Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  We just couldn’t understand it when the next single ‘I Don’t Know Why I Love You’ only charted at 41 again. Radio 1 had been caning it. It was a good song, a good single. The next week both the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses were on Top of the Pops. I think I knew then in my heart it wasn’t going to work for them.

  It was time for a change. Jeff Barrett had been a brilliant publicist but he was overstretched between Creation, Factory and the House of Love, and I wanted someone committed to every band on Creation. He was gutted to have Primal Scream taken away from him – he believed in them as much as I did.

  Primal Scream were very unpopular then. The anoraks who’d got into them as part of the C86 bullshit didn’t like them any more. Ooh, they’ve rocked out! Namby pambies, we were glad to lose them. In principle. But we needed to sell more of their records.

  I think it was Andrew Innes’ idea to get Andy Weatherall to do a dance remix of ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’. They’d recorded the song to a click track so it was perfectly in time. Weatherall had never remixed anything in his life but this was completely in the spirit of Creation. He had great taste and a good attitude and he knew what made a dance floor go off. The sample at the start of that record from Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels totally encapsulates the attitude we all had. We wanted to be free. We were going to have a good time, and we were going to get loaded.

  Still, it didn’t go smoothly. There was a lot of back and forth. I thought we needed to have a Bobby vocal on it. Bobby disagreed – he and Innes wanted Weatherall to be more brutal, to do what he wanted. Innes was in the studio with him – it was an artistic collaboration, not just a straight dance remix. It dragged on. In the end, I realized they were right and that we didn’t need Bobby on the track.

  When the year closed, it seemed like it couldn’t get any worse for Primal Scream. Their big gig in London at Subterranea was half empty. Creation’s flagship band was almost irrelevant now.

  Then a week later Andrew Innes went with Weatherall to watch him play ‘Loaded’. They’d just finished it and had never heard it played on a dance floor. At three in the morning Weatherall dropped it in Subterranea – and the place went crazy. Innes rang to tell me. Everyone was going nuts in the background.

  In one way House of Love’s massive tour worked out well. The album came out at the beginning of 1990, landed in the Top 10 and went gold. But in the process we lost the lead guitarist and fucked the band.

  Throughout November 1989 I’d been hearing horror stories from the House of Love tour. Chadwick was lashing out at Bickers, blaming him for what was going wrong, for being out of it earlier in the year. He kept trying to throw him out of the band but I wouldn’t let him.

  At the end of the month I flew out to America with Dave Bates to meet Phonogram’s people who were going to try to break the band over there. This was just the opportunity Chadwick needed.

  While we were out of the country Bickers managed to get hold of a carrier bag of mushrooms at a gig in deepest Wales. They all had terrible bad trips in a haunted house. Bickers smashed his room to bits. No one was talking to him. He wound Pete the drummer up – a sweet guy – until he ended up punching Bickers in the face and running away in a service station and saying he’d left the band.

  Guy didn’t let Pete Evans leave the band. He saw his opportunity and sacked Bickers instead.

  I remember taking the call, about half eight in the morning in the Chateau Marmont hotel in LA and thinking, Great, we’ve thrown out the centre forward. I knew that the dynamite team was Guy and Terry. Bickers was just a killer guitarist. It’s not very cool to say it, but he was the only guy around then who was challenging the Edge as a guitar hero. Guy’s songs were great but it was Terry’s playing that made them shine. You don’t throw a guy like that out of the band, it’s insane.

  I know it wasn’t easy dealing with Bickers – he was having a genuine breakdown – but kicking him out of the band was throwing in the towel. Things hadn’t been going well but given time and luck they could still have become one of the biggest bands in the world. Sacking Bickers removed any chance of that. They had to find a way of rehabilitating him somehow if they wanted to be successful.

  I did my best to persuade them to take him back. I was furious. I was probably too honest. I told them they couldn’t survive without him, which was a blow to their egos.

  They’d mostly recorded the Butterfly album (called House of Love like its predecessor, but known for its butterfly sleeve artwork) with Terry playing on it, but he didn’t tour it. They brought in Simon Walker who was actually a very good guitar player, but he wasn’t right. In a different way, a jazz way, he was arguably a better guitarist than Terry Bickers. But for me that’s what’s wrong with jazz – players who think they’re more intelligent than other players because they understand the chords better. (Some journalists have that problem too with punctuation if you ask me. No, it’s about the message unfortunately.) He was trying to educate the masses when what they wanted was a killer guitar line. When I first saw them play with Simon, I knew they’d blown their chance for good. He just didn’t have the presence of Bickers – you turned up to watch the band and it had become the Guy Chadwick show with a backing band. Getting rid of Bickers got rid of the rub that makes the best bands. Often it’s a brother thing. You look at Kasabian, at Tom and Serge, you look at Oasis, at Liam and Noel. The Libertines, Pete and Carl, and the Reid brothers. Great bands have got that rub. Even if they’re best mates, they’ve got that rub.

  Interestingly, it’s not the same for record labels. Record labels work because they’re one man’s vision. It’s about Ivo at 4AD, or Laurence at Domino, or Jeff at Heavenly.

  I used to talk about running Creation with a fascist state of mind and people thought I was a cunt for saying it. But it’s the only way to do it. You have to believe in your own vision and if people challenge it you have to have the courage to say, Fuck off, this is the way we’re doing it. Otherwise you never take risks and you never move quickly enough.

  But bands aren’t like that. You need Bobby and Andrew. You need a spark against each other. We needed Guy and Terry.

  I lost all belief in House of Love at that moment. It was just as they began to work in the charts too. The album came in at number 8, they sold out the Albert Hall. That was okay. But I had convinced myself that they were going to be superstars, and I couldn’t delude myself about that any more.

  8: LOADED

  You could make an argument that My Bloody Valentine were the most influential of all the Creation bands. I’m sure Oasis and Primal Scream would have something to say, but you could still make the argument. We certainly saw a lot of bands who’d been influenced by Isn’t Anything. The most successful of these we signed was Ride.

  They were just kids. Teenagers at art college in Oxford. I’d first heard them in 1989, in the middle of my acid house obsession. This had manifested itself for a while in me managing the Grid, who had signed a major label deal with Warners with a guy called Cally Calloman. I was round his office and he played me a tape of a band called Ride he was thinking of signing. Very trusting of him. I was nodding non-committally. They’re not that bad, I suppose.

  But really I’d loved what I heard. It was a Creation band through and through, influenced by Valentines and House of Love but younger sounding, more romantic I guess. I left the office and got straight on the phone to them. They didn’t sound like a major label band to me – I thought they wouldn’t get through the bullshit, the marketing people’s distrust. I hoped Cally would have trouble getting Rob Dickins and Malcolm Dunbar onside. He really wanted to sign them but was having to do it almost secretly, funding a recording and an EP through an indie label to keep the music press sweet and because his bosses wouldn’t take the risk of signing them properly.

  They weren’t signed so there was nothing to stop me from talking to them. They came to a meeting with me and didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. The Glasgow accent’s
a problem for middle-class bands from the South. But they were big fans of the label. They didn’t want to be hustled into a deal, they were wary, so we just talked about the music. Other labels were scaring them, but they liked my attitude. My unprofessionalism, I guess! It wasn’t always such a bad thing.

  I followed them around on tour for the next two weeks, all around the country, went to every gig. They were supporting my mates the Soup Dragons. They were great. Mark Gardener was an amazing front man, Andy Bell a great guitarist. I loved the drummer Loz Colbert. I wasn’t so keen on the bass player. He was one of those guys who read the NME back to front every week and thought he knew everything about the cynical practices of the music industry. He was an idealist. They all purported to be idealists, but the other three were really more interested in being rock and roll stars. They were at all the Creation parties, surrounded by women.

  I took them to see the House of Love. We were having a good time. I thought it was Mark’s band then. We used to go out and do Es together. He was the spokesman and seemed to be the leader. We assumed he wrote all the songs and he never corrected us so we took that as the case. And then they signed with us.

  We released their first EP Ride in January 1990 and it took off straight away. (It was actually the recording Cally Calloman had paid for but didn’t own; he never spoke to me again.) We sold out in three days and the music press went wild for them. Seymour Stein, who was a legend, appeared at the end of January to watch them play. The list of his bands was incredible: he’d put out British bands like the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen; and his American acts went from the Ramones to Blondie to Talking Heads and even Madonna on his label Sire. I’d met Seymour back in 1986 in Cannes when I was hanging out with my friend Luc Vergier, who was a music promoter then and later went to work for Sony. When I’d been introduced to Seymour then he was a bit rude to me – ‘Ah, the new Brian Epstein,’ he said, and he must have been taking the piss. I didn’t realize that was his style, that from him it was a compliment. So when he tried to sign My Bloody Valentine I refused for a year as a matter of principle. I told him to fuck off fifty times before he wore me down. Classic Creation: he was trying to give me money and I was more interested in winning an argument he wasn’t even having with me. My Bloody Valentine were the first band he signed from us; the next was Primal Scream. Selling bands to him and other labels in America was the way that we survived financially for a couple of years. But I didn’t have a deal in place for world rights for Ride. Part of the way I’d managed to sign them at all was by not being pushy, so I couldn’t do anything when Seymour Stein and his A&R man Joe McEwen offered the band a direct deal for America on Sire. Joe McEwen had really reinvigorated Sire. They’d had the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen but no big bands for a while and Joe signed Dinosaur Jr, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and (annoyingly) Ride.

  Despite all the excitement around Ride at the beginning of 1990 I still hadn’t given up on my ambition to put out a brilliant dance record on Creation. Ed Ball was busy knocking out dance records, and had a bit of success with Danny Rampling remixing a tune called ‘Palatial’. But it was ‘Loaded’ that was really beginning to cause a stir, and we ended up having to switch it to the A-side and demote the original song ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’ to the B-side. That was the moment everything changed, when the crossfader got flicked and Primal Scream became Screamadelica.

  Everyone from the NME to The Face was mad for the song. The calls started to flood in to Laurence Verfaillie, who’d taken over Jeff Barrett’s job. She was Jim Reid’s girlfriend. She showed up the very first time they ever played Paris. On that night we’d only had ten places on the guest list and she barged her way to the top of the queue to order me to put her on. I thought she was German at first, she was screaming and shouting at me, ‘I must be on zee guest list now! You imbecile man!’ I thought: You’re turning me on, I’m putting you on the list. And she got together with Jim that night. She was so pushy, just what you needed for a publicist, I thought. We always employed people on their personalities rather than their experience.

  Bobby Gillespie started doing his interview routine, slagging off all the shit bands of the moment. Radio 1 playlisted the single. It hit the Top 40, in at 32, then 24, then it became our first Top 20 hit when it reached 16. They were booked for Top of the Pops. I’d had bands I’d managed on Top of the Pops before, the Jesus and Mary Chain and House of Love, but never for a record released by Creation.

  Of all the successes Creation ever had, ‘Loaded’ was the one I enjoyed the most. House of Love had had a Top 20 hit, but that wasn’t Creation. House of Love weren’t Primal Scream, my best friends, and the band everyone had been telling me for years would never amount to anything. We’d worked for so long for this and it had happened. They’d gone from a joke to the hippest band in the land. It seemed like a number one, it was such a big record. One of those records you heard everywhere, that defines the era. I wanted to run around the streets jumping up and down. I wanted to march into Malcolm Dunbar’s office with Bobby and dance on his table together. I wanted to get loaded, and have a party. Go way baby, let’s go!

  I set Ride up as House of Love’s support band for three nights in Europe in April – I always managed to set them up with Creation acts as support. Ride’s second EP was about to come out and Chadwick was scared stiff of them, hanging around by the mixing desk trying to turn their sound down. Ride were playing out of their skins, with pure euphoria, whereas the House of Love were now very paranoid and nervous and missed the dynamic presence of Bickers. I didn’t help their nerves by constantly buying champagne.

  ‘What’s the celebration?’ Guy would ask eagerly.

  ‘Primal Scream are at number 16,’ I’d say, and watch his face fall.

  The major label pressure was destroying any harmony within the band. Their new single ‘Beatles and the Stones’ was coming out in about a dozen formats to try and rig the charts and Dave Bates wanted them to film a big budget MTV-friendly video in LA. All of the band except Chadwick refused to be in it. In the end Dave Bates forced them to do it. It never got played on MTV. The single only made the Top 40 for a week. ‘Play’ by Ride went in at 32, with almost no marketing spend. It was looking really bad for the House of Love. But at Creation we had never had it so good. I thought of Tony Wilson telling me not to quit, to do my own thing. This was what I was good at, I realized now. It was the best time of my career so far. Suddenly we had hit records. I wanted more of them.

  It’s an amusing myth that waiting for My Bloody Valentine to deliver their second album Loveless turned Dick Green’s hair grey. The other myth, less amusing, is that all our houses were put on the line. Well, not quite, but very close.

  No one really knows what went wrong between Isn’t Anything and Loveless. Maybe Kevin Shields was smoking a lot. Perhaps it was the weed that sent him mad. Who knows? How could we tell if someone had a drug problem? We all had drug problems and so we normalized and excused each other’s behaviour. Everyone dealt with their drug abuse in a different way. The Primals took drugs in a really obvious, Rolling Stones-madness way – champagne and cocaine and heroin. Maybe My Bloody Valentine did it quietly and internalized it all. You didn’t see the signs – you just didn’t see the second album.

  A year earlier, at the start of 1989, we’d been keen to see some progress but Kevin wasn’t letting us near the studios the band were recording in, and the sessions were dragging on. They spent six weeks in one studio just recording drums! They were still at it in October.

  So by the start of February 1990 Dick Green and I had pretty much no idea what they’d been doing for the last year. They wouldn’t let us hear anything. I had to beg Kevin and, eventually, in one of the twenty-one studios he ended up using, he let me hear one song. If he hadn’t I would have been close to pulling the plug on the recordings – the cost was creeping up and up. It was a clever move because the song was ‘Soon’ and I absolutely loved it. It was the Stooges meets th
e Mondays. The beat was amazing, the guitars were amazing. It was perfect for the moment too, an obvious single. From then he had me hooked.

  We managed to get more tracks and released them as the Glider EP in April 1990. It was so hard getting even this out of him. Shields insisted on moving studios every week. Nothing was ever right for him. He was getting paranoid, lost in his head. He insisted on recording all night long, always overnight. Which limited the options for engineers slightly.

  Glider was amazing – blew everyone away. But we needed the album. We were spending what was beginning to be a fortune on it. Money we just didn’t have. We were always ambitious and so any profits got swallowed with recording cost and promotions, and we were always on the verge of going bust.

  My sisters and I found out my mother’s cancer was terminal two weeks before she died. Mum wanted to believe she was getting better and somehow that was the impression we had too.

  While she was ill I’d been seeing her every couple of months, like I normally would. I wish I’d spent more time there with her. I didn’t realize how little time there was left, but it was my own fault I didn’t go back more then. I was so busy with the label and taking drugs that the time slipped away without me noticing.

  I found out she was about to die imminently in the middle of a Lilac Time tour. I was managing them for Dave Bates (who thought I’d done a good job with House of Love now the record was selling well). I had been due to go up in a couple of days, but I told their singer and songwriter Stephen Duffy I had to go immediately and headed off. I was in Birmingham and I’d got as far as York before I answered a call on my mobile, one of the first ones, for which everyone (correctly) used to give me abuse and call me a champagne Charlie when I whipped it out.