Creation Stories

by Mcgee, Alan

  I was doing other jobs by then. One was putting the jam into doughnuts in a bakery. It seemed to me then that Glaswegians ate a lot of doughnuts. Then on Saturdays I’d go round the houses, offering the leftovers from the bakers for sale. Anything left after that, I’d take home to my family.

  By the time I was fourteen, I’d pretty much given up on school. I wasn’t getting educated, unless a survival course in not getting your head kicked in counts for education. It was like that for most boys where I was from. Girls could show a bit more interest in learning than we were allowed to. If you were a boy and you showed interest, you were a swot and you were likely to get a kicking in the playground. If you were lucky. You never knew what people were carrying around.

  I thought teachers were wankers then. I hated the place and so anyone involved with it was automatically a wanker to me. I learned how to add up, but after that, I can’t think of anything I was taught that I’ve found useful. I thought it was all rubbish. I was always dobbing school, playing Bowie and Led Zeppelin records round my (appropriately named) pal Dobbins’s house. In those days no one cared much about where we were. The fewer people in a class, the fewer to create problems. School didn’t give a fuck. My parents kidded on they cared but I don’t think they really gave a fuck either. They didn’t see much hope for me and formal education. They didn’t seem to see much hope for me at all.

  As I got older at secondary school I’d become more and more lonely, more depressed. Home was miserable. I’d become too old to get hit by my mum or Gran Barr. I wouldn’t stand for it. But the violence from my dad had started, and it was much worse. My mum and gran had always been in control of themselves, and not that much stronger than me. My dad was a strong man, and he’d completely lose it.

  Laura watched Dad punch and kick me on the stairs one day. I had to go to hospital and have stitches in my head. I can show you the scar today. ‘Don’t tell anyone how this happened,’ he told me before we went into hospital.

  There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to make too much of this. One of the ways to cope is by making light of it. It was only what was going on around the country at the time, whether it was mates round the corner or Noel Gallagher in Burnage. It was a violent time – a drunken man’s world – people were more accepting of knocking your kids about than they are now. There’s been some progress, I guess.

  But there’s another part of me who knows what the violence did to me. I’m not talking physically, though when other people’s dads hit them, they weren’t ending up in hospital as far as I know. I’m talking more about the feeling I had of complete powerlessness and worthlessness. Wanting to run but having nowhere to go. It was a feeling I always had inside me but I could never explain what it was. It controlled me and I was running away from it as fast as I could, without understanding what it was, this feeling that made me so argumentative, hedonistic, self-destructive, provocative, and sometimes really nasty.

  I was diagnosed as being clinically depressed when I was thirty-five, but I think then, at fifteen, was the first time I suffered majorly from it. It was the 1970s. I was in Glasgow. Of course it was undiagnosed. You’d never heard of depression at that time. But I knew that even in Glasgow it wasn’t normal that I didn’t leave the house once for the entire summer. It wasn’t until I was thirty-five that I realized I had been clinically depressed for twenty years. No medication – except I supplied a lot of my own. I think it was the fact that I never confronted my depression which made me violent, argumentative, competitive to the point of being mental – probably all the reasons I made it in the music business.

  My dad fucked me up you see, but you could say in quite a brilliant way – it formed my personality and led to the success I had. In the end, there’s not much you can be scared of that’s worse than your own father trying to really hurt you.

  Punk changed everything when I was sixteen. It was a wake-up call. I remember when I first heard ‘God Save the Queen’, sitting my O-levels, still living with my parents. It was the end of probably the most depressing period of my life. The music was life-changing for me. I rushed out to buy ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols, ‘Go Buddy Go’ by the Stranglers and ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’ by the Ramones, all on the same day. I was like, fuck, I’m in to this.

  My first punk gig was the Ramones supported by the Rezillos. The Rezillos were amazing. I went with a girl I had a crush on. My mum’s pal’s daughter Caroline. I was too innocent then to even think about trying it on. I had only just left school.

  The first thing for me with punk wasn’t the politics or even the attitude, though there was a lot about the attitude that appealed to my hatred of bogus authority at home and at school. But first of all it was about the simplicity of the music, the way a few chords could sound so good, the way a singer with swagger could make music as good as a technically brilliant vocalist. It made me think that here was something I could do. Maybe I can be in a band. Before that, there wasn’t one thing I wanted I believed I could get, you see. I wasn’t thinking about running a record company or making lots of money or anything like that. But when I heard those songs I thought, I can do this, I could play guitar in a band like this. And maybe I don’t have to turn out like my dad.

  The music was so refreshing then. It was all Elton John and Rolls-Royces before that. And then you have Mick Jones arriving, saying he’s never lived anywhere lower than the fourteenth floor of a tower block. And though I didn’t live in a tower block, I thought yes, I understand that.

  I wasn’t surprised when I only got one O-level (in arithmetic). I’d never considered staying on for any more education and had always known that this would be the point in my life when I had to join the ‘real world’. My parents thought I should become a tradesman. If I was really lucky, I might end up a taxi-driver, but they thought probably the best I could hope for was an electrician. So I got a job as an apprentice electrician and immediately hated it. From one set of bullies to another. They used to send me up on these moving scaffolding towers on wheels. I think they’re illegal now – you had to climb up the outside of it. None of the men would do it. They’d say, you do it, you’re light, but they only said that because they knew that anyone who climbed up on it stood a good chance of coming off it and dying. That or being in a wheelchair for life. I used to climb to the ceiling of a gymnasium, up a fifty-foot scaffolding, and then put in halogen lamps. Completely fucking bonkers. I wish I could say I got used to it, but each time it was terrifying.

  I was only sixteen and surrounded by grown men, bullies a lot of them. They liked to do something nasty as an initiation for the new boys. Mine was that they pinned me down and painted my bollocks with bright red paint. And actually, it was pretty funny. I could take a joke. Then they tried to do it again another day. A big guy from Castlemilk leading the attempt. That was no fucking laughing matter at all. I picked up a metal bar and started swinging it at his head, chased him round the warehouse we were working in. I nearly caught him a couple of times when I threw it at his head. Good job I missed. It probably would have killed him. Maybe just maimed him. But it kept flying that frustrating inch or two just over his head.

  It was understood after that that I was a bit of a head-the-ball. On a short fuse, supposedly. They never tried to paint my balls again.

  My dad had always had a battered old acoustic lying around. He’d pretended to my mum he could play guitar to impress her, obviously without ever giving a demonstration, because he couldn’t play a fucking note. When I decided I was going to be in a band I started to play around on it, working out basslines. Then, when I became an apprentice electrician I bought myself a crap Japanese Stratocaster imitation with a terrible neck. I think it cost £70. I had one or two lessons but didn’t like them.

  My relationship with my dad had got worse now I’d discovered punk. He’d always suspected me of being gay since my obsession with Bowie (I was so in love with Bowie I wondered if I was gay myself), and now I’d started to wear eyeliner w
hen I went out. I was beginning to look like a Buzzcock. He couldn’t understand how he had managed to produce a man so completely unlike himself. I understand that: I’ve no idea how a man like him produced me either.

  I didn’t have to even be awake to provoke him. He’d get in from the Masons pissed and angry and come looking for me. He woke me up one time, my hands pinned below my sheet, and gave me five rabbit punches to the face. It was a Tom and Jerry-style doing. My head bounced back and forward against his fists and the pillow with my hands trapped and him staring down at me, furious about – about fucking what I don’t know. It sounds comical when I tell the story now, and it’s easier to tell it that way, but it wasn’t funny then. You can’t stay somewhere where you get assaulted in your sleep. I knew I had to get out. The next day I went round to Bobby’s and asked if I could stay there for a few days. His dad, who I’ve always looked up to, took me in. He didn’t judge my father: he knew the old man was frustrated, financially strapped. But he agreed to put me up, and he was an example to me of what a dad could be. Bobby’s family were pretty far ahead of their time: the only parents I knew who didn’t batter their kids.

  After that I found a bedsit in the West End of Glasgow. I had no money, just enough to pay the rent and eat, but it was enough. At least I was safe when I went to sleep at night.

  I hated my job and it was only punk that gave me hope of a different life. I wasn’t getting on too well with learning the guitar so I decided to buy myself a bass. I thought it might be easier playing one string at a time. I bought myself a cheap cherry-red Gibson SG copy – a heavy metal bass, really, though a lot of punk bands used them too. Now I just had to find a band. There was a show on Radio Clyde I used to listen to, the Brian Ford show. This was the punk show and definitely the main thing I listened to on the radio. I listened to John Peel a bit too, but he seemed miles away from my life. I never thought I’d move to London then: Glasgow was still the world. On the show Brian Ford would read out adverts from bands looking for members and that’s how I met Andrew Innes, who was looking for a bassist for his band the Drains. Even then, I thought, What a shit name. I think he was taking the piss. He’s always been a satirical bastard.

  The Drains was Innes on lead guitar and a posh guy on drums, Pete Buchanan. He was Innes’s next door neighbour. From a private school. We bullied him for two or three months then kicked him out. We used to really wind each other up too, but we were tough little bastards and we could give as much as we got. Bobby would start coming round and hanging out with us on Friday nights in Andrew’s bedroom. So putting those two together was the first of the many things I would do for Primal Scream, and they remain to this day the creative force of Primal Scream (now Throb’s left the band). The three of us formed an imaginary band that never left that bedroom, called Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Me and Innes would drink beer and play Clash, the Sex Pistols, even Sham 69. We never had a drummer. We never played a gig. Andrew had a Les Paul copy in cherry red. Bobby would sing a bit and bang some boxes but mostly roll around the floor like Iggy Pop. I’d be on the bed, pretending to be Glen Matlock. We wanted to be at a punk gig every Friday night and because we couldn’t we put it on ourselves. We were the audience and the band.

  Innes was a brilliant guitarist. He could play all the songs, everything by the Jam, everything by the Clash. He could play ‘Freebird’. He was a twisted fuck too, even at sixteen. He knew just what to say to me to upset me. But I knew just what to say to him to upset him.

  It was nothing serious: he’d call me a ginger cunt and I’d call him a speccy wee shite. Gillespie and I didn’t argue at all at that stage. Our music tastes merged into each other.

  It was Innes who taught me how to play my bass. He’d point out where to put my fingers. He’s a real musician; I’m a blagger. He taught me to be a punk bass player. It was the same with the Clash: Mick Jones taught Paul Simonon. All the punk bass players were taught on the job. Before too long I could hold my own in a punk band. We got a good-looking singer in, Jack Riley, and changed the band’s name from the Drains to Newspeak. (I’d just read 1984.) This was the dream. It was what kept me hopeful in those days.

  I chucked the electricians after six months. I just made tea and risked my neck changing light bulbs. I was learning fuck all. My dad was pissed off that I quit, but I didn’t have to listen to him so much any more now I’d moved out. Luckily, in those days there were jobs to be had and I managed to get one working for British Rail. This was pretty boring, putting wage packets together, but it wasn’t unbearable and the people were a good laugh there. You didn’t have to wear a tie, which suited the Buzzcocks-style Oxfam chic I was wearing in those days.

  It was here I met Yvonne, my first wife. She was one of the supervisor’s sisters, a couple of years younger than me. I met her at a work social event in the Pollokshields depot – she was selling cakes – and fancied her straight away but I didn’t think I stood a chance of going out with her. She was beautiful, with dark Italian looks. A few months after I’d first met her, she came to work for British Rail too, and we became good friends. She had a boyfriend, so for nine months all we were was pals.

  I turned eighteen in 1978. My father proudly gave me a form to fill in so I could join the Masons, like him. I was thinking, What the fuck, Dad? I’m a punk! Who ever heard of a punk joining the Masons? I enjoyed ripping up that form. That pissed him right off. And that pleased me enormously.

  And then, incredibly, Yvonne and her boyfriend split up. I wondered if I’d ever have the courage to tell her how I felt. Somehow I managed to mumble it out. And incredibly she told me she liked me and kissed me and we started going out. She was so beautiful. I was walking around in a state of amazement. I was so happy! I had a job, a flat, a band, a girlfriend.

  It was then that Andrew Innes told me we had to move to London.

  2: LONDON

  Andrew Innes, what a bastard. He wanted me to leave Glasgow just when life there was finally good. It had taken nineteen years to become good, and now he wanted me to start again in London!

  Well, I could have said no and stayed where I was. A lot of people would have thought that was the sensible thing to do. I had a girlfriend, my own place, a steady job. But Andrew was going and I knew my best chance to make it in a band was to stay with him. He’d taught me everything I knew about how to play music. So I decided to go with him, and that was the first time I picked music as a priority over Yvonne. It wouldn’t be the last. I think quite often about what would have happened if I hadn’t followed Andrew. There’d have been no Creation Records, that’s for sure. Maybe I’d have become a taxi-driver and fulfilled my parents’ ambitions for me. Had fifty conversations a day about Rangers. When the heart attack arrived, I’d have probably been glad.

  I said goodbye to Yvonne but we decided we would stay together and give long distance love a go.

  I quit my job and caught the train down with Andrew Innes. I took nothing with me except a new Yamaha bass guitar bought on credit and a very small bag of clothes. We had no plan except that we would arrive in London and become pop stars.

  We all lived in a bedsit in Tooting Bec, me, Andrew Innes and Jack Riley. It was survival of the fittest. Jack didn’t last long. He came from a nice family. Well, you know about mine, and Innes was born a twisted and dark human being independent of familial influence. We’re as acerbic as each other. Jack was a good-looking rich lad and had been having a whale of a time in Glasgow, living in his parents’ nice house, shagging all the girls. He should have been in the Police. Now he had to live with two vitriolic cunts who informed him on a minute-by-minute basis how much we hated him. You know how it is when you’re that age, or maybe you don’t. We were cruel and we were nasty and we loved it. There was a bitterness in me, a rage at those who had had it so much easier than me. When you think the world doesn’t want to let you into its club you can either give up trying or make yourself sharp like a knife and try to stab your way through. I’m sorry for it now. Jack was
a bit soft and didn’t stand a chance against me and Innes. Off he went back to Glasgow and Innes took over singing duties. We changed the name of the band at this point too, from Newspeak to the Laughing Apple (you’d have to ask Andrew why).

  We needed a drummer and I found one, when I walked past this punk girl with bright pink hair and got chatting to her. Do you know any drummers? I asked. Of course she did, she had one on the sofa back at her place, a lovely guy but with a bad smack problem. He kept his kit in a squat on St Alphonsus Road in Clapham and when we ran out of money Andrew and I moved in there. It was really run down in those days. The place was full of guys who were on the run from the army, deserters. All of them with no hope, with the threat of military prison hanging over them. It was a heavy drug scene, the first time I saw people injecting heroin. I’d never seen any drugs until then. Bobby, Innes, me, we were all innocents in that respect.

  I’ve always been grateful that it was there that I first saw heroin. It was definitely good for me. If I’d seen people shooting up in a more glamorous setting, I think I would have fallen for it later in life. I mean, I got addicted to every other drug going. I remember watching a guy inject in this horrible, dark, damp room in Clapham and thinking, No, that’s not for me.

  After a couple of months of that I’d had enough. I’d got a job working for the railways again. I was a stores clerk. It was the most boring job in the world. People would come in and ask for thirty-two bolts and then I was supposed to fill in a form and give them thirty-two bolts. But I’d never do the paperwork. I used to take it all home in my bag and dump it in the bin. I had to work with a guy called Tony who was a total div. He was the stores supervisor and OCD about everything. I don’t think he liked Scottish people, and definitely not Scottish people like me. It was with great joy that I used to take home the entire week’s paperwork and dump it. It was so boring. I couldn’t face it. It took them a couple of years to find out it was all missing, by which time I was off. When I left I used to torment Tony by sending him postcards from the Jesus and Mary Chain tours I’d go on. From Tokyo, New York, Paris. Missing you Tony, love Alan. I knew he’d receive them sitting in his horrible little storage hut, where he’d be till he got his pension, and he would hate me. I kept that up for a couple of years.