appetite for the rock and roll lifestyle they knew was theirs now for the taking. Every time they arrived in London it was the start of a two-day bender. I had the flu that night – I should have been in bed. But I was taking coke with Throb Young. He racks out lines as long as your arm. Almost as thick, too. Just before my taxi arrived, I made the mistake of doing one.

  I was taking my sister Susan with me on this trip. I was going to show her a good time in Los Angeles, introduce her to my cool friends out there. It was going to be great fun. Creation Records was the most hedonistic good times rock and roll label in the world, and it was modelled in my own image.

  In the taxi to Heathrow I began to feel unusual. I checked my pockets, looking for a Valium or a Temazepam. Shit, I’d run out. I took a deep breath. It didn’t matter. I’d done this trip a hundred times before. Another deep breath. It would be fine.

  It was the last time I would leave Britain for three years. It was the moment that everything changed.

  1: GLASGOW

  My father hasn’t gone out of his way to help me much in life but he did give me one useful piece of advice when I was young: If someone tells you they’re going to hit you, they’re probably not going to. Don’t worry about the ones who threaten you. It’s probably all they’ll do.

  He was right about that. Even in Glasgow, in the violent 1970s, the mouthy dudes weren’t the problem. It wouldn’t be long before I’d become one of them myself. And that advice would stick in my mind years later when I was negotiating with the most powerful people in the music industry, people who were telling me they were going to take away everything I’d built up.

  My father didn’t give warnings. He gave me something else. From the day I left Glasgow I’ve never been scared of anyone, because I know what being scared really feels like.

  I was born on 29 September 1960 in Redlands hospital, in the West End Road area of Glasgow. My father John McGee married my mother Barbara Barr in 1953. He was twenty years old; she was nineteen. They met when my mum was doing the books for the car mechanics where my dad worked as a panel-beater.

  Both my parents were from working-class families. My grandpa on my mother’s side, Jimmy Barr, worked in the shipyards in Govan, on the Clyde. I never met him; he died in 1953 from a heart attack. Members of my family tend to check out when they’re in their fifties. A bit worrying for the fifty-two-year-old writing this book. But that’s Scotland, the diet, the weather, the booze – I’ve put all that behind me. Grandpa Barr was, by all accounts, an abusive alcoholic. My mum says he made her and Gran Barr’s lives a misery. From where I was standing, that was all too easy to believe. I’ve never met a more miserable woman than Gran Barr, and no wonder that after growing up with her my mother wasn’t too happy herself. Gran Barr had been raised in one of the now notorious Quarrier’s homes for orphans, founded in the nineteenth century by a Glaswegian shoemaker, William Quarrier. They were a byword for abuse. Her mother had died young of illness and then her father had been killed in the First World War. Gran Barr and her brother were sent to the Quarrier’s home then. I didn’t know much about this when I was a child and only found out about this later, when my father saw me putting money into an envelope to give to Quarrier’s. ‘Never let your gran see that,’ he told me. I never found out exactly what had happened to my gran in those homes. There was physical abuse; that I’m sure of. Gran Barr could be a vicious piece of work, but with a beginning like that, she probably didn’t have much choice.

  I never knew my dad’s dad either. He was in the car trade, like my father, and died in his fifties before I was born. We didn’t see much of Gran Gee, as we called her. She was slightly demonized at home, for reasons kept from me, and didn’t have much of a relationship with my dad. She died when I was fourteen. My dad had one brother, who passed away not too long ago. He’d been shot in the head in Cyprus during the Second World War. It didn’t seem to hold him back much.

  My father was a seriously handsome man, with dark Cary Grant hair and piercing blue eyes. As a wee child he was my hero. He was strong from his work as a panel-beater. In fact one of my earliest memories is of him lifting me out of bed and carrying me downstairs when the roof of our house caught fire because of some dodgy wiring in the attic. The firemen arrived and saved the day; the house survived. As I grew up, I saw less and less of him. He was always at work. There was his day job at Wiley’s, then he’d come home, have a quick tea, then be off to do a ‘homer’ – a cash job to sneak past the tax man – or to go to the Masons.

  It was sometimes hard to keep track of what my mum looked like. She changed regularly, her hair a different cut or colour from one month to the next. She kept herself well turned out and was very thin. She was a looker herself, but probably not in the same league as my dad, and it wound her up to see the attention he enjoyed from other women. She smoked constantly, especially when one of her moods came on.

  And they came on a lot more when Gran Barr moved into the house. This was just after we moved from Govan Hill in Paisley to 36 Carmunnock Road in Mount Florida in 1963, just around the corner from Hampden Park, the national football ground. Gran Barr had been burgled and was too scared now to stay in her house. With no brothers or sisters, my mum was the only one who could help, and so Gran came to live with us. The mood at home went rapidly downhill. I can imagine what a prison sentence it was to my parents, and how much they must have resented the sacrifice they had to make. That was when I was three years old, so Gran pretty much set the domestic tone for my whole childhood. I would live in this house till I was sixteen, when my dad made it impossible to stay there any longer. (We’ll come to that later.)

  My mum worked hard to make money as well as my dad. She worked wherever she could, in a sports shop as well as doing the books in the mechanics; she was a jack of all trades. She was the clever one in the relationship, but it wasn’t in the days when it was possible for women to break through to a position of power. Not working-class women from Glasgow, anyway. I wish she’d been born twenty years later when she would have stood a chance to use her intelligence. She’d have found life much less frustrating. She argued all the time with my dad – she knew exactly how to wind him up.

  Nevertheless, until I wen
t to secondary school, I had quite a happy childhood.

  I went to Mount Florida primary school 200 yards up the road. School was fun. My sister Laura had been born in 1963; too early for me to remember. To begin with she looked up to me, though our relationship soon became more competitive. I must still have been cute enough then not to annoy my parents, small enough for it to seem unreasonable for them to give me a belt. I loved football and we lived five minutes’ walk away from Hampden Park. Dad would take me there as a treat to watch Queen’s Park or an international against England. Those England games were the most exciting things on earth. They were just mental: 150,000 people standing, singing and swaying twenty yards to one side, twenty yards to the other – the Hampden sway. It was seriously dangerous, exhilarating. My dad would have to hold on to me to stop me from getting trampled to death. He hated it. Later, I supported Rangers, which was further away – thirty minutes to the west, just south of the shipyards where my grandfather had worked. I went on my own from the age of eleven, and saw them every second Saturday.

  You can’t get away from sectarianism in Glasgow. I knew as a Rangers fan I was supposed to hate Celtic fans, just because they were Catholic. But I had a lot of friends who were Catholic – it never mattered for a second to me. I don’t even believe in Christianity, let alone the Catholic or Protestant creed.

  But having said all that, there was something about the tribalism of the rivalry that made for an unbeatable atmosphere. They were great matches. The roar in the stadium was ferocious. The Rangers fans would be busy beating each other up, never mind the Celtic fans. But I was used to it; it never felt scary to me.

  It was Gran Barr who gave me my first taste of violence in the house. She’d whack with a slipper to start with, moving up to her heels. They were big heavy things, and it gave my mum the idea too, so she started joining in.

  The violence increased steadily from the time I was about nine. This was when my younger sister Susan was born. There just wasn’t enough love in the house for it to be shared between three kids, and Laura and I were no longer a priority. Tempers frayed. There were a lot of us in the house now and we were on top of each other a lot of the time. My mum was a loving woman, but a frustrated woman. A busy woman too: she worked hard and as the woman in the house probably thought she needed to prioritize looking after the girls.

  Gran Barr could take her shoe off in a split second and then I’d be on the floor, holding the lump that was growing on my head. She was a big woman. She had a strong swing for an old lady. You never knew what to expect from her. She was on all kinds of prescriptions and swallowed pills by the handful. Thyroid pills for certain but all kinds of others too – I didn’t know what they did. My dad used to say if you shook her, she’d rattle. He did his best to keep away from her, and I suspect she was the reason he did so many ‘homers’ and became such an active Mason.

  I assumed this was what life was like for everyone and I suspect for many people it was. Glasgow was a dismal place, an angry place. No one had any money where I was from and when people drank they took their frustrations out on whatever was nearest to them. And the older I got the more often that was me.

  There was no choice about where you went after primary school, like there seems to be these days. King’s Park Secondary it was, and that’s where I met the boys who became the first incarnation of Primal Scream: Bobby Gillespie, Robert Young and Jim Beattie. I was a year above Gillespie who lived just round the corner from me. We’re only nine months apart but he has definitely done a deal with the devil at some point; he looks twenty years younger than me, despite having caned it for years after I’d calmed down. Well, we’ve all done our deals with the devil, some more successfully than others. In the end, I didn’t do too badly myself.

  Bobby Gillespie is my oldest and best friend. We’ve known each other now for forty-one years. It’s been an intense relationship. For some of those years we haven’t been able to talk to each other at all, though in the end we always come back to each other. Certainly then, I couldn’t have guessed he’d become the hippest rock star of his generation. He was just a normal lad, one of the pack, liked to blend in. Ran around the yard chasing a football, just like all of us.

  There was something in the air in Mount Florida. As soon as we went up to secondary school the violence showed itself. I saw things no child should have seen. One day an older kid brought a hatchet in and buried it in someone’s back in the playground. We presumed this was normal. The area wasn’t terrible, not for Glasgow. But there were still knife fights in the playground and the occasional hatchet job.

  I wasn’t violent in those days at all. Robert Young from Primal Scream, a few years younger, he liked a fight. He was small but really bolshie. We called him Throb later on. He was the heart-throb of the band. Even then, he may have got his confidence from his physical attributes. As Alex Ferguson said of Dion Dublin, you should see him in the showers, it’s magnificent. Bobby was no fighter either, though he hung with guys who were. I’d only ever fight if I was forced into a corner. I wasn’t soft – you had to be able to take a punch in my house, and I’d happily batter someone if they were going to insist. But fighting was not my bag: I was into Bowie.

  I was becoming quite a music obsessive. I saw music as my salvation, it was that important to me. And straight away music and money were connected for me. I needed money to buy records, to take myself off to concerts, to keep some independence from my family. I started earning my own when I was eleven years old, shortly after starting secondary school. My pals were getting 50p pocket money a week so I asked my parents if I could have some too. I should have known the answer: there was no way they’d give me that. Well, they didn’t have it to give me, they really didn’t, they needed it all to feed us and pay the bills. I’ll give credit to my dad in that respect: he didn’t earn much and he had to work hard to get it but he brought home the money to raise three children. There was nothing left afterwards.

  He was never going to give me pocket money, that was for certain. So I got a job with the South Side News, selling newspapers for 10p a copy on the streets. I got to keep 4p for every one I sold. That was okay, for a week, then I realized if I turned up at five in the morning rather than six, the papers had been delivered and there was no one else around. So, with an hour’s less sleep, I could just help myself to them for free. I’d take 200 copies, sell the lot and make £20 in a week. Twenty quid was a fortune in those days, and not just for a wee lad.

  This is when it all started. The love of having money in my pocket. The thrill of making it. There was no time to sleep if you wanted to get rich.

  The music that my parents played in the house was nearly all terrible. It has always amazed me that so many people of their generation went through the 1960s, young enough to get what was happening around them, but they chose to stay at home and listen to Tony Christie. That’s one of my few memories of my mum and dad being happy together, having a drink on a Saturday night, playing ‘Knock Three Times’ and banging the floor instead of the ceiling when Tony asked if they wanted him. The answer is no, I don’t. I couldn’t understand how they could like this stuff when they were living in the middle of a musical revolution. Of course, if they’d been hip, it may have thrown me a different way, so I shouldn’t complain. They tolerated the Beatles, because the London Symphony Orchestra had done a version of their songs. And actually, they loved Simon and Garfunkel, were always playing ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and that wasn’t so bad. But other than that, I got into music by myself. I spent my money in the record shop at Battlefield. It was one of those shops that sold everything, TVs, stereos, but they had all the new records too. I’d be in there every week. Singles were only 50p, albums a few quid, but I only ever bought singles to start with. I’d go the library too and take out records then tape them at home. I got into the Beatles this way, taped both the red and blue singles compilations.

  Glam rock was the first music that really got me going. This was 1971. I loved ‘
Get It On’ by T. Rex. Then Slade, ‘Coz I Luv You’. I bought both singles and played them all the time. My dad was very protective of his stereo so I bought myself a little Dansette mono record player with built-in speakers and this lasted me till I was sixteen. I’d never bought an album before I heard David Bowie. I thought albums were for grownups. After finding out about Bowie though, I went out and bought Ziggy Stardust. I still think it’s one of the best ten albums ever made. I must have listened to it about two thousand times and I think this is when my dad decided there was something wrong with me. My room was covered in posters of him and he was all I talked about. He thought I was in love with Bowie. He was right. I was in love with him. I was obsessed.

  I started going to rock concerts when I was about fourteen. I’d go to anything that was on at the Apollo. So I saw gigs by Queen, Santana, The Who, Alex Harvey, Lynyrd Skynyrd. I’d get crazily excited when the roadies just brought the amps on stage, there cheering them on at the front. So I’d been to loads of gigs on my own before I took Gillespie to his first ever gig. It was music that would make me and Bobby so close. I was fifteen, he was fourteen. He knocked on the door. ‘Would you take me to Thin Lizzy?’

  Would you take me to Thin Lizzy? I didn’t really get it. I was thinking, Why don’t you just go on your fucking own? I’d been going to gigs on my own for ages. It was one of the advantages of having parents who didn’t care about me. They didn’t give a fuck if I was in at midnight or seven o’clock. No one would tell me off on that level. They cared about what the girls were up to – they didn’t want them getting reputations that would reflect badly on them – but they couldn’t give two shits what I was doing. As long as the police weren’t coming to the door – and they never did. I’d go and see the glam bands, on my own or with my mate Colin. I wasn’t scared, but looking back, they were more dangerous than today’s gigs. There was a header called General Jed who would just walk up to people and smack them in the face. You assumed it was normal and moved out of the way if you saw him coming.