Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  It was Dick Green on the phone. He told me my mother had just died. I’d missed her by two hours.

  My sisters saw it all first hand. They said it was horrible to see her go. They both had a hard time for a few years afterwards coming to terms with it.

  I arrived in Glasgow and a minister came round to talk to us. He said a lot of clichéd Christian things I didn’t believe in and that really annoyed me, that seemed really false. My dad was trying to keep it together. My gran was heartbroken to have lost her daughter. After a couple of days I went back to London but returned soon for the funeral, with Ed Ball and Belinda.

  I couldn’t grieve at the time. I felt really disconnected. It hit me hardest when I got sober in 1994. The amount of drugs I was taking until then stalled the process and distanced the grief.

  There was a notice in the paper about the church funeral. Someone must have read that notice and realized our house would be empty, because when we returned for the wake the house had been burgled. They stole my mum’s jewellery, the stereo, nothing of much financial value. It was probably a desperate junkie, and it’s a good job he didn’t get caught. It was a big crowd at the funeral and there was a dark element to my family. The thief would never have made it to prison. He’d have been showing up in tins of dog food.

  It was a tragedy Mum died so young. If only she’d had a few more years and could have seen the rest of the 1990s. She would have loved Kate. She would have loved my daughter Charlie. She’d have loved the fact that I had it away and sold millions of records. I could have bought her her own big house. She never got to see any of that.

  Or who knows? Maybe she was sitting next to me the whole time. The only thing you know is that you don’t know.

  Over the next few months, if I started to feel pain over the loss of my mum, I distracted myself by working hard and by the frantic life I’d always lived. It was work and drugs separated by sleep and not so much of that, and it had been like that for years by then.

  That year I ended our relationship with Rough Trade and signed with their main rival Pinnacle. We were about to be out of contract with Rough Trade and in typical Rough Trade fashion they used that as an opportunity to try to raise the percentage they charged us.

  I’d always hated Rough Trade’s attitude, their indie values which just seemed like hypocrisy to me. I liked Pinnacle for not indulging in any of that bollocks and for treating it honestly as a business about making money. They were really keen to sign us, particularly as George Kimpton, Steve Mason’s old partner at Pinnacle, had now taken over Rough Trade. We played them off against each other until they were both offering ridiculously good deals, down from 28 to 12 per cent. That was incredibly low, no one had a percentage deal like that. But for years I had felt that Rough Trade hadn’t given us the respect we deserved. It wasn’t a problem with Geoff Travis, it was a company-wide thing. They still treated us like we were chancers. Now they were desperate to show us how much they wanted us but they’d left it too late. We signed with Pinnacle and I bought a lot of bottles of champagne that day.

  We’d never had a formal contract with Primal Scream but after having lost out on Ride in the US I thought it was about time we did. We formally signed them for £15,000 and waited to hear the next Weatherall collaboration, ‘Come Together’. It wasn’t an easy record to get right. It came close to breaking up the band at points. We were doing two mixes of it, a Weatherall one and a Terry Farley one. The Weatherall one was superb. But one big problem. He’d taken Bobby’s vocals off it completely. They didn’t fit with what he’d done, an epic house track. Bobby understood what a phenomenal song the Weatherall mix was but felt totally redundant. Robert Young had walked out too because his guitars had been taken off. Both of them were thinking there was no point in them being there if they weren’t on any of the records. We knew we were going to have a problem with Robert Young. Throb got into ecstasy and acid house around summer 1990 when the scene was pretty much over. Before that he wanted Primal Scream to be the New York Dolls and was threatening to leave all the way through the making of Screamadelica. Funnily enough, if Throb had left, it would have been a disaster for the album. If Throb hadn’t been resistant to the new direction, I think Bobby and Andrew would have taken their experimentalism too far. I think Throb reined that in, kept the link with the band’s past and future as a rock and roll band.

  But we were more concerned about Bobby than about Throb. To everyone in the world, Bobby Gillespie is Primal Scream. His vision for that band is absolutely essential to it being what it is.

  Then to compound the situation, Farley’s vocal mix wasn’t working and he sent a new version that didn’t have Bobby on it at all! Bobby heard it and was really pissed off. It wasn’t a good mix anyway. The band had written a great pop song with a brilliant melody, and we had to have it in one version or what was the point? So I phoned Farley and threatened him. I told him to put Bobby back on the mix or he wasn’t getting paid. I kept on at him until he got it right and to his credit he pulled off an amazing mix, great percussion, piano high in the mix, gospel singers dropping out for Bobby to sing clear over the top of it, completely blissed out. (There might even be a little bit of Throb’s guitar at the very end of it. The band certainly made it up to him with the next album, anyway.) I actually prefer the Farley mix to the Weatherall one. Weatherall’s version is great but here’s no hint of the original melody left there.

  Bobby was strutting after that. Front cover of the NME, head to toe in white, like there had never been an issue. We had the two bands of the moment. We were becoming the hippest label in the UK. We hit the Top 30 with ‘Come Together’ in the summer. A bit disappointing, but it was time to build an album around those two singles now.

  9: SHOEGAZING

  Ride had a good manager, Dave Newton. He was in his late twenties and protected them, asked the right questions of me and of Sire. Allowed them complete creative freedom, even when the commercial arguments were opposed to it.

  The band were no problem at all to begin with. The ticking time bomb was the tension between Mark Gardener and Andy Bell. They credited the whole group for the songwriting but we all thought it was Mark Gardener. Mark was nineteen years old but could have been twenty-nine, one of these guys who was just confident, an equal. He was the most outgoing, the most charismatic on stage. He was less shy than Andy, got more involved with the parties in the office – just made himself visible in a way that Andy didn’t. Then one day Andy Bell came up to me and asked why I never spoke to him.

  ‘You don’t talk to me,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know I write the songs?’ he asked me then, which surprised me a lot, because I didn’t. Maybe Mark wasn’t telling us he wrote all the songs himself but he certainly wasn’t correcting us. Andy and Mark were both really talented, that’s the thing. At the start they wrote songs as a band and worked on each other’s songs, the McCartney and Lennon, Richards and Jagger model. Mark was just an amazing frontman, a really great producer, really underrated. He seems to be going out again on the road now and doing acoustic gigs, which I’m really pleased about. Mark was one of my favourite people we had on the label.

  They were all nice lads but that didn’t make for great press. Laurence was always trying to work out how we could make them say something more nasty, more quotable, but they just weren’t that sort of lads. So we tried to promote Mark perhaps a bit more over Andy as the frontman, as the pin-up – and that was probably a mistake, because then the jealousy set in when Mark appeared on his own on an NME cover.

  The album, Nowhere, went in at number 11 in October, which was the highest chart position we’d ever had at that point, and went gold. In the space of a year they’d gone from playing the upstairs of pubs to headlining to over a thousand people a night. Everything was great at that point.

  Ride were not the only band we signed around then who had been influenced by My Bloody Valentine. Slowdive were Creation fans, still at school when we signed them. They were sixteen years o
ld, very Valentines influenced. They were a very good band. I recently listened to their third album Pygmalion, which is terrific. By the time they’d got to this point they were sounding like Talk Talk. That album came out at the time Oasis and Britpop were going through the roof so it got completely overlooked. We got them a deal in America. We should have kept going with them for another album but it was towards the end of Creation, and again, it was unfortunate timing. So much of success in the music industry can be about luck. I really liked them as people, Rachel and Neil.

  Swervedriver were a brilliant group – I was a big fan and still have a lot of love for them. I saw them a lot in America. They hit an anglophile audience and had more success out there than here. England had gone Britpop but America still had more of an audience for a harder rock sound.

  In a book like this it’s easy to pass quickly over the bands that didn’t sell as many records as Oasis and Primal Scream but I’ve always been very proud of these bands. We didn’t bring out records by bands unless someone in the office loved them.

  From the beginning of 1991 Ride were trying to break America. That was Seymour Stein’s responsibility now. They didn’t have the greatest of times but then most bands don’t. America’s so much harder than England and my bands have always been pretty terrible at it. You really have to play the game over there. British bands were always too cool to do the meet and greets, to tell the guy from Boise, Idaho that his wife was fantastic and it was an honour to be on his show. As soon as my bands left Los Angeles and New York they were in trouble.

  If anything, it went wrong for Ride when I started playing them Byrds and Beatles records after a couple of years. They started dressing like the Byrds and trying to write songs like them. They were more original at the start. They were bloody wonderful: the My Bloody Valentine who actually made records! I think they’d have sold more over the long term if they hadn’t changed their sound so drastically – perhaps I could have got another five shoegazing albums out of them. That was probably a more transferable sound to the US, a more distorted, college-friendly sound for the rock fans.

  I had four ‘shoegazing’ bands with My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Swervedriver and Slowdive. The music press called it ‘shoegazing’ because the bands didn’t look at the audience and spent a lot of time hitting effects pedals. That was my sole contribution to creating a musical genre, and, anyway, it was all Kevin Shields’ fault. Though they weren’t all big bands in the UK market they were lifesavers for Creation. As usual, we were about to go bust. The way I managed to keep things going in those days was flying to America and selling one of our bands over there. Dick Green would tell me we were fucked unless I jumped on a plane to America and sold a band. It was exhausting and stressful but I loved the excitement of flying over to America and incredibly I normally managed to do it. I kept myself going with booze and drugs. Whatever’s about to go wrong, try not to think about it: that’s how I coped. There was a lot I refused to think about, a lot that would bite me on the arse in the near future. We got a $250,000 deal for Swervedriver. It was the only way we managed to keep our heads above water.

  My Bloody Valentine’s progress was so slow it was killing us: 248 nights of recording took place during 1990 and 1991. I had to go and borrow money from my father – money from my mum’s life-insurance policy – to complete the album.

  Kevin never understood. He was a perfectionist genius who couldn’t see past the problems he’d set himself. I remember putting my mum’s death money into the account, paying for another studio session and having Kevin shouting at me because I was only thinking about money. That was the breaking point for me. I’d borrowed money that had made me ashamed to ask my dad for, and Kevin was still talking to me like I was trying to rip him off.

  My relationship with My Bloody Valentine didn’t end officially that day, but in my mind I probably knew it couldn’t go any further.

  I don’t blame Kevin now for his behaviour. I don’t think he had any idea how far in debt we were getting. He was obsessively creative – he could only consider his own creative problems. It’s the price you pay to work with geniuses. Kevin was erecting tents in the studio to get a special guitar sound only he could hear in his mind, experimenting relentlessly. He was a pure pioneer of sound.

  I don’t think our bands could have made the albums they did if they weren’t on the edge. They’re psychedelic masterpieces. They’re extreme records. The people who made them were pushing the envelope.

  I’ve always been proud that I managed to squeeze two albums out of Kevin Shields in five years, which no else ever managed to. Even if I knew I couldn’t put myself through working with Kevin again I refused to give up on Loveless. But I really had to resort to desperate measures. They were always asking for more money for more recording. I had to cry down the phone to him. I wasn’t really crying. Well, maybe on the inside. It was the only way to make him understand what he was doing to us – otherwise he was too wrapped up in his perfectionism.

  He let us hear more songs. Exceptional songs. We put them out in February 1991 as the Tremolo EP, and it went straight into the Top 30, their highest position yet. They were getting bigger and bigger just through word of mouth and live gigs and the fact their records were undisputedly incredible pieces of music.

  We could never pull the plug because we were always so close, because there was never a second’s doubt that when it came the music would be mind-blowingly good.

  But if it didn’t come soon, we’d go under. There were times when I nearly couldn’t pay the wages to my staff. If I’d thought about things like I should have done, I don’t know how I’d have coped. I remember thinking, What happens when I have to come off the drugs? I knew already that they were what fuelled me and took away the stress. You couldn’t stop the bands from making you stressed, but you could always buy another gram.

  We’d also signed another of our biggest bands by then, Teenage Fanclub. Again, it’s Bobby Gillespie I have to thank for that – he was instrumental in persuading them to change labels for Creation. I’d known them for a few years as they were from Glasgow. When they started to get a name for themselves in 1990 I used to run into them in Euston station, me jumping a train to Birmingham to see Belinda and them getting off from Glasgow to play some gigs in London. They had a deal already with Matador and another album contracted to give to them. There was some legal wrangling before they could sign to us as Matador didn’t want to accept the instrumental album that was offered to them to complete the deal. Matador thought I was behind that. People are always ascribing Machiavellian manoeuvres to me, and I find that quite flattering, but they’re normally incorrect. It was all the band’s doing. They wanted to be on Creation and set out to try to fulfil their contract to Matador. Once that was sorted they headed off to the studio.

  I wasn’t involved at all in the recording of Bandwagonesque. I went up to the studio in Parr Street in June expecting to hear an indie album that would sell a maximum of 30,000 copies and heard hit after hit instead. Don Fleming had done a brilliant job producing it. It was really melodic and influenced by Big Star, who I adored. And mixed in with those tracks were harder grungier tracks that would appeal to Nirvana fans. Suddenly we had another big record to add to the year’s schedule next to Loveless and Screamadelica.

  Midway through 1991 Dick and I realized how truly and absolutely fucked we were for money. We needed three-quarters of a million quid to survive. My Bloody Valentine had fucked us. We had a killer schedule ahead of us – we’d just added Saint Etienne (who I’d started managing and who we were joint releasing as a one-off with Jeff Barrett’s new label Heavenly) – but none of the money was in yet. We needed records out quickly to pay the bills that were coming in and so we tried to double our output to get the cashflow going. We’d put out pretty much anything in those days – we released four Ed Ball albums. He’d do them for hardly any money and we’d get them out as quick as possible.

  It was a good job then that the big deals I’d
negotiated in the US weren’t as lucrative for the labels there as I’d claimed they were going to be, or I’d suddenly be having to pay the artists a shitload of royalties. If Swervedriver had done what I’d hoped, it would have bankrupted us. We were terrible at planning for the future. We just winged it, day after day.

  We owed money to Ride and they could have walked – they were very loyal to us.

  The scariest thing was whether we would even have the money to put out Screamadelica. Scary because it was such a masterpiece. It had been a slow process getting it out of them because the band were quite messy by this point. They were available for work two days a week basically, Wednesday and Thursday. They’d be partying Thursday night through to Sunday, then need two days to recover. Two-day weeks! They did not suffer from the Calvinist work ethic, that is for certain. And Screamadelica got made this way, while other bands were nicking our space.

  After ‘Come Together’ we considered releasing ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’, which is a terrific song, a total house classic, a floor filler. But I was convinced the singles needed to keep having Bobby on them or we’d lose his power as a figurehead. So we picked ‘Higher Than the Sun’, perhaps my favourite single we ever released on Creation, a collaboration with the Orb. It’s not an obvious single in many ways – you’d never have a major label release it. I always tell people I was more about the money than the music, and I still think that’s true, but – make your mind up when you listen to this. You don’t know what you’re hearing to start with, there’s no beat, just weird organs and long sliding whale groans before Bobby comes in and sings. The beat comes in with the chorus and the whole thing is so euphoric and psychedelic, just beautiful. It’s basically a hymn to drugs, a celebration of where they can take you creatively, spiritually. It’s the music I’d like to have played at my funeral.

  We put that out in June but it only charted at 40. The whole office was mad about that single, and it was disappointing. But we knew they’d made something more important than that, something that would last the test of time.