If the patronage of Rough Trade was still the only real way of making a record happen, another newcomer with a plastic bag of demos under his arm was, in his head at least, far more interested in the kind of language that had long since been banished from Rough Trade – if it had ever even been heard in the first place – along with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, there was another crucial aspect to his desire: money.
‘I can remember, on a really hot summer’s day’, says Richard Scott, ‘Simon Edwards, who’s a man I have a lot of time for, said he had this new guy that he wanted me to meet. I was sitting outside on the pavement by the Malt & Hops and this person turns up in full leathers – on this blisteringly hot day –and says, “All right, I’m Alan McGee.” We sat down and I asked him, “What do you want from your label?” And he replied, “I want to make a million quid.”’
‘I’m pretty sure,’ says McGee, ‘I said I wanted his secretary as well, but because it was Rough Trade I don’t think he even had one. I couldn’t give a fuck about all that worthy indie bullshit, I got into music to have a mansion, take drugs and shag beautiful women, really, to be honest. And I remember feeling pretty gutted when we started releasing Jasmine Minks records and I thought that fucking mansion was pretty far away.’
As a teenager in Glasgow, McGee, a redhead with an interrogatory stare, had been a regular audience member of the kind of punk shows which had so bemused Edwyn Collins and Alan Horne, where the combination of theatrical aggression and onstage noise led to such a release of rabid male hormones in the audience that fights would erupt amid the spit, sweat and spilt McEwans before the first number had come to an end. ‘What people really forget about punk,’ says McGee, ‘is that it was more like going to a football match, just really macho. You could be standing at a Damned gig in ’78 and it would just go mental. I remember turning round and somebody punching this little guy, and it was such a strong punch the guy went about eight foot back before he fell down. Every gig was like that in Glasgow, fucking mental.’
Trying his hand as a bassist in a succession of embryonic punk and New Wave bands, first H2O then Newspeak, McGee, a Rangers fan, had chosen music over football while holding down a day job as a clerk with British Rail, a job that, should he decide to take the plunge and follow the bright lights of the big city, he could transfer to London – a decision that was given impetus by a run-in with a fellow punk audience member.
‘Some guy threatened to stab me cause he thought I was a poseur who was a punk,’ says McGee. ‘He liked to decide who were the poseurs and who were the real punks. How the fuck you could think a guy with ginger hair was a poseur, I don’t know, but I remember thinking this guy had allegedly stabbed a lot of people, so when Innes from Primal Scream said, “Let’s go to London and be pop stars,” it sounded like quite a good idea.’ The pop group Innes and McGee had started was called The Laughing Apple.
London at the tail end of 1980 felt impenetrable and lifeless to Innes and McGee. Falling back on his considerable reserves of enthusiasm for whatever had his attention at the time, McGee started a fanzine called Communication Blur, which slowly grew into a semi-regular music night, the Communication Club. Taking their name from a Donovan track, The Laughing Apple found kindred spirits in the scene growing up around the Television Personalities, who had evolved from their earlier trash-song beginnings into a permanently Sixties-referencing pop-art band. Like Postcard, but without the exuberant disco inflections or commercial hooks, the Television Personalities were drawing heavily on references from the past. Ignoring the modern world in favour of an acute mod-into-psych reading of Swinging London, the Television Personalities and their label Whaam! were permanently framed by the black-and-white psychedelia of 1966, all refracted through their singer and songwriter Dan Treacy’s faux-naif voice. If the original Sixties flower children had been dreaming of re-entering the garden, the Television Personalities imagined themselves as schoolboys bunking off to audition as extras in Ready Steady Go!
‘There wasn’t anything going on at that point,’ says Joe Foster, who as bassist in the Television Personalities quickly became one of McGee’s closest friends and confidants. ‘There was psychobilly at the Hammersmith Clarendon Klub Foot where Nick Cave played and that’s all that was going on, so we wanted to do something very different.’
Foster, a keen student of rock history since his early teens, was a fount of knowledge when it came to the long-deleted records that he rightly considered ripe for reinvestigation. ‘Joe Foster was a train-spotter, and the hidden genius behind nearly all of it,’ says McGee. ‘He got me and a lot of people into a lot of stuff, Big Star, Velvet Underground, Fred Neil, Dylan. But his speciality was bad-behaviour bands and Joe was into bad behaviour by default because of his records.’
The bad-behaviour bands: Love, the Seeds, the Rolling Stones in their mid-Sixties imperial phase and all their imitators on the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations were to hold great sway over McGee and Foster as they started a new club, The Living Room, on Tottenham Court Road, upstairs at The Roebuck pub. The Living Room quickly developed into a small but enthusiastic scene, championing both new bands that met the three-minute psych criteria, as well as more established or partially forgotten acts that represented a lifeline back to the Sixties-inspired end of punk. Booked for either a Friday or Saturday night, The Living Room became a watering hole for anyone willing enough to imagine that it was part of a thriving underground network. A live compilation of acts playing at the club, ‘produced’ by Joe Foster with the sound quality of someone hitting a biscuit tin, Alive at The Living Room became the first release on the new record label McGee had decided to launch with his proceeds from the club, Creation.
‘We were kids really,’ says McGee. ‘I was twenty-three when I started Creation. I met Joe when I was twenty-two and to be honest I probably didn’t really know that much about music or the music business.’ Though lively and often sold to well beyond its fire-safety capacity, The Living Room was still firmly on the margins of the London live scene. In McGee and Foster’s heads, however, a new leather-trousered revolution was building to rival the Sunset Strip or Detroit in their mid-Sixties heyday. ‘We wanted to simultaneously be Sky Saxon and the new Motown,’ says Foster, ‘so we had to create a whole scene, a whole happening thing with loads of people. The thing was, we didn’t have loads of people so we pretended to be loads of people as well.’
Complementing the name of the label, taken from the British Sixties mod-garage band in excelsis, The Creation, the track listing of Alive at The Living Room reads like a best-of-Sixties garage-band drug songs. The Pastels cover Red Crayola’s ‘Hurricane Fighter Plane’, and the Jasmine Minks turn in a knock-kneed version of a Love song as well as a primitive run-through of Alvin Lee’s ‘Green Fuz’, as featured on Pebbles, volume two. ‘By the time we were playing our first shows in London, there was a massive lean to Sixties revivalism going on,’ says the Pastels’ Stephen McRobbie. ‘There were all these Sixties psych clubs and TV Personalities had that aspect. Dan Treacy released our records and I think we played maybe six shows with them just after we started. People could see photographs of the Byrds and Love and the Velvet Underground more easily, and everyone was bored with the punk-rock look. There was also an escapism in a way, because there was something depressing about the middle of the 1980s, very much so.’
Most of the clientele and performers at The Living Room rejected or loathed most contemporary music. A new release at the start of 1985 had as much impact as if it had been released by the latest music-press-sponsored buzz band. VU was a collection of lost mid-period Velvet Underground tracks restored to their original multitrack clarity. While a few of the songs had been previously available on low-quality bootlegs, the sound of ‘Stephanie Says’ and ‘Foggy Notion’ released in crystal-clear fidelity was a vindication of all that McGee, Foster and Treacy held dear. In comparison to the high-gloss smiles of the mid-Eighties charts acts, in the accompanying photographs to VU the Velvet Undergr
ound, in all their amphetamine black-and-white glory looked like the ultimate pop-art aristocracy. Anyone at The Living Room without a striped top, Sterling Morrison fringe or motorcycle boots now needed no encouragement to make the necessary purchases.
A band that had missed inclusion on Alive at The Living Room, but had regularly played there, was McGee’s new group, Biff Bang Pow, whose guitarist, Dick Green became the third member alongside McGee and Foster in the loose business partnership of Creation Records. Less extrovert than either Foster or McGee, Green, who was as much in love with the Creation mission of ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’ as his partners, had also studied for a degree.
‘Dick was handling a lot of the more adminy type things which Alan and I couldn’t grasp,’ says Foster. ‘He had the facility for doing that, which is not to suggest that he was somehow the straight man, which is what people sometimes assume. He was just as bad as the rest of us, he just had a particular area of expertise that was very important.’ As Creation was starting to try to turn into a real-life record company, McGee was signalling to his fellow ex-teenage punks in Glasgow to follow him down and join in the fun; one of them, Bobby Gillespie had started their own club – Splash One. Taking its name from a Thirteenth Floor Elevators song, Splash One shared the aesthetics and playlist of The Living Room with the addition of a forward-looking mix of contemporary music.
‘I knew Bob before Splash One,’ says McRobbie. ‘Bobby was the person that could get sleeves made because he worked in a printmakers. I really like Bobby. I think our personalities were very different even then, but I really liked him, and he was a really smart, intelligent guy and very uncompromising and passionate. Splash One was the place to go and they played fantastic music, and it had something semi-permanent about the fact it was always on a Sunday.’
As well as having immaculately prepared cassettes ready to play over the PA between the bands, Splash One had a self-confidence in its unique position, via Gillespie and McGee’s regular phone calls, of being able to book The Living Room bands for their only Scottish date. Glasgow also had a thriving scene in new DIY groups in the Postcard style: bands like BMX Bandits, the Soup Dragons, the Pastels and Edinburgh’s Shop Assistants were able to fill the club and brought along with them a Glaswegian bohemian attitude; both male and female audience members would take knitting to the Sunday afternoon sessions – a clear indicator that the Orange Juice sense of Warholian style was flourishing once more in the city.
After Alive at The Living Room, Creation issued a series of singles by bands that regularly appeared on the club’s flyers. Housed in fold-over paper sleeves printed by Gillespie in Glasgow, the Revolving Paint Dream’s ‘Flowers in the Sky’ or Jasmine Minks’ ‘Think!’, on cursory listens, gave the distinct impression that, while the audience of The Living Room may have known their way around the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations, their records were likely to remain a minority interest to anyone but the most regular visitors of the upstairs room of The Roebuck pub. Anyone unlucky enough to come across the two singles Creation released by a fanzine writer, The Legend!, who also went by the pseudonym Everett True, would be struck by their baffling incompetency. Both ‘73 in ’83’ and ‘Destroys the Blues’ were the sound of scrawled late-night editorials half-barked and half-mumbled inside a cheap recording studio – running commentaries on a niche part of the independent music industry that largely existed only in The Legend!’s head.
It was a band from nearby East Kilbride which had passed on a demo to Gillespie at Splash One that enabled Creation to take a step up from its Sixties fetishisation and back up its daydream hyperbole with a record of visceral rock ’n’ roll. ‘Creation was more a kind of theoretical project if you like,’ says Foster. ‘Songs had been written and stuff was being done, but nothing much had really been solidified, but Bobby brought the Mary Chain down and it all kicked off.’
‘When they signed the Mary Chain,’ says McRobbie ‘that felt like an incredible step up, like something far more vibrant and exciting was starting to happen. They looked amazing, too, like a real gang. In the Pastels, our style was more like ramblers or something.’ The label’s twelfth release, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Upside Down’ took the Velvets’ love of Motown and feedback for a walk around a Lanarkshire new town at chucking-out time. It had an urgency and aggression that everything else on the label lacked. The very act of putting on the single, which Foster and the band had recorded while the mixing desk was overheating with distortion – only for McGee to remix it to the point where the mastering engineer found it almost impossible to cut – tested the listener’s faith in preserving their hi-fi. The fact that underneath the noise was the best-constructed pop song Creation had released was now proof, as McGee was pointing out to anything that moved, that the label was walking the walk. Best of all, Creation had scored a hit: the first pressing of the single sold a remarkable 14,000 copies, beginning a run at the top of the independent charts that lasted until the single had sold over 35,000 copies. The Jesus and Mary Chain were on the way to becoming a genuine phenomenon and meeting instant music press hype.
‘Alan used to get these 7-inch PVC bags and sleeves shipped down from Glasgow into London,’ says Simon Harper, ‘and we used to sleeve those singles in one of the many offices at Collier Street, and we just couldn’t keep up. Everyone wanted it; it was such an important record. We couldn’t keep up with demand just in terms of the speed it was taking us to sleeve them.’
Simon Harper was one of McGee’s allies at Rough Trade, a place that he and Foster were, with their more carnivorous tastes, becoming increasingly tired of. The success of ‘Upside Down’ suddenly meant the press and the rest of the industry were taking notice of McGee and Creation beyond the niche of The Living Room. McGee talked up Creation and the Jesus and Mary Chain in the Loog Oldham/Tin Pan Alley vernacular, happily admitting he wanted whatever showbusiness might throw his way, especially money. Putting as much psychological distance between Creation and the company that was still funding it as possible, McGee was often entertaining, and started to win the ear of a certain section of the music press. McGee’s firebrand patter was becoming increasingly pharmaceutically assisted. ‘I just took whatever Joe put in front of me,’ he says, ‘and we were off. I didn’t even know what it was half the time.’
Foster in particular had always felt that the Television Personalities were never taken as seriously by Rough Trade as they deserved. Their debut single, ‘Part Time Punks’, which Travis had released on Rough Trade, had sold over 30,000 copies, but Foster felt the TVPs had been passed over in favour of the more intellectual Scritti Politti. Green Gartside in particular is still an object of Foster’s decorous ire: ‘They were always pushing their intelligence in people’s faces in the music,’ says Foster. ‘So where is your book? You’re not actually smart enough to write a fucking book are you?’ Now, as Creation’s house producer and provocateur-in-chief, Foster was feeling equally patronised by Rough Trade. ‘At the end of the day they just weren’t cool,’ he says. ‘They just liked the kind of cool music that you’d like if you were an estate agent who read the Guardian, they liked Bob Marley … fucking hell … yeah, sure you do.’
Creation thrived on confrontation, partly as a tribute to punk and partly because McGee, whose thick speed-assisted brogue was delivered so quickly as to occasionally render it impenetrable, felt patronised by the management at Collier Street. ‘Joe hated them worse than me,’ says McGee. ‘I saw them as condescending middle-class wankers and I just wanted to ram one right up their arse, so it was just war, class warfare, for me, so I didn’t really give a fuck how I achieved my ends, as long as I beat them.’
While despising Rough Trade, McGee would nevertheless have to deal with Geoff Travis as the Jesus and Mary Chain, after months of maximum shock value one-off London shows and the occasional full-scale riot, eventually signed to Blanco y Negro. As their manager McGee, with the band’s full co-operation, had played out his Malcolm McLaren fantasies using The Great Rock
’n’ Roll Swindle maxim, cash from chaos, to stoke both an atmosphere of hostility in the band’s concerts and their asking price for signing to a major. All of this played well in the media, which quickly fell into line with a ‘New Sex Pistols’ reflex. But when Travis met the band in the Reid brothers’ parents’ front room in East Kilbride, it was no more confrontational a signing than if he’d been discussing a new recording with their imminent Blanco y Negro label mates Dream Academy or Everything but the Girl. ‘There was an attempt at provocation from Alan,’ says Travis, ‘but basically the band wanted to sign to a real record company; by then they’d had enough of messing about on Creation.’
Quickly realising that Travis had the best of both worlds by running Rough Trade as well as having access to major-label budgets for Blanco y Negro, McGee used his growing reputation to talk Rob Dickins at Warners into funding his own version of Blanco – an imprint called Elevation. The first two Elevation releases would allow two of Creation’s brightest prospects, Primal Scream and the Weather Prophets – Pete Astor’s wispish north London bedsit version of Creedence – to record their debut albums in professional recording studios as well as get a full major-label marketing push.
However, excited to have negotiated a deal out of them, McGee himself was a little adrift within the Warner Brothers Kensington High Street offices. He had, though, found an ally in Mick Houghton, who was handling PR for both Elevation and the Jesus and Mary Chain. ‘I’m sure Alan would say this himself,’ says Houghton. ‘He didn’t have a clue what he was doing, and Elevation certainly killed off the Weather Prophets and all but killed off Primal Scream.’
While Blanco y Negro went from strength to strength, cornering a foothold in the coffee-table market with Everything but the Girl as well as full support from the music papers, Elevation would singularly fail to live up to expectations. Both the Weather Prophets’ Mayflower and Primal Scream’s Sonic Flower Groove would, by Warner Brothers’ standards, sink without trace. There was another crucial difference. ‘I think Warners were a bit scared of Geoff,’ says Houghton. ‘They just thought he was a bit too smart for them, which he probably was. Geoff didn’t indulge in the rock ’n’and roll lifestyle. I always felt like I was in the presence of a schoolmaster who was sort of saying, “You’re a bit too old to be behaving like that.” He was probably right, but at the time it was great.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 22