Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  (I don’t know how I managed to avoid getting tinnitus after all those years at gigs. Noel Gallagher’s got it now, I heard. He once told me his guitar at Reading was as loud as a plane engine. No wonder the lunatic has tinnitus if he stood next to a plane engine every night!)

  Being assaulted in the way they were didn’t stop the fans from coming to see My Bloody Valentine. The tour was a great success. We were very pleased with Isn’t Anything. Solid sales and unanimous respect. We couldn’t wait for the follow-up.

  While this was going on I had turned into an acid house fanatic. I really wanted to have a dance song. It would take me till February 1990 for that, so there was a bit of an incubation period. Grant Fleming played an important role in that. He had been the merch guy for the last House of Love tour. The band were such hard work at the time, most of them on drugs and going nuts, so I always travelled with Grant and the merch. Grant was great, a big West Ham fan who had a real joy for life. At the age of sixteen he’d been the tour manager of Jimmy Pursey and Sham 69. We’d drive around the country together listening to acid house records and after the gig we’d get on an E and track down the best club we could find. Whatever was going on me and Grant would be there. I think we took an E on every night of that tour.

  At the end of the tour I asked him if he wanted to start an acid house label, and he started laughing and asked what we’d call it.

  Creation, of course, I said.

  People really don’t remember us as an acid house label but we were serious about it. There’s a great compilation from us around that time, with Primal Scream and Fluke and Hypnotone and Love Corporation. It’s a fucking great acid house record and it was Grant who was the cheerleader for all of that. He was the one going round the shops on Saturday afternoon with the white labels.

  Before Creation could fully embrace acid house I had to convert Bobby Gillespie to ecstasy and the clubs. I’d been telling him how great ecstasy was, how great Manchester was, and he came up with his girlfriend. I bought three Es off Shaun that night. They were twenty quid a go then. I bought two for me and one for Bobby. He was new to it: that would be more than enough for him, so I thought. I forgot, though, how dysfunctional Bobby’s system is. The first one didn’t touch the sides. He never came up at all. I was high as a kite. He had to have two to come up – I had to give him my other one, much to my disappointment! Bobby was a bit cautious about the scene to start with. He’d come to the clubs – there was a Brighton scene beginning; we started going to a club called Escape. While we were dancing around Bobby would sit on a wall with his legs dangling like a Ramone, off his face on E. That’s Bob – he waits a while to make up his mind, dips his toes in the water before he plunges in completely. It was the same with punk – he got into it a few months after me, though that was independently of me, and the thing that really cemented our friendship. And it was the same with drugs in some ways too. As I was getting out of addiction in the mid-1990s, floating to the surface, Bobby was jumping in with both feet and waving at me on his way down as we passed each other.

  In London we were going to Shoom and Spectrum regularly now. All the bands were there. House of Love – Guy taking his clothes off, always taking his clothes off. Kevin Shields, not saying anything to anyone. Bobby, vaguely talking to people, a rock and roller in winklepickers and tight trousers and despite that managing to look more entitled to be there than everyone else in the room. The Stone Roses – they were recording in London at the time.

  Andrew Innes understood acid house straight away. The Es were just opening everyone up, to other people, to new ideas, to collaborations. Robert Young, the degenerate rocker, hated it. Really hated it. I understand why – they were about to record a classic two Les Paul rock and roll album. He was the happiest he’d been with his role in the band since it had started. He wanted Primal Scream to be the New York Dolls and didn’t need acid house interfering with that.

  Creation was expanding. House of Love was still selling. Isn’t Anything by My Bloody Valentine was selling. Dick and I hired James Kyllo at the start of 1989 as a business manager. He’d just quit Cherry Red, and he was working in a Record and Tape exchange. We needed someone who had experience of doing royalties, of using computers, of the systems you needed to run a record label that was getting bigger. We still didn’t have contracts in those days – just a handshake and an agreement for a fifty-fifty profit share with the band. It was time to think about protecting our interests – though it was years before we signed anyone up to a proper contract.

  The shoebox in Clerkenwell was far too small. To make things worse, it was full of band members lying on the floor. They’d wander in to hang out, drugged out of their heads. It was a tiny fucking office, two broom cupboards now, four of us sharing two desks and Primal Scream and the Weather Prophets lying on the floor in leather trousers while Jeff Barrett tried to write his press releases. They’d come in there and take acid. We didn’t need that. I asked James Kyllo to find us new premises, somewhere far enough away for the bands not to move in, and he found us a place in Westgate Street, Hackney. We were moving out from central London to a place where, at that time, no one in the music industry went anywhere near. It was rough. It had no tube. I knew if we moved there, the bands would be too lazy or scared to come by. Bobby Gillespie has it that the reason I moved there was so it would be harder for people to come in and get the royalties they were owed. It was 1989, Bobby: there weren’t any fucking royalties! It was only the Valentines who were selling any records in those days, and House of Love. We waited for six years for Primal Scream to have a hit single. Anyway, we moved to this big office in Hackney, with tons of space, under the railway arches next to London Fields. Hackney’s trendy nowadays but it wasn’t then. No fucker would go there. You’d get mugged! It was perfect for us.

  I was still living in Brighton. Graham Gillespie had moved out after managing to miss paying rent to me for fourteen of the twenty-six weeks he lived there. So I replaced him with Lawrence from Felt, who wanted to get out of Birmingham. That’s when I found out the truth about his tidiness. It’s bullshit that he’s tidy. I’m tidier than Lawrence! He was a messy fucker. He was just playing up to journalists. When Lawrence moved in I knew for a fact that he would never pay me any rent, so I just said, ‘Lawrence, it is your job to answer the phone and take messages for me.’ Which he managed to do. We were actually good flatmates. He was part of the Primal Scream gang. They took to him immediately. All my experiences of Lawrence face to face were really positive.

  I needed Lawrence as an answering service as I was beginning to spend a lot of time out of Brighton back then. Debbie Turner in Manchester was my new best mate and I began to spend weekend after weekend up there. Mainly, if I’m honest, for the drugs. On the weekend we met Debbie had taken me round various houses and I’d never seen so much ecstasy. I was thinking, This is amazing, this man’s got a thousand Es in his fridge. The next thought was, Why don’t I get a flat here? I told Tony Wilson I was coming up and he arranged for me to rent Alan Erasmus’s place, one of the Factory directors. Debbie moved in and we split the rent. We were never boyfriend and girlfriend. I’d jump on a train north every week at some point. There was only one place then you wanted to party and that was Manchester. Once I was there, I’d think, Fuck the record company, and I’d stay a few days. I had that place for about six months and had such great times there. The Mancs were really friendly, to me anyway, though they didn’t like cockneys much. I met Mani Mounfield and the Roses, and they admired me for being a headcase, for moving up at the drop of a hat to go to raves. I think it got Creation a lot of respect actually, me being in the middle of the action. London wasn’t music’s creative centre then, if it ever has been, and I was on hand to see it for myself. Tony Wilson asked me to come on the regional news show he presented, Granada Tonight. I think he thought I was going to be a passive interviewee – because he was my hero – and, of course, I wasn’t.

  ‘Why’ve you moved to Manchester, Ala
n?’

  ‘A better class of drugs, Tony.’

  Noel Gallagher saw that interview. I think the whole of Manchester saw that interview. I went on and I was a rotten cunt. I think Tony quite enjoyed it.

  I suppose I’d lost interest in rock music temporarily. Not a good thing for the manager of ‘the next U2’. But far more of a problem for House of Love was the fact that Terry Bickers was getting even worse. I had no experience of what to do. None of us did. We thought he was just throwing tantrums for a while but it became clear there was something really wrong. It seemed he was clinically depressed. What did that mean though? The thing I came to realize much later is that I was clinically depressed too. And I was self-medicating like crazy. I wrote myself a prescription of ecstasy, speed, acid, coke or Jack Daniel’s almost every day. I was the worst person to help him.

  Before long the new Hackney office was the scene of some of the heaviest parties in London. So much for getting rid of the bands. We threw an opening party and everyone came. We introduced the NME to ecstasy that night by giving it to two of their journalists, Danny Kelly and Helen Mead. There was Primal Scream, the House of Love, My Bloody Valentine, the Weather Prophets.

  One thing I wish is that I’d never introduced Guy Chadwick to ecstasy. Though he would have got hold of it without me anyway. It was not his scene at all. He couldn’t take it without getting naked. It was so embarrassing. Every time. That’s what the drug was for him – an excuse to take his clothes off. Made no impact whatsoever on his music. You’d see him neck a pill and think, Christ, we’re in for it now.

  ‘Never’, the first single on Fontana, came out in May and charted at 41. I thought it was a terrible choice of single but Bates overruled me. It hadn’t worked with Tim Palmer and they ended up using lots of other producers, including Stephen Hague who’d just done ‘True Faith’ by New Order. But none of it was working and the recording was growing out of control. It was all the band’s fault. They seemed completely deranged most of the time. Drugs didn’t suit any of them, and definitely not Bickers and Chadwick. You didn’t have Bono getting off stage and taking nine Es in a night. No wonder they were going crazy in the studio. No one could control them, not Dave Bates, not me. I’d begun to give up trying to.

  The parties in the office were happening all the time. It was one big party really, which lasted from 1989 to 1995. It was still going on for a year or so after I’d finished. (It was one of the reasons we had to move offices!) I’d buy a lot of Es then and give them out, so I’m known as this big ecstasy evangelist. But I was no more of an evangelist than Bobby Gillespie or Jeff Barrett. We were all on that trip. Everyone was. We’d never been part of anything like it. You couldn’t keep it to yourself.

  For the first six months in 1989 when I wasn’t in Manchester I pretty much lived in the office. I decided there was no point going back to Brighton. I’d just go to the clubs then come back to the office and crash. You can imagine I was pretty smelly in those days. I’ve always been grateful to Guy Chadwick for pointing that out. He phoned me up after we’d got a taxi home together once.

  ‘Alan,’ he said. ‘I need to tell you something.’ Here we go again, what have I done wrong now . . . ‘You smell.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Alan, when you got out of the taxi, a really bad smell left.’

  So I immediately borrowed someone’s bath and tried to remember to do that more frequently. If I wasn’t careful I’d find myself spending weeks taking drugs, not washing and sleeping on the office floor.

  I wasn’t the only one in the office who’d had his head turned by Manchester. We’d agreed that Jeff Barrett could start working as a publicist for Factory as well and he was promoting Happy Mondays and New Order. We were up there all the time – I’d go to every single New Order gig. Bernie Sumner, by the way, rivals Jeff Barrett for the strangest dance ever. I became good friends with him and I used to end up at parties with him at six in the morning. He’d stand on one leg and sort of bend over sideways and bounce about, like a flamingo coming up on mushrooms. It was worth the price of admission and an E just to watch Bernard dance.

  House of Love were becoming a disaster. The money eventually spent recording that first Fontana album was mental – four to five hundred thousand.

  The minute Chadwick got the wedge from the deal, he moved straight into a posh house in Camberwell and had everything going on, bar the butler. And he was trying to get the butler!

  It wasn’t just hiring the studios that was expensive, or the fact that nothing got done there. It was like a competition to see who could spend the most money. They blew £10,000 on taxis in a matter of months – god knows how. We thought a session with Daniel Miller might be more suitable for them but Terry Bickers lost it there, smashed his amp, threw his guitar at the wall. Another wasted session; they’d started recording at the start of 1989 and it was already July now. It was going to take years for the album to make a profit, if it was ever finished.

  And there were big new bands on the scene. The biggest – surprise, surprise – from Manchester. In May the Stone Roses album was in the shops and soon they were playing to thousands of people. They had the euphoria and the rhythm of house, mixed with classic melodies and harmonies. House of Love were in danger of becoming yesterday’s news.

  It was the same with Primal Scream, whose second album Primal Scream came out in July. It was not of its moment at all. It was MC5 and the Stooges. I never understood why they made that record. There were some good songs on it but it was really not the right time for an album like that to catch the imagination. But I could never tell them what to do. There’s no point telling Bobby Gillespie or Noel Gallagher or Kevin Shields or Kevin Rowlands what direction they should be travelling in. They know what they want. If they’re feeling polite they’ll listen to you and ignore you. If they’re being impolite (more frequent) they’ll tell you to fuck off, at length.

  My favourite song on Primal Scream was ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’, a ballad, a break-up song. It proved they could write timeless classic songs. I still believed in them. I knew they were so talented, that they had more than talent, they had the spirit, the genius. And now we were all getting into ecstasy I wondered how we could channel that genius into something completely of the moment.

  It was Andrew Weatherall who made the difference. Barrett was introduced to him first, I think. Weatherall was a DJ upstairs at Shoom, and didn’t just play house records but mixed them in with New Order, old funk and soul. Bobby and I first met him at a rave in Brighton. He had hair like Marc Bolan. We danced all night – Bobby still dressed in his classic sixties gear, but that’s what the scene was like – everyone was allowed in. Everyone was welcome.

  Weatherall ran a magazine called Boy’s Own and Jeff Barrett sent him the Primal Scream album to review. He loved it, loved the ballads. Thank god someone did. There weren’t many around who did. What I found interesting was that it was someone coming out of that club culture who loved the band. Maybe there wasn’t such a big divide between Primal Scream and acid house after all.

  Terry Bickers got a girlfriend, which calmed him down for a while. We eventually got a couple more tracks for the album recorded with Stephen Hague’s engineer, Dave Meegan. The rest of the album was to be recorded at Abbey Road. Apparently it got really stupid then, drinking all day, playing up – I was sick of it all by then and stayed away more. The wastage was stupid – I mean, I like money, I like spending it myself, but not on nothing. They recorded enough tracks but to what extent they really tried to make a great album, I don’t know. Bates rejected the lot. He hated them. It was such a disaster. The only sessions that had worked were with Meegan. We went back to him for one last try. Finally, seven weeks later, the album was done after being completely re-recorded.

  We’d been really worried about their appearance at Reading that August. Guy had suggested to me that we fire Bickers on a couple of occasions, but I knew he was the world-beater on the
team and I persuaded him against it. In the end, they were really good. Bickers was in a good phase – the crowd loved it, their biggest gig by miles. Bickers celebrated by taking too many drugs, becoming feral and disappearing into the night.

  I was backstage, off my face too. Apparently the office cleaner introduced me to her boyfriend Noel Gallagher that day. I certainly don’t remember it.

  I had one of the last fights of my life that summer, with James Brown (the features editor of NME, later editor of Loaded, not the godfather of soul). It was a House of Love gig and he said something snide to me, so I told him I’d slept with his girlfriend (I had and, well, what I said was nastier than that). He just lost it. I wasn’t scared of him so I just chucked my beer over him and walked off. He came up from behind and got a really good punch in, staggered me. More punches were flying in and so I realized I had to fight back. But I wasn’t winning. Luckily we got pulled apart.

  After that I tried to slow down a little. Belinda moved to Birmingham and I gave up the flat in Manchester to move there. Except, I’d only go there for a weekend to chill out. I’d get to hers on a Friday night and I’d be flying after a week in London. She would sober me up and keep me around till Tuesday before I’d run off to get fucked again.

  The rest of the time was spent running riot in London and sleeping in the office. If I slept.

  Dave Bates needed to restart the momentum of House of Love, and suggested a long tour. I agreed, and to this day I wonder whether things would have been better if I’d resisted. It was on tour that Guy and Terry’s sanity was most tested. We had seventy days booked in Britain and Ireland stretching from October to March in 1990. The idea was to have three singles come out during this megatour, and the tour would promote them into the Top 20.

  The album was finished and it had cost well over half a million quid. But it was an okay album, a commercial sounding album that hadn’t gone too far and ruined the band’s individuality. Dave Bates was happy.