by Mcgee, Alan
(I dress for the country these days, tweeds and dark greens. I saw Lee Mavers in Leeds recently, when I was dressed head to foot in Barbour and wearing a tweed hat. ‘Why are you wearing that?’ he asked. ‘It’s my image,’ I said, straight-faced. He walked away, shaking his head. Apparently it is becoming fashionable now. But I don’t see Bobby Gillespie turning up on stage in plus fours any time soon.)
Anyway, Kate loves fashion and runs her own label, Client, so she really wanted to go. But when I asked if she could come along I was told no. Not famous enough, I guess, not enough of a photo opportunity to help advertise Cherie’s ‘sense of now’. The next day Kate called up New Labour and told them never to ask me for another donation again. (I’d given them another £20,000 recently.) They really didn’t understand the dynamic going on in my family. It’s Kate who’s in charge.
Two weeks later, to make amends, an invitation arrived to spend a night with the Blairs at Chequers. This was on 23 October 1999. We were driven down there by a West Ham football hooligan in the Sony limo I had been stealing very frequently, and we arrived at half seven. There were full SWAT teams over the lawn to greet us. I got out, Paul Smith-suited-up, Kate wearing Prada, and we walked on in. And there was Blair, scruffy bastard in his Gap jeans: Hello! Tony and I had a ten-minute discussion about music, about Oasis and Blur, and just as that finished we turned round and Now then, now then, now then, Jimmy Savile walked in the room with a security guy. We both stood there looking at this 1980s TV star, with a cigar and a mad fucking rock and roll jacket on. Now then, now then, now then.
‘This can’t get any more bizarre,’ I said to Tony, and he burst out laughing.
At the table, it was Tony and Cherie, me and Kate, John O’Farrell and his missus, Judi Dench and her husband Michael Williams, Admiral Boyce (the guy who presses the nuclear button), John Reid (the home secretary, a Scottish guy who did well for himself and later had a spell as chairman of Celtic FC), and a couple of others. And Jimmy Savile. Kate was placed right between Jimmy Savile and Judi Dench. And he immediately started to hit on her (Kate, not Judi). He was kissing his way right up her arms, kissing her fingers. Kate wasn’t too happy about this. I was thinking, What a dirty old man. I had no idea he was a nonce, just thought he was a dirty old fucker. And a cheeky cunt to boot. His security guard looked tasty so it would have been a bad idea to put an elbow in his face, much as it was tempting. When at Chequers, it’s not the done thing to break Jimmy Savile’s nose. The fact that I was in a position to even consider it was mindblowing enough in itself.
Eventually, the dinner was over. Kate came over and said, ‘He’s a dirty old pervert,’ and I said, ‘I know!’ He left her alone once she was next to me at least.
I’ll tell you something about Jimmy Savile though. I couldn’t tell he was a paedophile, all that’s just the benefit of hindsight. But I knew straight away there was something sinister about him. This hasn’t come out yet, but I’m sure at some point it will. He was a gangster, I’m convinced of it. I’ve dealt with people like that. There was an edge to him, a quiet menace, the threat of violence. I come from Glasgow, I can tell when someone’s dangerous. I could tell he was connected. He was perhaps seventy at this moment but I knew he was a gangster.
In fact everyone was trying to avoid Jimmy Savile. Why he was invited, I don’t know. It was as if he was the host of the party rather than Tony. He was speaking to the whole table apart from when he was trying to suck Kate’s fingers. He’d stand up and walk around too. It really shows the strange power and connection to the establishment he had. I don’t think we’ve heard the half of what he got up to yet, and we probably never will.
What really drove a wedge between me and the Labour Party was when I backed Malcolm McLaren for London mayor ahead of Frank Dobson at the end of 1999. I’d always loved Malcolm. I’d even tried to be him for a while when I was managing the Jesus and Mary Chain. We’d met first in 1996 when we’d done an interview together for Punch and I pulverized him in it. I was a right cunt. I said if I’d had the Sex Pistols they’d still be going, I’d have sold 60 million records. He couldn’t really answer back about that, because I had the biggest group in the world by then in Oasis.
Of course, to be fair, with the Sex Pistols he changed culture and I never did. Unless you count inventing Shoegazing.
We became pals afterwards. I used to go and see him in his office on Denmark Street. He’d phone me up regularly and we’d go for four-hour dinners, during which he’d order the two most expensive bottles of wine on the menu and proceed to talk for three hours and forty-five minutes. Then for fifteen minutes he’d want a rest and to eat his dinner, during which time I would be allowed to talk. I must have bought him dinner twelve times. He never paid once. But it was an education, worth every penny
I’ll tell you what – he was genius. This was in the mid-1990s and he was going on about China, how they were going to become the world’s biggest economy, about the internet and MP3s and how that was going to transform the music industry. It’s all come true. (It was listening to him that gave me the ambition for my next label Poptones, and the problem with listening to a man so far ahead of his time is that the idea for my label was ahead of its time too.)
Malcolm was always doing speaking tours. He bragged to me once about one talk he gave to an audience in Norway for eleven hours! He waited till they were all asleep before he stopped! Malcolm, you’ve got to love him!
Particularly for the way he got me to put him up for Mayor of London. I had absolutely no say in the matter. In fact, I was in the Caribbean when I heard I was putting him up. I was with Kate and my sister Susan and her husband at the time, Louis, and her fantastic daughter Jade who’s the only one in my family who likes the music I released. (Everyone else thinks it’s fucking rubbish.) Anyway, so we’re there on holiday and we started getting calls because it had been announced that I am putting Malcolm up for Mayor of London.
This wasn’t the first I’d heard of his plans to run for mayor. He’d told me all about it over dinner the week before and asked me to put him up. And I hadn’t agreed. I clearly remember not agreeing to put him up for the Mayor of London. So, he just announced it anyway!
I was impressed by that. See, it was an education hanging around with Malcolm. I sounded vaguely intelligent in those days. The biggest problem Malcolm had was how to connect his ideas with making money. His ideas were miles better than mine – he just didn’t know how to make money out of them. That was my skill. That was why I was in a position to help. So I went back to Sony and asked them to write a cheque to Malcolm for £20,000.
‘Why are we doing this, Alan?’
‘It’s an art project,’ I said.
Creation’s accountant was looking at me thinking, This man should not be in charge of the company. I’ve always been pleased I got Sony to pay for that. And I’m glad Malcolm tricked me into supporting him for mayor. It was time to end that link with New Labour.
We ran the campaign for a few months but then Malcolm withdrew when Ken Livingstone stood as an independent, as we both liked him. And of course Ken Livingstone beat the Labour candidate Frank Dobson. I felt bad for Margaret McDonagh then. She took the blame for that and finished as Labour Party general secretary soon after that, but I don’t think Malcolm McLaren had much to do with it.
I was gutted when Malcolm died. I’d had no indication at all that was going to happen. He was always so full of life.
The last time I saw him was in LA, maybe a year before he died. He had a laugh unlike anyone else’s in the world. I didn’t see him first, I heard him. From a table on the complete opposite side of the room. There’s only one guy who laughs like that. It was a delight to hear. I’ll always remember that laugh.
There’s nothing that could make me get involved in party politics again. I no longer believe in the political system we live in. I like individuals in the system who try to sort out people’s problems, like our local MP. But I’ve come to realize, no matter what,
Labour, Tory or Lib Dem, they’re all puppets for the shadow government above it, business, America, the people who really run the world.
19: THE END
In those days I had never ever used a computer. I didn’t have one in my office. I couldn’t understand what I would do on one if I did. It was Kate who turned me on to the internet. Predictably, I wasn’t interested at first. Fuck all that internet rubbish, etc. But she knew how to get me into it: type a band that you’re interested in here. So I typed in Oasis, and a whole list of stuff came up, and about an hour later I was, wow, I want one! How do I get an internet?
Straight away I saw the implications of it. It was obvious. That’s how people were going to get their music. So I wrote an article predicting the end of the music industry as we knew it, that people would stop buying CDs. Malcolm McLaren had helped me see that was going to be the case, but it was completely obvious as soon as you thought about it. But most people in the industry didn’t want to see the obvious, because of how disastrous the implications were for them. So my article pissed a lot of people off, particularly Rob Dickins and the BPI. They said I was insane.
I don’t want to say I told you so but . . .
Guitar bands were on the slide so we had a go at branching out in a different direction at Creation. We wanted to see if we could compete with the majors by doing what they did – moving away from white boys and guitars and focusing on pop acts. It was a sign of how far we’d come from when we started – it had been a passion to begin with; now we were making business decisions. But it was interesting too, or I wouldn’t have done it. You’ve got to push yourself out of your comfort zone sometimes.
I’d put out an ambient record Underwater Symphonies with Kate first when she was recording under the name Scuba. I started seeing her just around that time. She was on Sony as part of a pop duo called Sirenes and they tried to screw her. Sony were trying to throw Kate out and release the tapes as though the singer was a solo artist, even though they were Kate’s songs that had been recorded. So I went in to get Kate’s tapes back. I was earning most of Sony’s money at the time through Oasis so I was never going to stand for them messing my girlfriend around like that. I went in and the boss said, ‘How can I make you happy?’ The tapes were delivered to mine later that night.
Kate had never seen anyone beat a corporation before. She thought it beat you every time. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ I said. It didn’t beat me, anyway. She became very confident after that in her dealings with the music industry.
She should be because she’s a very talented songwriter. We signed her new band Technique and tried to break them as a commercial pop act, but the singles stalled at about 64 and 56
in April and August 1999. The interesting thing is that her songs made her quite a lot of money. In 2001 we got an email from a star in Asia called Coco Lee who’d heard Technique’s second single ‘You and Me’ and was going to do a cover of it. It was number one for six months in the whole of Indonesia! So Kate had a number one. She made a decent amount of money out of writing songs. The first song ‘Sun is Shining’ was used in a major video game. Years later her next band Client put out four or five records with Depeche Mode’s label. They were a modest hit in England in 2005, but they’d play to big audiences in Germany and Hungary. They had a strong visual sense and all wore uniforms and Kate took this for the starting point for her fashion label Client, which she now runs from the house in Wales.
I didn’t just come back from my honeymoon with a new wife, I’d found a new act there too, Mishka, and we released his debut album a year later. He’s a white reggae singer and I’m supposed to feel embarrassed about that. Bollocks. That’s like saying black guys can’t play rock music. And I found out recently that in May 2013, he was America’s number one selling reggae artist that month with a record he put out on Jimmy Buffett’s label. Mishka, the album Creation put out in 1999, sold about 100,000 copies worldwide and went Top 10 in Japan – for a failure, that’s not too bad!
He probably would have worked better on another label without our reputation for white boy guitar rock. He would have been taken seriously then, but with us, people were jealous of Oasis’s success and would decide in advance that any attempt to try something different was bound to be ridiculous. We thought naively we could break out of our genre. But we couldn’t.
This is why I still think about what would have happened if I’d gone to V2 with Richard Branson and Jeremy Pearce in 1996. It would have been a fresh chance. I might have been able to break out of my mould there.
My final, glorious failure at Creation is the one I’m most proud of, the one that showed that the Creation spirit still lived, even if only in my head and a couple of other people’s. That was when I signed Kevin Rowland as a solo artist. He’d released one solo album in 1988 after Dexys Midnight Runners had split up, but no one had heard of him for the last ten years.
I’d always loved Dexys Midnight Runners but I’d been warned in advance that Kevin Rowland could be hard work. I’d heard a story that Martin from Heavenly had offered an opinion about his demo in a meeting they’d had; Kevin had told him to shut his fucking mouth, he only wanted to talk to Jeff Barrett. Of course, this just made me more interested.
When I met him, he was lovely to me. He had strange clothes on that day. He looked like a dethroned king. Like Henry VIII without the crown.
Anyway, he sang ‘Manhood’ to us. Just a capella. It was beautiful. He finished and I said straight away, ‘I’ll sign you.’
He was, like, what?
Everyone else he was talking to was umming and ahing, adding conditions. None of that with me: I just trusted my instincts, like I always had done.
So he signed and we got on with doing the album. He’d ask my opinion about certain things. I never sugarcoated anything, so I’d tell him, no, that’s shit.
That approach didn’t work. He was twitchy. He’d just got clean, and he was pretty raw. He couldn’t handle my directness then, not at that time. We agreed at a certain point that the record was never going to get made with me A&Ring it. So Mark Bowen babysat that record.
It’s funny that Kevin Rowland couldn’t cope with me. I was the one being warned in advance from other labels that I wouldn’t be able to cope with Kevin, and he couldn’t cope with me!
I give Mark Bowen his due, it’s a great record. Kevin wanted to reinterpret records that had got him through his depression, and it was a brilliant concept.
Andy Saunders was really upset he wasn’t going to work on the publicity campaign. He was a big Dexys fan, but Kevin wanted a woman. Saunders thought I’d betrayed him. So, I said, ‘Look mate, you don’t want to do the publicity on this, trust me. Wait till you see the cover. It will blow your mind.’
The truth of the matter is the record was brilliant. The thing that stopped people liking the record was the cover: Kevin in a black velvet dress, pulled down to show his nipples, pulled up to show his silky black knickers, stockings and suspenders.
It’s Kevin Rowland, you let him do what he wants. You’ve got two choices: you do what he wants to do, or you don’t do the record. It was eleven years since his last record. It could be eleven more. Why would he listen to Alan McGee about his image?
The choice was to try and influence him and fail, or just to put the record out.
There was a naughtiness to my decision too. I knew Creation was likely to end soon. And I knew that this was a great record. Once I saw the cover the first thing I did was order 10,000 posters printed and put them up all over the country in accident black spots trying to cause a car crash. I imagined these commuters, barely having woken up, at eight in the morning being confronted by Kevin Rowland’s big balls in black knickers and driving straight off the road.
I liked the sleeve a lot. We both did. He thought it was a work of art. I thought it was bonkers.
Going ahead with it was old school Creation, not giving a fuck about what anyone thought. And all the corporate people at Creation, the people who w
orked on Oasis records, thought it was outrageous, that it was ruining the name of the label. They thought the label stood for corporate indie, but I thought the label stood for bonkers brave fuck-you creativity. For provocation. Independence wasn’t a fucking musical genre. A lot of the staff couldn’t take it and were bitter that I was still allowed to make decisions they thought were crazily uncommercial.
Their animosity was symptomatic of the new music business landscape. The independent music scene was dying, and this was just a reflection of that.
We sold 500 copies of the first single, 700 copies of the album in the UK. It was a shame the cover put everyone off because otherwise, as an album of respectable covers of pop standards, it was perfect Radio 2 music, like a good Robson and Jerome. But you’d never see that pair wearing women’s knickers in public, and therein lay the problem. How much of a disaster the record was is always exaggerated. We ended up selling 20,000 copies of the album worldwide: not bad.
And that was one of the last things we did. There was an incredible Primal Scream album due for release at the end of 1999, XTRMNTR. They had their own studio by now, could move at their own pace and we never had any troubles again like we did with recording Give Out But Don’t Give Up. By that time the band had become a Bobby and Andrew creative partnership. Throb had been missing in action for a while.
In the first words Bobby sings on the album he accuses a money man of losing his soul. I had the money now. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my soul yet. And every day in the office felt like it was killing it. There were fifty people in the office and I only really talked to half a dozen of them. Joe, Ed, Dick, Jon Andrews, Andy Saunders – after that I was struggling to find anyone I had any affinity with.
Dick and I were hardly going in any more. I remember one particularly bleak February morning in 1999 I phoned him up.
