‘I was invited to those acid house parties,’ says Nick Currie, who, being both drug-free and Creation’s most self-sufficient artist, had not been exposed to the increased rush of hedonism in the label’s offices. ‘The launch of Biff Bang Pow’s The Acid House Album was a big and incredible Ecstasy party out at the Hackney office. I think I was the only person in the room not on Ecstasy, which was probably the most extraordinary thing to be, because I could witness these crashing tides of empathy where everybody was just slithering all over everybody else. The House of Love were all in a big human bundle of limbs and I got off with some girl who did the artwork at Rough Trade who ended up marrying Bill Drummond. You’d have these Ecstasy affairs with people and it almost didn’t matter who you were, or what you looked like, because the drugs did all the work for you.’
Once the cleaning-up process began, some time on the Monday morning, McGee beamed with pride as Creation now found itself with a purpose-decorated party space. ‘We now had another back room,’ says Kyllo. ‘This big empty area sprayed in fluorescent paint and it was a bit separate. From then on that’s where all the craziness took place.’
The life-affirming Ecstasy parties were accompanied by the crushing and destabilising drift of the midweek comedowns that followed, a cycle not everyone around Creation was sufficiently well-equipped to handle. ‘We turned a lot of people on to it,’ says McGee. ‘A lot of people tuned in, dropped out and never came back.’
The House of Love were still part of the inner Creation circle and were duly invited to the Hackney parties, but the band were finding life on Fontana difficult to navigate, the pressures of the size of their advance creating an artificial sense of what they could achieve. The band’s iconic guitarist Terry Bickers found the expectation around the band particularly hard to tolerate and suffered a breakdown, which was accelerated by the band’s drug use. As the House of Love’s recording sessions started to stall, his instability was kept from the press, but within Westgate Street his behaviour was making his problems self-evident. ‘Terry Bickers was very unwell and came into the office with a gun,’ says Kyllo. ‘It wasn’t really aimed at anybody. It wasn’t, “I’m going to take you all out.” I don’t suppose it was loaded but we had to talk him down from waving it around for a long time.’
Bickers eventually recovered and left the band; his fragility was a rare but very real instance of the downside of the Creation partying. McGee had thrown himself headlong into the hedonism of acid house and was starting to move in a different milieu, one that was more typical of his office’s Hackney environs than of the indie clubs.
‘I’d be dancing, if you can call it dancing,’ says McGee. ‘Fucking hopping on one leg more like, but I’d be on one leg talking to some girl who’d be sticking her tongue down my throat telling me it was great and then her boyfriend would give me a big kiss and I’d go, “What do you do?” and she’d go, “I work in a bank.” I said to her boyfriend, “What do you do?” “I rob banks.” In any other culture that’s a joke; in acid house, on stage at the Gardening Club in Covent Garden in 1990, that wasn’t a joke. You knew he was a fucking bank robber, you knew his message was “What’s in the bank?”’
The next logical step as far as McGee was concerned was to fully embrace the culture and start releasing acid house 12-inches as the offices were full of an ever-growing retinue of hustlers and dealers, all ready to offer their advice on the state of the culture.
McGee and the rest of Creation’s embrace of acid house was written in black and white on the label’s release schedule for 1990. It was also a success. Love Corporation, Ed Ball’s nom-de-acid house, released the epic ‘Palatial’ 12-inch which sufficiently impressed Danny Rampling for him to remix it. Rampling did the same for another Creation release, Hypnotone’s ‘Dream Beam’, which along with records by Sheer Taft and Fluke was played at nights at the Milk Bar.
The following year Creation released Keeping The Faith, a compilation of its acid house releases. Housed in a white sleeve, bearing a newly designed and short-lived fluorescent Creation logo, the album bore all the hallmarks of a dance label release. To the aficionado it was a decent collection of a fast-moving genre; to the indie kids scanning a track listing that included Crazy Eddie & QQ Freestyle’s ‘Nena De Ibiza’, it was a head-scratching introduction into the world to which McGee, who was managing the Grid and Fluke, had dedicated the last twelve months.
‘Everybody claimed to [have] put it together,’ says McGee, ‘but it was Grant Fleming that did it. We were actually pretty good at acid house, but really Grant more than anybody was really responsible for it. He was the one on a Saturday afternoon going round with the white labels.’
Grant Fleming, a teenage West Ham fan, was as far removed a character from the fanzine editors, who still occasionally braved the transport system to visit Creation, as could be imagined. McGee, in an attempt to liven up his relations with the House of Love, with whom he was now thoroughly bored, suggested Fleming join him and the band on the road.
‘I made him in charge of the merch on a big House of Love tour when I was still managing them,’ says McGee. ‘I never used to travel with the band, ’cause I found them too boring, and me and Grant were speeding up and down the motorway – and I use the word “speeding” in its right context. We just had three weeks of debauchery. We came off of that tour and I’d totally had it with the House of Love. We were more rock ’n’ roll than the band: the band were going to bed at fucking one in the morning having had their eight pints of lager, we were going out, coming back at seven, and then on to the next gig off our nuts for three or four weeks. At the end of that I just went to Grant, “Do you want a job?” and he went, “What?” and I went, “I want to a start dance label,” and he went, “What are we calling it?” “Creation.”’
Sharing space alongside Crazy Eddie and QQ Freestyle on the Creation release schedule for 1990 were three EPs and, in November, an album, by McGee’s newest signings, a quartet of Oxford art college students, Ride. Named after a Nick Drake song, the quartet were as boyish as the folk singer, and equally redolent of Arcadian youth. Enormous fans of My Bloody Valentine and the House of Love, they had arrived at a sound that explored the DNA of both bands: crashing drums, cooed harmonies and a different effects pedal for every chord change. Lyrically their songs were opaque and dreamy and sung with an affecting, if slightly mannered, hesitancy.
Ride’s debut EP Ride was released in the third week of 1990, and the band were instantly tipped as an act for the new decade. Ride had struck a chord. In the absence of any new House of Love or My Bloody Valentine material, they filled the gap the older bands had left and started drawing audiences in their image, late teenage or early twenties guitar music fans who read the music papers and were yet to have an interest in acid house. There were many more Ride fans than there were Hypnotone or Sheer Taft fans, and the Ride EP gave Creation its first-ever singles chart position at no. 72 and in its newest signings a perfectly timed lucky break.
The Ride demo had come to McGee via Cally Calloman, who had moved from Phonogram to Warners. ‘I was an A&R man then,’ he says, ‘and the scout Ben Wardle came to me with a cassette that just had the word ‘Ride’ written big in Letraset on it. I tracked them down and watched them rehearse and I just thought, this is the perfect group. I thought, there’s no argument – and I couldn’t get anyone interested in the record company at all, and Ride kept saying they were big fans of My Bloody Valentine and I was going, “But you’re so much better.”’
Word reached McGee that a tape made by a quartet of young Creation fans was being passed around Warners, who duly started chasing the band. ‘Alan phoned up and it was a bit like, “Your girlfriend doesn’t like you very much … do you mind if I go out with her?”’ says Calloman. ‘He was really nice, he said, “This is the sort of band I need to rebuild Creation and I want to do this and I want to do that,” and I thought, oh well, I can’t get anyone interested here, so good luck.’
Ride ha
d a phenomenal run in 1990, ending a breakneck year of touring with an album, Nowhere, that entered the charts at no. 11, maintaining a coveted presence for Creation in the music weeklies while ‘The President’ carried on raving. In love with each release, McGee talked up every new signing, whether a guitar band from the Thames valley or an East End chancer with a sampler, as ‘genius’ and ‘the best band in the world’. It would take Primal Scream, who released Loaded in March in 1990, to bring the two Creation cultures of acid house and classic guitar music together.
Despite the chart success of Ride, Creation was still permanently on the verge of bankruptcy. ‘Alan’s priorities on what to spend the money on were not necessarily what a bookkeeper would advise,’ says Kyllo. ‘It was absolutely hand to mouth. We were always at the edge of what we could afford to do. Our success was growing and, because of the way that cash flow works, you usually have to pay the bills before you get the money back, so when you’re growing that quickly it creates even bigger cash-flow issues.’
McGee, while never losing sight of the need to hustle licensing deals for his signings in America to pour back into Creation, was distracted by Ecstasy. He had watched in awe in late 1989 as two bands had appeared on Top of the Pops on the same night. Two years after Barrett had started promoting them in London when no one else would touch them, Happy Mondays were now in the charts alongside their home-town neighbours, the Stone Roses. It had been a strange journey from The Back Door to Babylon to Top of the Pops.
‘We used to have an answerphone at Clerkenwell Road,’ says Dave Harper. ‘One of the most spectacular messages ever left on it was from Nathan McGough. He’s eating while he’s talking … going, “Harper, it’s Nathan, I’m managing the fucking Mondays now, so you better fucking pull your fucking finger out, all right?”’
13 Getting Away With It
Electronic, Getting Away With It Fac 257 (Peter Saville/Factory)
After the international success of Substance and concentrated periods of touring the US, New Order were determined that the recording of their next album should be a more relaxed affair. All four band members had agreed to start work on solo projects once the album had been completed, giving the sessions a relaxed atmosphere. Such was the leisurely mood in the camp that New Order had insisted on finding a recording studio with a swimming pool and beach access. The only residential studio that could match their criteria was in Ibiza. With perfect timing, the band arrived on an island awash with Ecstasy, and the warm pulse of Balearic beats drifting across the breeze.
‘It was a brilliant fucking holiday,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘It was a bit like going to New York the first time and seeing lofts. The only reason we went to Ibiza is because it had a swimming pool. The place was owned by Judas Priest’s drummer and it was a shit studio. We were there reading the NME and it’s like Balearic? That’s here isn’t it? It was kicking off – we’d seen a bit of it at Heaven but it wasn’t really a kicking off vibe.’
In Ibiza New Order experienced the relaxed energies of acid house in its Balearic, open-air, dancing-under-the stars form. They also failed to make any headway on the recording of their album and returned home with barely a drum track committed to tape. They transferred their recording sessions to the Wiltshire countryside and Peter Gabriel’s newly opened Real World Studios at Box, near Bath. New Order were Real World’s first clients and in late 1988, for a long, almost interminable weekend, the studio was transformed into a West Country version of the Haçienda’s Hot Nights.
‘We finished the record off and Rob decided we should have a party,’ says Morris. ‘A certain group of people talk about it to this day.’
Dave Harper was summoned to the studio for what he had expected to be a playback of the album, Technique, and an informal discussion about plans for the release. Instead he was met with scenes of unbridled carnage. ‘I went down on the train,’ he says, ‘and there was Showsec security in the middle of Wiltshire – buses and carloads from Manchester, all of Happy Mondays and their entourage. I walked in and I can’t remember much about it. But Mike Pickering, from that day on, has referred to me as “mad dog”, because, apparently, I axed a urinal off a wall, evidently with an axe.’ ‘That was just the start,’ says Morris. ‘“Dave, Dave – what are you doing … no Dave, put the axe down.” He was pickled.’
Mike Pickering had arrived at Box in the convoy of buses and cars that had been summoned from Manchester to celebrate the album’s completion. As Haçienda regulars and members of the wider Factory circle made their way through narrow country lanes, the effects of the pills that had been swallowed in anticipation started to take hold. ‘They were double-decker coaches and everyone was getting a bit flushed,’ he says. ‘They’d obviously dropped already so they were getting a bit like, “Fucking where is it?” Someone shouted, “Lights!” We all had whistles and everyone started whistling and dancing on the bus. Then we were like, “They’re just lights, it’s just a house, it’s probably some poor old bastard in a farmhouse.” It’s a wonder we survived it really ’cause they were very strong Ecstasies, wow.’
‘The hedonism was out of control,’ says Harper. ‘When the E hit, it was insane. At the party at Real World it was bacchanalia gone mental. I’ve been back there dozens of times over the years and never recognised the place. It was the end of the world. People didn’t recover for days on end.’
Pickering was DJing as the party reached yet another peak. As he started looking through his record box, his concentration was broken by the arrival of Graeme Park, his colleague at the Hot Nights. ‘He went, “Do you want to swap over?”’ says Pickering. ‘I went, “Fucking hell, mate, I’ve just come on.” I honestly thought I had. He went, “Mike, you’ve been playing for nearly five hours” … “Whoosh, fucking hell.” It was fucking amazing. And the best thing about it was, Peter Gabriel didn’t know.’
New Order’s first public engagement for the promotion of Technique was a Top of the Pops appearance for the single ‘Fine Time’. The track was the album’s most overt reference to the Balearic sounds they had encountered on Ibiza. Another point of reference was the single’s dichromatic sleeve – a picture of dozens of pills. The Top of the Pops performance was another highlight in the band’s ongoing attempts to break with the programme’s formula. After previously disastrous attempts at playing live on the show, New Order agreed to mime. As the cameras rolled, Peter Hook stood stock still with his hands in his pockets and his bass worn over the shoulder like a rifle, while Bernard Sumner danced wildly in front of the microphone. Sumner’s style of dancing would start to become familiar to television audiences as the man whose moves he had copied, Bez from Happy Mondays, followed New Order into the charts. ‘Bernard loved the Mondays,’ says Harper, ‘loved them. On Top of the Pops, Bernard’s wearing dungarees and he’s raving, looking insane. They’d gone mental’.
‘Fine Time’ was released in November 1988, in the same month Factory released Happy Mondays’ second album, Bummed. The album was met without much fanfare. Tony Wilson scheduled the band for an appearance on his new Granada television music show, The Other Side of Midnight, and the band remained a lively, if little-known, phenomenon. Jeff Barrett, who was now the band’s PR man, ensured that interest was kept up, but the record’s audience, despite the cachet of a launch party at Heaven and a handful of glowing reviews, was stubbornly small.
Bummed had a cavernous, almost whale-song, quality that left most reviewers perplexed; the fact that the promo cassette listed the first track as ‘Some Cunt from Preston’ (later renamed ‘Country Song’) only added to the general sense of apprehension around the band. Within a few months the record’s qualities would start to reveal themselves. As the proliferation of Ecstasy increased, Bummed’s dark energies began to take hold. Wilson had hoped that the Happy Mondays would become the rock ’n’ roll band for the Ecstasy generation and he would be proved right. But it would be a slowly evolving process before they were anointed as the raver’s Rolling Stones; and once the band h
ad been crowned it was a position they would struggle to maintain.
‘Tony’s theory about why the Mondays failed was that there wasn’t a middle-class person in the band,’ says Nathan McGough. ‘He said the bands that always survive may have had working-class roots in them, but you need a middle-class kid in the band. They’re the ones who actually really understood the context of the band, and where it sat culturally within society. So that’s what the Mondays lacked. I guess the middle-class person within that outfit was me.’
McGough had been asked to manage the band by Shaun Ryder, a decision that had infuriated Wilson. ‘I was summoned to Tony’s house,’ says McGough, ‘and Wilson said to me, “You’re not managing this band,” and we’d been friends for, like, eight years or something. “You’re not welcome in the Factory office. You annoy everyone …” Mike Pickering mediates at this point. And Wilson went, “Fine, right, I want a contract,” and I was like, “That’s the greatest news I’ve ever heard coming from you, because at least now you’re going to have to state what you’re going to do for the band and it’ll cost you a bit of money as well.” So we did a deal, God knows how much, but enough to get things going.’
Happy Mondays had first come to the attention of Factory through Pickering and Rob Gretton, who had seen the band perform at the Haçienda. A Factory affiliate, Phil Saxe, who later became the label’s A&R, was given the challenging task of managing them. The band’s debut LP Squirrel & G-Man was released in 1987 to a handful of positive reviews but little else.* To all concerned, even their handful of supporters, Happy Mondays appeared to be another addition to the Factory B-list, but Wilson remained committed to the band and was convinced of their potential – the largest credit on the sleeve of their 1986 single ‘Freaky Dancin” read in block Modernist capitals: ‘Executive – Antony Wilson’† – yet however much he liked the idea of the Happy Mondays as a street gang ready to take on the charts, he was resistant to any thought of serious investment in the group.
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 33