Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  We went into the studio again to record a single, ‘Imperial’, this time with Clive Langer. First thing he did was hire a session drummer, the guy from Prefab Sprout, and things went a bit more smoothly, though by the end of the session Langer was drinking a lot of vodka.

  Meanwhile, the money situation at Creation was typically desperate and Yvonne wasn’t helping. She was wandering into the office at 4 p.m. going, ‘I’ve just been down to Boots and spent forty quid on the credit card.’ Things were getting worse and worse between us. I’d be trying to make her see how desperate things were and she’d just think I was trying to boss her around. We weren’t happy together in the office or at home. It had become a toxic relationship and I think we both knew in 1987 that we should have gone through with the split in 1985, when Yvonne had gone back to Glasgow for a while. We’d been together now for eight years, and we’d completely changed. We made the mistake of trying to carry on when deep down we knew we couldn’t. We were both too scared to split up. I was twenty-seven, she was twenty-five. I was pretty unworldly; she was the only girlfriend I’d ever had. And I understand why she didn’t want to give up on a marriage at the age of twenty-five. There was no winner in this situation. I’m sorry for any hurt I caused her because I really did love her. But we’d grown too far away from each other.

  It was during my time at Elevation that I met Bill Drummond, later of the KLF. With Dave Balfe (who later set up Food and released Blur’s records) he’d managed the Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen. Now Rob Dickins had offered him an A&R job in Warners.

  Neither of us belonged there, really. He loved the Mary Chain but was working with Stock, Aitken and Waterman on trying to make massive-selling chart pop. And his bands just didn’t work out. When he quit, still in his early thirties, he decided to record his own solo album and asked me if I’d put it out on Creation. He was disgusted with the industry. He wanted to say goodbye to it with an album that he’d write in five days and record in five days and thought I was the only one who’d be mad enough to put it out. Even so, I think he was surprised when I agreed without having listened to a note. I just thought the guy was probably a genius and he was offering to cover the cost of recording himself. There was nothing to lose, I thought. He delivered me a country folk album with him singing on it in a thick Scottish accent. We put it out, it got great reviews, sold fuck all, but I was proud of that album.

  With money going from bad to worse, I needed to try something new at Creation and I came up with the idea of Baby Amphetamine. The charts were full of formulaic girl-group pop – I thought we could play this game and subvert it at the same time. I explained my idea to Nick Currie, otherwise known as Momus, who we’d just signed, and he helped me develop it. Then we decided to go and find our girl group in the Virgin megastore on Oxford Street.

  We picked the three best-looking girls and I bought them all leather jackets. I wrote the lyrics as a rap and we went in and recorded them over a hip hop beat. ‘Chernobyl Baby (Who Needs the Government)’ – a great title but not the best song in the world, I’ll admit.

  Now I had the band and a single I needed to put them on the cover of the NME. Incredibly, Danny Kelly went for it. And then the girls started to slag me off in the interview! Which was fine, that was the plan. It went wrong when they decided they were real artists. They might have been right, they might have been wrong: it wasn’t the point.

  There was never another single. Everyone hated Baby Amphetamine except for Bill Drummond who started dancing around and punching the air when I told him about it. Two months later he told me he’d formed a new band, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, and he was going to get in the Top 10

  sampling Abba records. Abba’s lawyers put a stop to that. But it didn’t keep him down for long . . .

  We released quite a few records by Momus. He talked a good game. One of my biggest regrets from the Creation days was from that period. Primal Scream were on tour with him. It was before the wall had come down in Berlin and there was a corridor you could stop off in between the East and West, where you could buy Polish vodka. The Scream had gone to get themselves some of that good stuff, with Momus in the van. Bobby rang me up.

  ‘Alan, can we leave Momus in No Man’s Land?’ He’d been driving them nuts on the bus. They couldn’t stand him.

  ‘Please don’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘Alan, please, can we just leave him here?’ Bobby asked again. He was surprised: he thought I would have been up for the idea. He really wanted to. I don’t know why I wasn’t more supportive. It could have been amazing, he could have been locked up for a couple of years . . .

  It was so much fun hanging out with Primal Scream in those days (if you weren’t Momus). They just drugged and partied their way around Britain and Europe. All you had to do was get on the bus, and then everything was great. If nothing else, they’d learned the first rule of rock and roll: have fun!

  The Weather Prophets’ debut album Mayflower came out in April 1987: a busy month for Warners. They were putting out new records by Prince, Fleetwood Mac and Simply Red, all at the height of their fame. You can’t blame Mayflower’s failure purely on this, but it definitely didn’t help.

  It only charted at 67. This would have been great on Creation but it wasn’t nearly enough for Rob Dickins to be interested in, and of course, it was no longer eligible for the indie charts and so there’d be no word of mouth that way.

  It smashed me for six. Everyone had been so bullish, and me more than anyone. There was a whole world between what I thought would happen and what actually did. Now I can hear immediately that it was produced terribly, that the sound was too flat. But at that time I didn’t have enough experience to know instantly what was wrong with it. By the time we got to Screamadelica, Loveless, Definitely Maybe, I could spot what was wrong, and what was right, much more easily.

  The band had started to hate the album too – they thought it was too sterile. The major-label method of recording albums in the 1980s was more suitable to high-gloss pop than to real rock and roll – and it was in the latter direction that Pete Astor had been trying to take the band.

  At the same time the Jesus and Mary Chain flew straight into the Top 10 with their next single, ‘April Skies’. No comment necessary. And it was about then that I stopped talking to the music press. People had stopped taking Creation’s music seriously after all my antagonistic statements about the Jesus and Mary Chain, and I wanted attention to be focused on our music now. I’d been overwhelming that with my personality.

  With the Weather Prophets performing so badly, Elevation’s future was in the hands of Primal Scream. We went into the Greenhouse studio with Mayo Thompson and Pat Collier at the controls. I think Bobby was still trying to record one word at a time, but the band hit it off with Mayo Thompson and we finished the recording.

  ‘Gentle Tuesday’ came out as the first single in June. It didn’t even reach the Top 75, and nor did ‘Imperial’ when we put that out in September. Though Warners didn’t give up immediately on Elevation they lost interest in Primal Scream straight away. They offered another £70,000 to record another Weather Prophets album, but they wanted control over the producer and Pete Astor said he wanted to do it himself.

  That was that: they instantly dropped the band.

  The first Primal Scream album Sonic Flower Groove came out in September 1987. Number 61. Warners weren’t interested, did nothing to promote it. Graham Carpenter left the company and was replaced by a guy called Malcolm Dunbar. He told me Primal Scream would never make it. I was fucking furious and if I’d believed him, they might never have made it. Luckily I ignored him. Well, I did more than ignore him – I told him exactly where to go. Now I can see he wasn’t such a bad guy, but at the time I couldn’t see past my rage. He was surprised at how aggressive I was to him. He caught two years of my frustration with major labels straight in the mouth. When I called him a cunt, I was really calling Warners a cunt. I was probably trying to provoke him into hitt
ing me so I could hit him back. I knew I was going to have to go but there was no way I was going to go in a rational way. I wasn’t rational in those days. But there was no glory in it for me, that was for sure.

  Then there was the crunch meeting with Rob Dickins. Who’ve you got for me next year, Alan? At the time, all I had was Momus. When that was all I could offer him, he pulled the plug and that was the end of Elevation.

  I won’t pretend I wasn’t shattered by how badly things had gone. Tony Wilson was a big help then – this was when we really bonded. He took me to one side and gave me a huge fatherly talk for about two hours. Not about my personal life, which was falling to bits; just about the label. He told me to forget about the majors and gave his biggest band New Order as an example. ‘You have to hang on to your bands,’ he was telling me. ‘If you make Creation big enough, then the majors can’t fuck with you.’ I’ll always remember that chat and it’s why Factory were the only label I really felt an affinity with. I’d go in to see Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and he’d accuse me of ripping off bands I’d never heard of. ‘I see what you’ve done with the Loft,’ he’d say, ‘ripping off the Raspberries.’ Pete Astor and I had no idea who the Raspberries were! With Geoff I always got a sense of rivalry, a feeling that he was trying to get one up on me. Tony never seemed to be threatened by Creation – he saw us as on the same side. Geoff talked to me like a schoolteacher whereas when Tony spoke to me it was like listening to a naughty big brother.

  I was glad of Tony’s friendship then because I wasn’t just losing Elevation and the Jesus and Mary Chain, I was losing my wife and my house. Yvonne and I couldn’t share the same space any more. In the end it was she who suggested it first: let’s break up for good. When I said yes, she said, I didn’t mean it. Too late: it was out there and it couldn’t be taken back. It was obviously what needed to happen, we just didn’t want to face it. We broke up that September and I moved out. Within the space of a year it felt like I’d lost everything: my big band, my new label, and now my home and my wife. It was inevitable but it was still shattering.

  I went off the rails that winter. We went on a Biff Bang Pow! tour with Felt in Germany. I drank a bottle of vodka a day. I blacked out. People told me I’d chased a promoter around a venue until he had to lock himself in an office. I put my foot through dressing-room walls.

  And I moved to Brighton. I needed to put some distance between me and Yvonne. The singer in Blow Up – one of our bands – found me a room there with two old gay guys. And there I was, miles away from the office, and not really bothered at all about what was going on there.

  6: HOUSE OF LOVE

  House of Love became Creation’s saviour over 1987 and 1988, though I would never have expected it when I first heard them. Guy Chadwick had been sending us demos for a while and Dick Green had rejected the first one. Jeff Barrett refused to put them on at his club night. In fact, my colleagues never ever liked them, even when they were single-handedly propping up the business. I hadn’t thought much of House of Love either at first, but then I noticed that Yvonne kept playing one of their songs, ‘Shine On’. I began to see they had quite a bit of potential, that their songs were really catchy, so I went to see the band play at the start of 1987. I told it to Chadwick straight afterwards: your songs are too long, too fiddly, you don’t look right, buy some leather jackets, go away and work on everything and then come back and we’ll do a single and that single will be ‘Shine On’.

  Guy Chadwick actually seemed to like being talked to in this way. He was ruthlessly ambitious and I guess he saw the same quality in me. He wasn’t precious about his art – he wanted to be massive, as big as U2, and so despite coming from completely different worlds we became a good partnership.

  They were an unusual band for Creation. Chadwick, the leader, was an aristocrat, the son of a major, high up in the army. He’d been in bands before, and had publishing deals, and I found out later he’d pretended to us all that he was younger than he was. Well, I’d played that trick before with the Mary Chain. His band were much younger than him. He’d picked them up from squats in Camberwell. There was Terry Bickers, a genius guitar player, Chris Groothuizen, a good bass player, good-looking, a bit of a space cadet, and Pete Evans on drums. Bickers and Chadwick were the strangest match. Chadwick – this was what I liked most about him – wanted to be Bono. Bickers, on the other hand, hadn’t just lived in a squat out of necessity – he’d believed in it, you know, as a philosophy, in communal living, opting out of the world of money. He was a hippy, a punk hippy, but still a hippy at heart.

  Chadwick wrote all the music – he’d had songs saved for years for this – and all of Bickers’ guitar lines, but live you could still see what a great player Bickers was. Seeing them on stage was a different proposition to listening to them on record, when Bickers would turn everything to ten and really rock out, guitar hero stuff.

  Their rise was slow. We put out a couple of singles that didn’t work. But meanwhile, they’d become an amazing live act after touring Europe with Echo & the Bunnymen. Jeff Barrett put them on in the end in Camden and the crowd were loving it. You could sense something was brewing, that they had momentum.

  I used money from my own bank account to fund the recording of their first album. I’d given them a budget of £4,000 to start with, but they were sounding like a big-stadium band and they needed more money to get what they were after. So I gambled and threw everything I had left at it.

  Just before Christmas 1987 I was in London at a Primal Scream gig – they were supporting New Order at Wembley – when I got really ill with food poisoning. Yvonne was there and took pity on me and invited me back to the house so I wouldn’t have to travel back to Brighton. We were lonely and had a brief fling on the third night, flirting with the idea of getting back together. It was a tough time. My heart was breaking. I felt like such a failure. It was a very short reunion and ended as soon as it started but it had serious consequences. In January I had a call from Yvonne. ‘Alan, I’ve got something to tell you.’

  See, when a woman says, ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ it’s going to be one of two things: You’re dumped or I’m pregnant.

  She was pregnant and she wanted to have the baby. I understand why now. We decided we’d have one last go at staying together for the baby’s sake. I came back for a week. It lasted until she said this memorable line to me: ‘You can’t afford to divorce me.’ Whenever someone tells me I’ve got no option but to do something is when I’m at my absolute worst. I pretty much always do the opposite. So I walked out the door and never came back.

  That’s Daniel, my son, who I’m talking about. Yvonne remarried in 1991 and her husband adopted him and so we don’t know each other well, and that’s a genuine regret. When he was eight I got back in touch with Yvonne, and contributed financially, but she thought it would unsettle him if I came into his life again at that time. We met when he was sixteen and, though we both tried, we didn’t know each other and it didn’t work out. I wish him the best of luck with his future and I’ll always be sorry I wasn’t able to be around for him when he grew up.

  Just after I’d found out Yvonne was pregnant we went on the final Biff Bang Pow! tour in France, with Momus this time. It was shit. We were playing in shoeboxes to almost nobody. I was arguing again with promoters: just incredibly, furiously angry with the world. We drank and drank and drank and by the time we’d done ten nights we abandoned it. It wasn’t fun any more. In the past touring had been an escape, a chance for me to live like the bands in a way I couldn’t back home with Yvonne. There was nothing stopping me now and what I found I craved was the comfort of my own bed. I couldn’t afford to waste time like this any more – if I wanted success in the music industry I needed to focus on the record company now. And that was the last time I went on tour as a member of a band.

  Back in Brighton I made a discovery that would change Creation for ever: ecstasy. I’d started hearing about this new drug and was curious. I found a guy who cou
ld sell me six and phoned a girl I fancied and asked her to come and take them with me. It was nothing about the clubs then. We just sat on a hill.

  We did one each and I felt this incredible empathy for her. I did another, and for some reason we moved to a burger bar. So I remember sitting with a coffee about six or seven at night and saying, ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you,’ and she was the same, ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you.’

  And then I did one a few weeks later with Ed Ball, and it was the same – I’d fallen in love with Ed Ball – and it was then I realized how powerful the drug was.

  Ed Ball was in many ways the soul of Creation Records, and it was around then he came to work for us. I met him in 1983 when he was in the Television Personalities. I had the first album he’d recorded as The Times, Pop Goes Art!, and I loved it. Ed was one of the most enthusiastic guys I ever met, and he came to be the engine room of belief in the idea of Creation, just as much as me. He really believed in our purpose (and so, unfortunately, he was very upset when it finished). We did so many records with him, in so many different genres. He was so talented: he made some of the most amazing acid house records as Love Corporation, then the next minute he’d be doing a death metal record with the guy from Extreme Noise Terror. But to begin with, his involvement was helping out in the office. He used to come down to Brighton to see me after everyone else had written me off, and try to convince me that there was work we needed to do, that Creation was important and that it could also be fun. I owe him enormously for that because it helped me a lot, and we came roaring back with a fantastic year in 1988 with House of Love and My Bloody Valentine. In that late period of the 1980s, and later too, he was like a blood brother to me.