by Mcgee, Alan
After a couple of months of Joe Foster and me drinking all of the profits from the Living Room away, the McGee work ethic kicked in and I decided with Joe to use the money to start putting records out. Running the club had been very useful too. Being on the door of the place everyone was trying to get into, I’d ended up getting known and made lots of new pals. The journalists were all coming along, and they all knew my face now.
We called the label Creation, after the band again, and with a lot of influence from Whaam!. The punk spirit and the melodies of 1960s psychedelic pop – that was the concept for the label. But the first record we ever brought out – in August 1983 – was by the Legend and it was fucking awful. I played the drums and Jerry chanted over the top. At the time I was shocked people didn’t think it was a work of genius. We were crucified. My favourite fanzine Jamming! described it as ‘totally worthless’. It took me six months before I dared attempt another record.
We did twelve singles before I found the Jesus and Mary Chain and we had our first hit. The Pastels, the Jasmine Minks, Revolving Paint Dream and the Loft all followed.
Of these, I thought the Jasmine Minks had the best chance of making it. They were the first band we took seriously in that respect. They were from Aberdeen. It was fronted by Jim Shepherd and Adam Sanderson and they both wrote songs. There aren’t many bigger characters in the history of the label than Hans Christian Sanderson, as we called him: he was an incredible teller of tall tales. They were all great people. We released their records till 1989. Majors were sniffing around them but it came to nothing. They should have made it, and maybe they did make it, maybe making it is the joy in making the records you wanted to make and getting to tour them around Britain and Europe. They seemed happy with that – they weren’t desperate to be pop stars. They had a punk ethos in that respect. Hans Christian ended up coming to work for Creation, answering the phones for a year, in the days of Hackney madness.
Revolving Paint Dream was just another name for Andrew Innes. He played most of the instruments himself, recorded one of my songs actually, ‘In the Afternoon’. On one version I sing, on another it’s his girlfriend. I’d steal songs from him and put them out with Biff Bang Pow! There was no preciousness about songs – we’d swap them all the time, not care about who got credited. ‘Someone Stole the Wheels’ for Biff Bang Pow! was one of Andrew’s for example.
The Loft were fronted by Pete Astor. When I first met Pete Astor I thought he was a pretentious prick. He’s a well-spoken posh lad, and we were all rough Scottish lads. You make snap judgements that are not really fair, because he’s a lovely lad. Back then, I thought he thought he was better than me. I began to realize the Loft could play really well watching them at the Living Room and signed them. Just before they split up they were getting a lot of radio play from Janice Long for ‘Up the Hill and Down the Slope’ – that was a tune. Perhaps if they’d stayed together they could have ridden that momentum and sold a few records. But it was inevitable they were going to split up: because Pete Astor absolutely hated two members of the band. They seemed oblivious to it. I wasn’t: he wouldn’t stop telling me how much he hated them. The drummer always seemed stoned, which may be why he didn’t annoy anyone or notice that the rest of the band hated each other, and when Pete split the band he came with him and formed the Weather Prophets.
We put out the Pastels too, though that wasn’t much fun. I’ve got nothing against Stephen Pastel – he’s coming from a good place, still busy with his shop and events and his band these days. But he always had such romantic ideas and it was hard to socialize with him then. In those days all the bands would stop with me and Yvonne in our house on Beaconsfield Road when they were playing London gigs. The Pastels were the most awkward people I’d ever met. I don’t know who they thought me and Yvonne were but they seemed terrified of us. We ended up dropping the band twice. Stephen had fallen out with Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and left them and we released the Pastels’ single ‘Something Going On’, which got some nice reviews. Then we put out ‘I Wonder Why’ and his guitar player called me and accused me of owing him £100 that I was sure I didn’t owe him. It was all a misunderstanding but for that we threw them off the label. I think Joe Foster re-signed them after that to do an album but I heard that before they’d even gone into record the songs they’d had an argument and they and Joe Foster had gone their separate ways.
We made a formal deal with Rough Trade, who had been distributing and selling my records since I pressed up the Laughing Apple singles. It was a straightforward P & D deal (production and distribution). I thought it was shit. They took 25 per cent off the top, despite all their bullshit about being a workers’ cooperative. Although I respected Rough Trade for what Geoff Travis had pulled off with the Cartel, I hated the ethos there from day one. The offices and the warehouse were up in Blenheim Crescent, off Ladbroke Grove. It was the most unsafe warehouse in the world: anyone could have wandered in off the street and stolen as many records as they wanted. While I liked the music fans on the warehouse floor I thought the bosses were preachy and hypocritical. You’d find out that they’d been to Eton, or that their dad was a merchant banker, and yet there was all this ‘up the workers’ crap and big bowls of communal brown rice for everyone to eat. It was pretend poverty. I had actually been poor; I didn’t aspire to be poor. As soon as I could, I was going to be a champagne and sirloin steak kind of guy and there was no way I’d be ashamed of it.
I was getting better and better at handling the music press. There wasn’t anyone else out there with my self-belief. By 1985 I was being quoted in Sounds: ‘I run the greatest record label in the world.’ Deep down I knew it wasn’t true, but I knew there was no way you could become the greatest record label in the world without people believing you were. I’d use any trick I could to rise out of indie obscurity and I knew no one else had the balls to make these kinds of claims.
The music press had always found me amusing. I was a breath of fresh air after all the worthy brown-rice-for-tea bollocks the likes of Rough Trade would spout to them. They loved the cocky persona, certainly at first. And when they decided I was too cocky, roughly 1988–1994, I barely did any interviews with them.
It was beginning to feel to me like maybe Creation could do something. But it was only a dream then. It took signing my first great rock and roll band in 1984 for me to really start to believe that I could make that dream a reality.
3: THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
The Jesus and Mary Chain were Bobby Gillespie’s discovery. You can’t underestimate Bobby’s importance to Creation. He’s been like a member of staff at times, an unofficial A&R man. When Bobby first heard the band they were called the Poppy Seeds and Alan Horne at Postcard had turned them down. Everyone had turned them down. It was doubtful whether anyone had even listened to the demos. William and Jim Reid sent them out from their bedroom in East Kilbride and never heard anything back. Do you know East Kilbride? One of the new towns that people from Glasgow were shifted to in the 1960s when it had run out of places for people to live. It looks like Milton Keynes, a drab place, no character. Though whether the band would have been any cheerier if they’d come from somewhere more lively is another matter.
The way Bobby had come across them was a mad chance thing. They’d sent a demo taped on the back of a Syd Barrett bootleg to a promoter in Glasgow called Nick Lowe. Nick Lowe didn’t think much of them but heard the Syd Barrett bootleg and knew Bobby would like it. When Bobby listened to the Poppy Seeds songs on the other side, he absolutely loved them. The tape had Douglas’s number on and Bobby called him up at his mum’s house and made friends with the band, started planning joint shows with the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. After a while Bobby told them about me, about the Living Room, the club I ran in London.
On Bobby’s recommendation I booked them for their first London gig in June 1984 – we’d moved venue again to the Roebuck on Tottenham Court Road – and they came down.
I remember the moment
they wandered into the pub. They were punk rockers from East Kilbride, six years too late. Scruffy clothes, hanging together. The Reid brothers, William and Jim, they looked like a punk version of the Bay City Rollers. What I mean is, they looked like they were punks by accident, like they could easily have been something else. Don’t get me wrong, they looked cool, but there was something wrong about it too, a small-town version of a movement that was dead. Douglas Hart, the bassist, was the most striking. He looked like a film star. He was only seventeen. Wandering round in motorcycle boots, tall as fuck and skinny.
So we said hello and told them when they were on and they sat down and started sinking pints. Lots of pints.
The demo we’d heard of the band was okay. Buzzsaw guitar, it sounded like the Ramones’ fourth album. So I wasn’t expecting wonders but when they got on stage they were fucking unbelievable.
A lot of that was down to Joe Foster. He was in control of the PA, which meant no one was in control of the PA. He didn’t know how to work a PA! He said he did but he just used to fiddle around with the knobs and eventually turn everything up to ten. William had never played a gig before and had no idea how to control his amplifier. When they started playing the feedback was outrageous. Howling. I’d never heard a noise that visceral. But buried beneath that were these great pop songs. The crowd was absolutely bewildered. The band looked like they were about to have a fight. They played ‘Vegetable Man’ and ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘Ambition’. The feedback kept screaming, getting louder and louder. William was crouched by his amp with his guitar. It was hard to know if he was trying to stop it or make it even louder. And at the end of it they all attacked the drummer! Kicked his drums over and started kicking him round the stage. I loved it! As soon as they’d finished I ran up and said, ‘Can I sign you?’
At that time I didn’t really think they’d sell loads of records but I did think we might get them as big as the Cramps, who they really loved.
They were all very shy at the beginning. I had different relationships with all of them. I became very good friends with Jim, the lead singer. He wasn’t as temperamentally miserable as William, but he must have felt he had to be out of family duty. His brother William, well, William didn’t really get me. We’ve never really got each other. We had such different personalities. William’s probably a lovely guy if you can tune into him – I could never understand the controls on the television. He was the shyer one. He gave the impression of being really annoyed we were imposing on his life of being a hermit in East Kilbride. William is the better guitarist, better songwriter, the original talent – he’d write two songs for every one of Jim’s. He was a genius guitar player, and I don’t mean that lightly. No one else sounded like him. He wasn’t good in the conventional technical sense; there was only one band in the world he could have played for, and luckily he did. Jim was more of a natural rock star than William. In his head he probably thought he was the Lizard King. Jim was the best rock star, the most charismatic; William the best musician. Neither one of them will want to see it like that! But the best bands normally have that rub, that personality clash, that combination of different skills.
Bobby wasn’t originally the drummer. We drafted him in to replace Murray Dalglish. Murray’s dad was advising him he should be getting £100 a gig! And they were playing for £50 a night in London to twelve people! No wonder they liked to assault him on stage. When he left we got Bobby in. Bobby knew exactly what kind of a drummer he’d be. One snare, one floor tom, playing a simple beat standing up like Maureen Tucker out of the Velvet Underground. He looked cool as fuck.
The first thing we had to do was record them but that was harder than it sounded. For one, the sound that I’d signed them for had been a complete fluke of circumstance caused by Joe Foster’s ineptitude and a dodgy sound system. Their sound had been created then and there at that gig by an alchemy of fuck-ups and now the band needed persuading that was their sound. William and Jim weren’t having it at all. We had to get Douglas Hart and Bobby Gillespie to convince them. It had been pure alchemy at that first gig, the feedback and their pop songs combining together in a way that was absolutely magical.
We recorded ‘Upside Down’ in September 1984 at Alaska Studios under a railway arch in Waterloo. It was a typical Creation recording session of that time. The cheapest you could book was for an overnighter, starting at midnight, normally dead time for a studio. We didn’t have a promising lead-up to the session. Before they’d come to London they’d played a gig in Glasgow where they’d been thrown off stage in less than five minutes and down the stairs of the club with their equipment following behind them. We’d had the band playing gigs all week in London, one a night, and they were going to be getting the coach home in the morning after a week of heavy drinking and on-stage fighting during which they’d managed to break their drum kit. So, in the studio, Joe Foster had to break into the locker of another band’s and steal theirs. (‘Why didn’t you just ring us and ask?’ they asked him later. ‘It was one in the morning,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to be rude.’)
Joe Foster was the producer of all the sessions back then. But when we listened to the recording, it was too clean, too weak. Joe mixed the feedback too low. So me and William went in and turned the feedback right back up again, arguing all the way with the engineer who kept telling us we couldn’t do what we were doing, that it would sound awful, that it broke every rule in the book.
He said it would be impossible to master. We ignored him.
I thought the end result sounded amazing. As close as you could get to the live sound. The Reid brothers unsurprisingly thought it was shit to start off with. They thought everything was shit to start off with. If they won the lottery it would put them in a bad mood.
And then it was the first tour for the Jesus and Mary Chain, in Germany. It was November 1984 and it was them, us (Biff Bang Pow!) and the Jasmine Minks. We hired a bus and off we went. The plan was to swap the headliners every night but after a couple of gigs we all got together and agreed the Mary Chain had to be the headliners. It was awful to follow them; they were just killing it every night. It would have been like having a Mini headline over a jumbo jet.
I first started getting into drugs on that tour. Joe Foster was on the bus still thinking he was Bob Dylan so there was a lot of speed there. We’d be washing it down with Polish vodka.
When we got back from touring Europe there was a great review by Neil Taylor in the NME. The Jesus and Mary Chain were the new Sex Pistols, he said!
I met Jeff Barrett for the first time then. They were the days we all wore leather trousers. Ours were fitted but Jeff’s were ahead of his time: he had the Happy Mondays look, in leather. Jeff had booked the Jesus and Mary Chain to play in Plymouth immediately after they’d got back from the European tour. We found it hard to get audiences for the band in London so I didn’t really believe he’d get any people to show up. But he did a brilliant job promoting it. First he rang the local radio station to wind them up. ‘They’re blasphemous, you know, they incite riots. They’re coming here!’ That sort of thing. I was doing it myself too. The local newspaper got hold of it and the gig sold out. There were cops, reporters, and loads of teenagers. Yeah, I thought, I like your style. Jeff was a brilliant guy, an enthusiast, believed in what we doing in the same way we believed. ‘What the fuck are you doing down here?’ I asked him, and it wasn’t long before I’d invited him to join the gang in London. He ended up working as our publicist, before he set up and had great success with Heavenly records.
‘Upside Down’ took a while to get going. Number 34 in the indie chart in its first week. Bobby had printed the sleeves for a thousand copies and sent them down from the printers he worked at in Glasgow. Then the press coverage of the gigs started and the radio play on John Peel’s show every night and suddenly Joe Foster and I were banging speed up our noses in my house and desperately trying to fold sleeves for thousands of records. Bobby would have more sleeves printed and sent down; we’d
fold them into little plastic bags with the records. Fifty thousand records in the end – it was incredible numbers. We couldn’t fold the sleeves fast enough and as soon as we’d done a box someone at Rough Trade would whisk them away and onto a lorry.
I knew then that we weren’t big enough to keep the Jesus and Mary Chain, but I was their manager as well as their label. (I don’t remember asking to be their manager, I don’t remember them asking me to be their manager, I just somehow was their manager.) I had a job to do and a commission to earn by finding them a good deal on a bigger label. Geoff Travis at Rough Trade had a new label, Blanco y Negro, which acted like an indie but was a puppet label of Warner Brothers. Whether he wore sandals or not, Travis was an A&R man for a major label. The meeting took place in Glasgow, in my mum and dad’s front room. I’ve seen this written up as me trying to provoke Travis by insisting he travel to Scotland. But the band lived in Scotland then, it was convenient for them! The truth of the matter is, I hadn’t been on a plane in a while and I fancied going on one to see them. It wasn’t me being Malcolm McLaren, it was me being a kid who wanted to go on a plane! The meeting went okay. The brothers were typically upbeat, staring at my mum’s carpet as if their own mum had just died, but Geoff said the right things. They saw him as a good halfway house: someone with indie values but the power of the corporation.
So he won the race and things started to move really quickly then. ‘Upside Down’ was still climbing, 12 to 6 on the indie chart at the start of December. Before Christmas they went into the studio to record a single with Stephen Street, who’d produced all the Smiths records. It was a disaster, and it wasn’t the last disaster one of my bands would have with Stephen Street. He wanted to rub off the edges, turn down the feedback, record the instruments one by one. The Smiths were technically brilliant musicians; my bands were punk and relied more on energy than precision. We abandoned those recordings and went back to Alaska, this time with an engineer called Noel Thompson. He did what he was told, left things visceral and screaming, and the recording was just right.