Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  But we got there okay, and I was pleased to have jumped that hurdle. The next day we met Tommy Mottola. He’s quite an intimidating character. His office – I’ve never seen an office like it – is painted all over in dark mud brown. He opens his door with a remote control like a TV zapper. There he is sat behind a massive desk. There was nothing to worry about – I was responsible for him having just sold 20 million records. It must have been weird for Ed Ball, being wheeled in to meet him with me. Mottola was looking at him curiously and saying, ‘And you are?’ Ed was actually Creation’s most prolific recording artist. I just loved having him there with me. ‘Don’t shut the door!’ Mottola shouted as we left the office, and lifted up his remote controller to do it for us. He obviously enjoyed doing that. It’s a shame he never got to see the Bunker – I wonder what he would have made of that.

  There were some funny moments on that trip. Ed and I were sitting in a restaurant with Joe McEwen, Seymour Stein’s A&R man. The whole music industry used to eat in the same restaurant in those days. Tommy Mottola was in there and bowled over, grabbed me and dragged me off to his table. ‘Alan, Alan, I want you to meet Daryl Hall and John Oates.’ And there they were, Hall and Oates, looking twenty years older, both eating huge plates of spaghetti bolognese. ‘You’ve got to manage them,’ he says to me. And then he turns to them and says, ‘Alan’s from the street! He’ll get you back on track.’ Just when you thought life couldn’t get any more surreal. I quite like Hall and Oates. But I couldn’t go for that.

  And then, on the plane back, we met Michael Jackson for the second time. He was sat at the front surrounded by security guards and started laughing his head off when he saw us, like he’d never seen two bald guys before! Ed Ball wanted to go up and have it out with him. I had to stop him. Jackson was sitting there with a face mask on, giggling away. I was thinking, You’re a cunt, but you’ve got four security guards.

  ‘Calm down, Ed. What can we do?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not having it, I’m going to go up,’ Ed’s insisting.

  I had to hold on to him to stop him. They’d have probably shot him dead. Tasered him at least.

  You run into all sorts of people if you’re always getting planes. I was met once at the gate by a man with a machine gun. ‘Show me your passport!’ I didn’t argue. Even Michael Jackson didn’t have security this intense. And when I got on the plane, who was there, sitting in seat 1A?

  Margaret Thatcher.

  It was a good job I was off the drugs by then or who knows what I would have said.

  Even as we were enjoying Oasis’ heyday, I could see the music business was changing, becoming even more commercial. Supermarkets were selling records, demanding massive discounts. It was getting harder and harder to compete on a level playing field. Guitar bands were going out of fashion again. Britpop was dying and the Spice Girls were coming through and another wave of dance music.

  We were trying to break Hurricane #1 in this new market. We tried all the commercial tricks, multi-formatting, etc. It started off well. We had a bit of momentum beforehand. Oakenfold had done a really good mix of ‘Step Into My World’ and that had gone in at 19 in May 1997. Their first album went to number 11 in the charts and sold something like 100,000 copies.

  But the next year I made a big mistake advising them to let their song ‘Only the Strongest Will Survive’ feature on a Sun advert. At the time, I thought it made sense because the money on offer would pay for their next album. But I think this killed their careers and lost them any credibility. If you played the corporate game too much, you alienated the indie fans. Having an edge had to be a big part of the appeal and we blunted any chance of them having this edge with that advert.

  They were up against it anyway because they weren’t Oasis and they sounded like Oasis. They probably arrived about nine months too late to really capitalize on the Britpop fad. Cast sold a million albums and that could have been Hurricane #1 if they’d got there first. All those Oasis fans, like Andy Bell, wanted something else to listen to. After Andy gave up on Hurricane #1, he was about to become a student again when he got the phone call after Bonehead left the band: would you like to be in Oasis? Yes, he would. And now of course he’s in Beady Eye with Liam.

  Be Here Now destroyed a lot of the affection people had for Oasis, for Noel and Liam. They’d been a refreshing change before when they’d first arrived, down to earth and laddish in a way the average guy from Salford understood.

  The campaign for the album was all wrong and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. It made them seem aloof, like they thought they were above everyone else. Ignition management took control of it and insisted we embargo it heavily and not allow it to be played on the radio before release. In one fell swoop, we managed to turn all the journalists off Oasis. Ignition insisted on everyone signing non-disclosure agreements, stuff that wasn’t necessary. There was a real paranoia to it. And Ignition used us as patsies – it was our name at the top of all these agreements and so everyone thought it was us getting too big for our boots.

  Jonny Hopkins was caught between a rock and a hard place. He was employed by Creation handling Oasis’ press, trying to please both us and Ignition. But we had no real power against Ignition – 90 per cent of our sales were Oasis and so we had to do whatever their management said. The risk of upsetting them was far too great.

  But while Ignition were busy alienating the press, Verve got hold of the football and ran with it and became the biggest band of the moment with Urban Hymns.

  I don’t think Ignition understood what they were doing. They decided they had to clamp everybody’s mouths shut and didn’t really understand how the internet was making it impossible to stop any leaks. It worked against the band and made them look as if they were prima donnas, as if they thought they were U2. Whereas in fact, the reason people loved Oasis, which I’d always understood, is that they were the people’s band. There wasn’t this big separation: this ‘I’m a rock star, I’m untouchable’ attitude. And now there was this big wall protecting the band, and it turned off a lot of journalists and people in the record shops. By this point, to be honest, it was Ignition who were in charge of Creation in a lot of ways. They had their people in the building and they were using us as the proxy Stasi. The waiver forms were issued from us but they came from Ignition management.

  I remember the Sunday Times reporting that I was a Svengali controlling the press. It wasn’t true. I thought the way the press was being managed for that record was going to lose people. And it did. We let the Verve in. We blew it.

  We blew it and we sold 11 million copies in the process. Now that’s a sentence you don’t hear said very often. That’s how big Oasis were at the time. But they’d never be as big again.

  Be Here Now seemed to signal the end of Britpop, the end of the success guitar bands could have making pop music. The other big ‘Britpop’ bands moved on and became less poppy to reject the label – Blur’s new album was in a harder, more American direction, and Pulp’s was much darker and without obvious hits.

  Success is a really weird thing, a paradox. The environment that made Creation so great, so different, was failure! So when we succeeded, we started to destroy the environment of adversity that made us so great.

  Vanishing Point by Primal Scream had come out on 7 July 1997 and was an incredible record. The record did well, 300,000 copies, something like that. It went in at number 2. I thought it should have been bigger, but it was becoming harder and harder again to make ambitious music work commercially.

  At the time it came out, things weren’t good between me and Bobby. I didn’t A&R the record, that was Jeff Barrett, and he was back doing their press too. Bobby and I were quite estranged, quite distant. I look back at that album and see there are some amazing songs on it. ‘Burning Wheel’ might even be their best. But at the time I was indifferent.

  The flashpoint for us falling out was the gig they played in Liverpool, a benefit gig for the dockers. Bobby had really put the pressu
re on me to come and see them. I’d been wary of it. I knew they were still a drug band and I was fearful that contact with them might undo all the work I’d put in to my recovery. I hadn’t been in their dressing room for years. There was no attempt to hide anything from me. Bobby necked a couple of Es right in front of me. I thought, Dude, I’ve come all this way, can’t you have some consideration? There wasn’t one ounce of malice in him doing it but it still really hurt me that he couldn’t imagine what it would be like for me to see that. It wasn’t that it made me want to take them myself, but at the same time it freaked me out to see it, for me to know how close I was again to the lifestyle that had nearly killed me. How hard do you want to make this for me? I was thinking. I’m here, I live miles away, just give me an inch. I didn’t see them live again for years after that gig.

  As the years went on I became able to watch people take drugs and not feel weird. (It’s basically impossible to work in the music industry and not be surrounded by people on drugs.) But then it was hard – and doubly hard because Primal Scream were my crowd, from when I was a child. Being with them was like being back in my old body, and I couldn’t block out what had happened to me, what I was recovering from.

  They couldn’t understand where I was at, because they were still out of their minds. It’s hard to make thoughtful decisions when you’re in that state. And it’s probably unfair of me to have expected it. There’re no badges when you get clean or sober. They were probably looking at me and pitying me, thinking what a better time they were having than me. It’s fair enough if they did – you’ve got to decide how to live your own life. I needed to have a break from the band so we could get on again, so we could remember we were friends first and foremost and not business colleagues. Any problems we had we kept strictly between ourselves and out of the public domain, and I think this is why we’ve managed to stay friends.

  Occasionally Bobby would still call me up to battle for him. He wanted to release ‘Kowalski’ as a single and the rest of Creation were telling him he couldn’t. That’s not how it works in my company, especially not with Primal Scream, so I overrode everyone and told them we were releasing it as a single. We still had the same gang ethos, even if we were keeping our distance temporarily. Let’s be honest, we both didn’t like each other much at the time. They were out on their own in many ways.

  There was a clear line from the Jesus and Mary Chain to Oasis. It was there in the sense of danger, the classic melodies and the fuck-you attitude. Bobby Gillespie arrived in my office one day in 1997 and told me I had to re-sign the Mary Chain. No one else would have put the record out. Their sales had been on the slide for a few years now and Geoff Travis had turned it down. I listened to the demos and knew it wouldn’t be an amazing Mary Chain album but I knew it would be a good one. I really liked the Mary Chain but Bobby loved the Mary Chain. I didn’t think much about the financial repercussions of decisions in those days. I thought I’d earned that right. So I just said: ‘Let’s do it.’ It was an attempt to try and reclaim our past and get back to the early days; and it was a naive ambition, because we’d gone beyond the point where that was possible.

  We offered them a reasonable deal, they agreed and then on the day they were supposed to be signing the contract they rang to ask for a load more money! We’d offered them a £60,000 advance to include the cost of recording, and they’d thought we meant £60,000 plus the cost of recording. No one else in the industry would give them a deal and they were still demanding last-minute improvements. But because it was the Mary Chain Dick and I just went, Oh, yeah, give it to them. It wasn’t worth the hassle. They were the same old band.

  It was only at that point that William Reid and I ever got close. He’d decided he wanted to get to know me. Perhaps because I was so friendly with Jim. So we were walking down Charlotte Street near Soho. He isn’t very worldly at all, William.

  ‘What is this, Alan?’ he’s asking me. ‘Who lives round here?’

  ‘Malcolm McLaren,’ I said.

  ‘Can we go and see him?’ he asked.

  Er, if you like. So we called for Malcolm McLaren at his flat but he wasn’t in. Still, just ringing the bell had made William quite excited. ‘What shall we do now?’ he asked me.

  At the time I was a member of the Groucho Club and that was round the corner, so I mentioned that – not very enthusiastically. If there’s one place I’m certain I’ll never set foot in again these days, it’s the Groucho. I don’t think I’d be comfortable even walking past it.

  William, however, was amazed by the idea. ‘The Groucho Club! The Groucho Club!’ he starts repeating in glee.

  I know the place is a fucking pit but he hasn’t been there. ‘Yeah, it could be . . . okay?’ I said.

  ‘The Groucho! Do girls go there?’

  ‘A few,’ I said.

  ‘The Groucho! Can we go?’

  So off we went and the minute we got there I saw seven or eight girls in their mid-twenties I knew, good pals. So I introduced them to William and they were all going, ‘The Mary Chain! You were my hero!’

  This was about thirteen years after we’d released ‘Upside Down’. They must have been about twelve then and they were telling him, ‘You were my fucking hero!’

  Anyway, we hung out with them for a while. William was having the time of his life. I was a bit bored. The next thing I know, Will Self comes up and calls me a cunt. No reason. Just comes over and informs me I’m a cunt. Then he’s off.

  ‘What did he call you?’ asked William.

  ‘Ah, he just called me a cunt, don’t worry about it.’

  I didn’t give a fuck. This was when Will Self was an alcoholic, a junkie. I just thought, Go off and take some more smack, overdose and die, do us a favour.

  The next thing though William has gone up to him: ‘You, you cunt, outside!’ He was trying to drag him outside and batter him. Will Self was holding on to the bar, smacked off his tits, as William was trying to drag him outside and give him a doing. That was the day I decided I quite liked William sometimes.

  And it was great to have the Jesus and Mary Chain back on the label again. I’d always loved the band. It was a link with the time of Creation when it had been really exciting. It just wasn’t like that on a day-to-day basis any more.

  I proposed to Kate that year and she accepted. I was a bit nervous about getting married again, not because I had any reservations about Kate, who I knew I loved and wanted to be with. But I dreaded all the fuss. We’d talk about a wedding and who we had to invite and, before you knew it, it was Knebworth all over again.

  We had a holiday planned that Christmas in Nevis. I’d hired a huge house with ten bedrooms and we’d invited lots of our friends to stay with us. Three days before we flew, I had the idea that it was probably the kind of place where you could organize a marriage quickly. I mentioned it to Kate and she was into the idea, though she didn’t believe I’d go through with it and manage to get it organized in time. Go on, I dare you, was her attitude. When we were out there, on New Year’s Day 1998, I got in touch with a local judge and priest called Cecil Byron – he could have people married or executed – and he agreed to execute, no, marry us the next day in the porch of the house we were all staying in.

  So that night Kate had a hen do and I had a lads do – me sipping Diet Cokes while Paul Gallagher (Noel and Liam’s brother who worked in A&R for Creation) made everyone cry with laughter.

  The next day we were married. The moment they said, Do you take this woman, I flashed back all those years ago to Yvonne and thought of the mistake we’d made. But I knew that I wasn’t making a mistake with Kate.

  I stopped going to the political dos after a while. I remember sitting at the high table next to the American ambassador at a dinner at the Labour conference in Bournemouth. He asked me what I did, and I was always quite modest about it in that company: Oh, you know, I do music. He’d heard of Oasis so we had something to chat about. Campbell was walking Blair about to say hello to different peopl
e. The minute he saw the American ambassador, he went into overdrive, really turned on the charm. You got the real sense that Blair had to snap to attention for him, that it was the American who was really in charge.

  In the end I became disappointed. I realized they weren’t listening to me. They had their own agenda, and if I said anything that fitted in with that, that was fine, but otherwise they were ignoring me.

  The whole idea of it being a glorious time to be British, the whole Cool Britannia thing, that was made up by the press. But Oasis’ support of the Labour Party, and their huge success at the time, did give Blair a sense of being the man of the moment. They used us and got what they wanted from us. I don’t feel bitter about it. The New Deal for musicians did something good for bands trying to make it, and I’m glad I could make that difference.

  Doors were opening up now everywhere I looked. The royals were courting me for a while. Charles invited me for ‘supper’ three times at Buckingham Palace. Perhaps Blair had told him what fun I was. Kate’s always been mad that I never accepted the invite. I can’t stand the royals, fucking can’t stand them, and once I said that in the papers the invitations stopped.

  Now I sort of wish we’d gone. My new philosophy is, if you don’t go, you don’t know. I don’t know what Prince Charles is about and if I had gone I’d know now. But I had and have no respect for them. I was more principled then: I didn’t believe in the monarchy so I couldn’t bring myself to go. The invitation was up on the mantelpiece for about a week and Kate was getting excited, and I just told her, I can’t go. I can’t.

  Perhaps they were sounding me out about giving me an honour. They can stick their honours up their arse, I’d never take one.

  It was sometimes a bit rocky between us and the Blairs. Cherie always liked me and seemed to think I was the kind of guy she should be hanging around with. She once asked me and Paul Smith to take her to London Fashion Week. I’ve really got no interest in fashion, not much then and less now.