Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘He’s punched out the head of Rough Trade distribution.’

  ‘Oh.’ I thought for a minute. ‘He probably has to.’ That was unacceptable, even by my venomous standards. I told him then to take a break. I didn’t know the break was going to be seven years. We needed the break by then, though I don’t want to underplay how important he’d been to Creation in those early years. He’d been the one in the studio, getting our records done quickly, capturing the energy of the bands so that the low budgets (£150, a lot of the time) of the sessions didn’t matter. He got great results. But he’d also fall out with band members at the drop of a hat. By the time we temporarily parted ways at the end of 1985, the bands were getting confident enough to want to control their own recording sessions, and so he wasn’t missed as much as he would have been in the beginning.

  I’ll save the story of Joe’s return to Creation for later. Most people wouldn’t have employed Joe then, or later. I think I’m one of only a few people who can deal with his madness. Well, some people think I’m madder than Joe – which is scary. I hope to god they’re wrong.

  4: SACKED

  Psychocandy was out now in America after we toured it in late December. The people there said we shouldn’t tour then because all the students would be on holiday. I knew from the momentum we had that we’d sell out, that this wasn’t just a band for students, and I was right. Americans got the band straight away. Full crowds everywhere. We flew back on Christmas Day.

  The Jesus and Mary Chain had some New Year resolutions for 1986. They wanted to be taken seriously. They were sick of the violence, of the amateurism. The songs were getting better and better. They were learning how to play their instruments properly. They consented to soundchecks. Sets were beginning to clock in at almost forty minutes as their first tour of the year started in January.

  At the start of 1986 Bobby Gillespie decided to leave the band to focus on Primal Scream. I admired him a lot for doing that – it took some courage to leave a band having that kind of success – and for a band who wouldn’t experience success for many more years. He didn’t take any of the advance offered to the band when they signed to Blanco y Negro.

  Creation had started to get it in the neck from the music press. At the end of 1985 we’d lost the Pastels and the Membranes, who had a certain amount of indie credibility. It wasn’t a financial decision. We weren’t capable of that at the time. It came down to a coin toss with the Membranes and Pastels as to who would headline on a night we were all playing. Joe won, but they claimed he’d cheated. There was an argument and the Pastels were dropped, and then the Membranes left out of solidarity. Up the workers again. So we were seen as the bad guys for that. (It was one of Joe’s final acts for Creation in the 1980s.) But we weren’t interested in pleasing the indie purists – the Jesus and Mary Chain had shown me that if Creation combined my favourite punk and psychedelic influences it would be a rock and roll label first and foremost.

  In those days, rock and roll was a dirty word for some journalists. They didn’t like the leather trousers Primal Scream and Pete Astor and me were wearing. How dare they play a guitar solo. That sort of bollocks. You weren’t supposed to reference anything before 1976. There was no point trying to please those cunts. It was more fun to annoy them.

  The whole indie thing wasn’t a philosophical choice. We recorded on a budget because that’s what we had to work with, and we were lucky that it suited a lot of our bands. But if recording on a budget was fine for my band – we weren’t doing it to smash the charts open – I knew that it wasn’t enough for Primal Scream or the Weather Prophets if we had real commercial ambition for them. If they wanted to move beyond the indie charts I knew we needed more money for studio time, for experienced producers.

  Primal Scream’s second single came out in April 1986. ‘Crystal Crescent’, the A-side, was backed with ‘Velocity Girl’ on the B. Bobby had wanted to have another go at recording the A-side but there wasn’t the money available for a second go. The B-side in fact grew much more popular than the A-side when the NME included it as the opening track on their C86 tape. This was a compilation of jangly indie pop, which launched the supposed C86 scene and found the band a lot of fans they’d quickly alienate with their next album. The single climbed up the indie chart and when they came back to London, this time we filled the University of London Union.

  Running the label and managing the Mary Chain was becoming exhausting. We were stepping up the releases. I’d just signed Felt. This was a real coup for Creation at the time. I’d been a fan of the records they’d put out with Cherry Red. I was amazed we could get Lawrence – who would never tell anyone his surname – to come to Creation. Felt were number one in the indie chart with the single ‘Primitive Painters’; he was a pop star to us. We didn’t chase him at all – Lawrence just called up and told me he wanted to sign with us. He was the singer and wrote all the songs for Felt. He wanted to be on a cool label and we had one of the coolest reputations at the time. The first album Lawrence gave me was insane. There was no singing on it at all. Loads of brilliant organ by Martin Duffy, who later joined Primal Scream. It was called, get this, Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death. With Lawrence I thought you had to let him do what he was going to do. He was very creative.

  So we were really excited about Felt and we also had ‘Almost Prayed’ about to come out by the Weather Prophets, a pure pop single we had high hopes for.

  That’s when my legs gave up on me. I just couldn’t walk on them any more. It turned out I was seriously ill, with sarcoidosis. I was very unlucky; about one person in every ten thousand gets it and it was incredibly painful. It took me six months to recover, so from then on I had to take a less hands-on role in the day-to-day management of the Jesus and Mary Chain. I think it was me being away that gave them the courage to do what they next did.

  Just when I was getting better I went to see Felt in a club on Portobello Road. Warners were quite interested in signing him at this stage. Lawrence took an acid tab that Douglas Hart had given him and had a freak-out right on stage, demanding that everyone stop looking at him! Then he legged it off stage. I tried to calm him down, persuade him back on. And he totally blew it, came back out, freaked out, told the crowd to ask for their money back and ran away again. It was quite clear to me then that Lawrence belonged on an indie label.

  In May 1986 the Jesus and Mary Chain headlined Hammersmith Palais. We were bricking it beforehand. It was the first London gig since the Electric Ballroom rampage. It went well. They toned down the feedback, which created less sound problems, though I thought it also made the gig less visceral, less atmospheric, less frightening.

  Warners had a lot invested in getting the next single right. ‘Some Candy Talking’ was an expensive recording, backed with an expensive video. The band’s playing was still a bit limited. Dick Green had had to play Douglas Hart’s bassline on the single. None of that mattered. When it was released in July it entered the charts at number 20 and by August had gone to 13. It was the first chart hit for a band of mine and I remember feeling so proud of it.

  Then Radio 1 banned it from the breakfast show – ‘Candy’ was a reference to drugs apparently. Everything’s a reference to drugs if you want it to be. I got ready to make a fuss about the establishment trying to censor the music the kids wanted to hear.

  But no – I wasn’t allowed to. The band and Geoff Travis were sick of controversy. Just ignore it, I was told. There was to be no more provocation.

  And then in September I was called in for a meeting in the usual venue, a Wendy’s burger bar on Oxford Street. It was William who told me the news. I was fired.

  It was cruel, but I wasn’t really surprised. I knew William and I didn’t understand each other. Geoff Travis had probably shown them when I was ill that they could do without me. I don’t know whether he ever suggested as much to them – he certainly wouldn’t have missed me. We never going to be great mates, me and Geoff: he’s a ric
h kid and I’m the son of a panel-beater. But I absolutely loved Jim Reid though, and thought he loved me, and that made being sacked hurt terribly. They said I was unprofessional. Probably right! But what the fuck did that matter? At this time they were in the Top 10, these depressives from East Kilbride! Who looked like they’d fallen out of an Oxfam shop! So I wasn’t doing that bad a job. They’d been on the dole for five years before I signed them. I’d made them believe they were as big as the Sex Pistols, because I believed that myself. I believed they were the revolution and with me they believed they were the revolution. So they sacked me. And after that, though they may have had their business taken care of more professionally, I think a lot of their self-belief walked out the door alongside me.

  I had a moment, I admit it, when I thought, what’s the point in going on with the label? I was absolutely gutted. I didn’t know how I was going to pay the bills, and I got paranoid wondering who else was going to betray me.

  Primal Scream were important to me then. I tried to imagine them abandoning me and I couldn’t. I knew Bobby would never let me down. So I kept going when I wanted to give up by holding on to my defiance. I decided then and there that I would make Primal Scream into stars.

  At the same time I wanted to know what I would have to do to get to a stage when I would have been able to keep the Mary Chain at Creation and never have had to involve Geoff Travis. How I could do what he had done and get the major labels to work for me?

  5: ELEVATION

  The Jesus and Mary Chain may have sacked me, but my reputation had grown after I had found them and managed them into the big time. I had a profile now and the music press loved me. I thought I could use my success to get me into a partnership with a major label. I picked myself up and decided to try again. After all, I’d only just turned twenty-six.

  The first thing I did was to sign a new band, a band who would completely transform my fortunes again. I’ll come to them in the next chapter. First I started a new record label with backing from a major.

  It was Rob Dickins who had brought Geoff Travis to Warners. I’d always liked him. He’d seen the appeal of the Jesus and Mary Chain straight away and supported Geoff Travis in his bid to sign them. He didn’t mind when I made stuff up to the press about the Reid brothers nicking his wallet and trashing his offices. He’s been unpopular with the Mary Chain, Echo & the Bunnymen, with other bands. But do you know what? He just told the truth. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a guy who just says I like it or I don’t like it. In my book that’s all you can ask for from a record company: the truth.

  Interest in Pete Astor’s new band the Weather Prophets had been building steadily. I was managing them as well as putting out their records. Their first single ‘Almost Prayed’ was brilliant pop, and Dickins came to me and offered a £75,000 advance to sign them to Warner Brothers. I had a better idea – he could fund me to start an offshoot label of Creation that was distributed by Warners. It would be for the bands on Creation with the biggest potential once they were ready to make a jump to the top division. Rob Dickins liked the idea and I managed to negotiate a deal for Primal Scream too, getting him up to £55,000. It meant the bands could get a wage, spend more on recording. But it also meant they’d no longer be eligible for the indie charts and would have to make it on a less forgiving stage. I called the label Elevation, another psychedelic name to go alongside Creation.

  I’d tried to get Felt a deal too but what they offered was minuscule, and I knew Lawrence would be better keeping his independence. This was at the same time Creation released their Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, one of the best records I think we ever did, Creation’s equivalent to the Smiths’ The Queen is Dead or Low-Life by New Order. It was too muted to be commercial, too art to go pop, too pop to go art – but it was a perfect combination of all my influences, all that I loved about music at the time.

  Lawrence was a minor-scale indie celebrity. He thought he wanted to be famous, but at the same time he wanted to stay in the underground. They were incompatible urges he never reconciled, and so he was never sure of himself. Danny Kelly loved him at the NME. He was famous for his clean living, for having this meticulously hoovered house in Birmingham, hovering by the bathroom when journalists came to interview him in case they had the cheek to try to shit in his toilet.

  Warners just didn’t want him enough – he’d have sunk without a trace there. There was an advantage to being on an indie label – he wouldn’t alienate his core fans and he’d continue to qualify for the indie charts and get noticed that way.

  The Weather Prophets went straight into the studio with Lenny Kaye – their first major label recording session. They were used to recording all the instruments at the same time, playing live in the studio essentially. But Kaye stripped it down to one track at a time, standard procedure on the majors. You get a cleaner sound this way, but if you’re not very careful you lose the energy.

  They’d finished the record by the end of the year and Warners were really happy with it. Graham Carpenter, who was the guy at Warners I worked directly with, loved the record. The signs were great. Pete called it Mayflower and they loved the title. There was something in the back of my mind though telling me the record wasn’t quite right. I was too inexperienced then to put my finger on it instantly, and so I joined in with the optimism.

  Recording the first Primal Scream album was a much harder experience. Warners were really keen on Stephen Street, though I should have known from his experience with the Mary Chain that he wasn’t temperamentally suited for working with bands who weren’t technically great musicians. Punk had shown the world you didn’t need to be technically great musicians to have great musical ideas and record great songs – but not everyone had got the message. We booked Rockfield studios in Monmouth and the whole of the Scream decamped to the Welsh countryside, not so far from where I live now. Street was a hotshot producer at the time; he’d just produced The Queen is Dead by the Smiths. But the Smiths were experienced musicians, and Street couldn’t get past the fact that Primal Scream’s drummer Tam McGurk couldn’t keep time. Street also insisted on recording one track at a time, the way you recorded session musicians. He was trying to enforce early starts, early to bed too: it’s hilarious he tried that with the Scream. You should have seen the way they lived in Glasgow. Andrew Innes wasn’t in the band at the start of that recording, though he was by the end. When the sessions began, the line-up was Bobby on vocals, Jim Beattie on twelve-string guitar, Tam the drummer and Throb was then the bassist so we had another rhythm guitarist in Stuart May. He wasn’t very good. No one was very good then. Things got ugly when they came in one morning and Stephen Street played them a guitar part he’d written and recorded for the song they were working on. Jim Beattie took the tape and wiped it, told him to go and record his own LP if that was what he wanted. After that, they were very wary of each other. A horrible atmosphere.

  Graham Carpenter drove us there for the first time three weeks into the recordings. The recordings were shit. Street was hung up on recording one song – ‘I Love You’ – over and over. The band were complaining straight away. I was tempted to sack Street. But I thought I should give them a chance to work it out on their own and Graham drove us back to London.

  Street called me back soon afterwards. The band were losing it. The drummer was holding everything up with his inability to keep time, and the band were beginning to take it out on him. It was obvious to everyone that Street didn’t have enough belief in the band’s musicianship. Bobby was having a particularly bad time with the vocals. I assumed it was because although Bobby was a natural singer he had no confidence then – it took him a decade to really get comfortable with his voice. He wanted to record it one word at a time.

  I drove up with Yvonne. When we got there at first it seemed like Street was exaggerating. The band seemed fine to me. But as the day wore on they grew more and more angry. That night Bobby, Jim and Throb locked themselves in the room next to where Yvonne
and I were trying to sleep and played fucking Burundi drums until seven in the morning, at which point we drove off. That was their way of letting me know they were unhappy.

  I thought it would be a good idea to bring Andrew Innes in. A musician who knew what he was doing, who Bobby knew already and would trust. For a while that seemed to help, not least because he immediately realized why Bobby was having problems. The keys were all based around Jim Beattie’s twelve-string guitar riffs. The band hadn’t noticed any problem live, but when they tried to record they were impossible for Bobby to sing to. Andrew changed the keys; problem solved. Andrew’s a great musician and a kindred spirit. From there on in, he was in the band.

  Then I got another call from Street. Bobby had vandalized the studio. Fucking hell, so off I go again to Monmouth, with Yvonne again and this time with Christine, Andrew’s girlfriend. The girls thought they’d combine the trip with an outing so they headed off on a pony trek.

  The idea that some people were going to have some fun during the recording seemed to provoke the band. It was when we arrived that they really lost it. Bobby, Jim and Throb barricaded themselves in one of the cottages with mattresses and threatened to pour a bucket of boiling water over anyone who tried to get in. It was all getting a bit medieval now. I’d forgotten to bring any siege enginery so I had little choice but to leave them to it. They never left the cottage again, until one morning, five days before Christmas, they watched Stephen Street take the master tapes, load them into his car and drive away. It was the very last they saw of him. It was going to be interesting to see if the band would have the balls to come back from this.

  We needed to do something so we sacked the drummer. There was only one song that was useable from weeks of recording. We’d used three-quarters of the advance on that one song! I now had to tell Rob Dickins that we were scrapping the album and starting again. He was underwhelmed by the recordings he’d heard, but he hadn’t lost faith yet. I don’t remember being particularly stressed about it, except it meant that the Primals were going to be staying on my floor a lot more when they came to London, and that really wasn’t going to help my relationship with Yvonne. For about three years Primal Scream and the Jesus and Mary Chain were regularly sleeping in my living room. I think that would be enough to break any marriage up.