by Mcgee, Alan
The album wouldn’t be out till September but they were starting to do gigs and had recruited Denise Johnson to tour with them for the rest of the year. They were going to be very different shows to the ones they’d toured Primal Scream with.
My Bloody Valentine finally recorded the vocals for Loveless during May and June in 1991. The end was in sight. We found Shields yet another studio where he thought he could finish the album. Dick Green was in a bad way, so stressed about the numbers that were about to doom us. I thought maybe there was light at the end of the tunnel. Then Shields decided the studio wasn’t working after all. That was when I started to weep down the phone line again at him. It was September or something when he finally finished. It takes a day or two to master an album. Shields took thirteen. But after those thirteen days, it was done.
We rushed out ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ in August, and it failed to go Top 40. Each single had done worse than the last and so it was a frightening time leading up to the release of Screamadelica. We’d already released half the album as singles. It wasn’t new to us, more like a compilation album of singles and extra tracks. Would people feel they were being cheated?
We hoped not. We were happy with the way the new tracks had gone. I’d suggested we bring in Jimmy Miller as a producer for some tracks, the legendary producer of some of the Rolling Stones’ best albums, from Beggars Banquet to Goats Head Soup. I’d met him at New Music Seminar in New York in 1989. He had a bright red face and, Okay, I thought, he’s a fucking alcoholic. Like I could care less. He played me a track he’d been working on with another band and it sounded exactly like it could have come from Exile on Main St. I realized immediately this is his sound – and the next thought was, I can apply this to Primal Scream. They learned a lot from Jimmy Miller. He taught them how to get the groove that the Stones had. It was about using cowbells on the off-beats, hand claps and different percussion. Call and response with the vocals and the guitars.
The Scream anyway have always been the world’s biggest Rolling Stones fans, and what’s brilliant about that band is that they don’t see any contradiction in starting their acid house album with a Jimmy Miller-produced song that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Stones album. ‘Movin’ On Up’ is a perfect start to the album. It’s an acoustic guitar riff you hear first that Innes made up, then Duffy’s classic piano, Miller’s touch bringing in the congas and shakers, Bobby calling and a gospel choir and Throb’s guitar solos responding. The whole band’s happy. It’s the start of a weekend, the start of a bender!
The tour to accompany the album would be ferociously hedonistic. It wasn’t all about ecstasy any more. The irony was that the Es started getting shit just as Primal Scream released their perfect ecstasy album. You still got good ones occasionally but more and more they were cut with smack, and that gave you such a different buzz – it erected boundaries between you and other people rather than broke them down. I’d switched more or less completely to coke by then and there was a lot of coke on the Primals’ tour too. Not that I ever saw myself as a cocaine addict. I was an everythingist. Whatever was going, I’d have some of it.
But the spirit of collaboration on Screamadelica was something very in keeping with the way ecstasy and the acid house scene broke down boundaries. It had changed the way Primal Scream made music forever.
We thought we had recorded one of the best albums of all time, but we thought it would remain a cult classic, maybe sell 50,000 copies if we were lucky. Fuck were we wrong.
We’d sold all 50,000 of those by the Thursday of the week it came out. We’d never done anything like it.
The tour that accompanied it was Rolling Stones madness, Cocksucker Blues-style. Heroin had made an appearance and some of them had started freebasing cocaine too, which was a horrible thing. They loved it and I tried it with them a couple of times. There’d be about six of us round a table, smoking cocaine through a pipe made out of a water bottle and tinfoil, and by the time two people had had their turn after you, you wanted to kill them, because you were so desperate again for a hit. They called it ‘going on the pipe’. It was always, I remember, a Vittel bottle. It was their Brighton version of crack.
I really hated it. It was so dark. It brought out the snidey snidey versions of us all. What I loved about E was it brought out the good versions of us all. But the Primals, they were obsessed with the dark side of life. And they loved it because it brought out the worst sides of their character.
As I’ve got older I’ve got more interested in the dark sides of our natures, but then I wanted to be happy. I wasn’t happy a lot of the time, but I was trying! They were almost trying for the opposite. Out of curiosity I guess. It was such a dark phase. It was antisocial. I hated it.
We had to kick the reporters out of the dressing rooms when they started reporting what was going on in there. It was fun to start with, but it quickly got frightening.
During all this time I became very glad I’d moved to Pinnacle because Rough Trade distribution completely collapsed. For a while it took out Rough Trade records, Mute, 4AD, and pretty much everyone bar Factory, us, and One Little Indian. We were probably the eighth or ninth biggest independent label before it went down, and afterwards we were number two. I felt bad for a lot of the labels, some of whom never recovered from it. But I didn’t feel sad for Rough Trade. They’d taken the piss for ages with the percentage they charged us and always treated me like I was an oik, even when I was making them a lot of money. Me and Joe Foster partied like we’d never before. We danced on their graves. It was a glorious week. For us it was like the death of Thatcher.
I did my best to forget it but the House of Love still existed and I was their manager. My relationship with them was awful now. I couldn’t really hide that I thought they were all such babies, and I was still furious that they’d thrown out Bickers. They invited me along to the studio one day and Chadwick tried to bollock me for not being interested enough. When I said I didn’t want to manage them any more he begged me to stay. I did, but I should have quit straight away.
The album actually wasn’t doing that badly by then. It sold about 500,000 copies worldwide in the end so it wasn’t as big a disaster as it’s made out. It did really well in France, though we nearly didn’t notice. A woman rang me up from Phonogram in Paris. ‘Do you have any idea what’s going on in France?’ she asked me. We’d put the record out there about nine months ago and sold about 10,000 copies.
‘What’ve you done, about 20,000 copies?’ I asked, feeling optimistic.
‘Alan, we’ve done 100,000 copies,’ she said. ‘I need you to tour over here immediately.’
And House of Love were suddenly massive pop stars in France. They played two nights at the Olympia, where the Rolling Stones play if they come to Paris, and then we did a sold-out regional tour to at least 2,000 people a night. You can never predict what the French will like. Pete Astor was really big there. Pete Doherty is massive there now. Once they’ve decided they like something, they just don’t take it off the radio.
But I was much more interested in the success of Creation by then. So when Guy finally sacked me I wasn’t at all surprised. I hadn’t called him for five weeks, I didn’t really give him any option. He expected me to be gutted and was annoyed at how well I took the news.
I look back on the early days with House of Love as being great times. We were good mates. Then the money corrupted everything. Guy nearly got himself a butler, for Christ’s sake. He thought he was royalty. Suddenly I was managing Mick Jagger. He was known as a lunatic in the Creation offices. He’d ring from a tour in America, out of his mind, at what was eleven in the morning for us and three in the morning for him, just to flirt with the receptionist. I should feel guilty, I guess, for getting them that big deal. But I would much rather have kept them on Creation: I just did what they’d hired me to do.
One thing was for sure: I was glad not to be involved in the recording of the next record, Babe Rainbow. It was enough to have My Bloody Vale
ntine and Primal Scream on my hands.
Ride spent the summer of 1991 doing European festivals and preparing their new album which was to come out in 1992. Andy Bell met his wife Idha while he was in Sweden.
They were changing their sound then. All the sixties records I’d played them had made their mark. They were more distinctive at the start but they wanted to try a cleaner, less effects-driven sound, without the quiet bit then loud bit structure that worked well for them on Nowhere.
Their first single from the new album was amazing – an eight-minute powerhouse called ‘Leave Them All Behind’ which was easy to mistake for an instrumental as the vocals didn’t come in for a good two minutes. It was a statement of intent I guess – they didn’t want to be part of any ‘shoegazing’ scene. It was an ambitious record. When you have a young band delivering you something that shows they’re wanting to stretch themselves – you’d be dead if you didn’t get excited. I suppose there were poppier choices of singles we could have chosen. But we were Creation, we were pioneers – we loved bands who pushed things forward. And so did record buyers – the single went straight in at number 9.
The year 1991 ended with us releasing two masterpieces in the same month.
Loveless by My Bloody Valentine was an incredible album, no way of disputing it. It arrived on 11 November in the shops, more than two years late. It did well, and we reached 50,000 sales quite quickly. It’s sold steadily ever since and I still make money from publishing it today. But back then I couldn’t really listen to it, it had been too hard an experience, it wasn’t something I wanted to think about. Dick Green never played it. We’d been smashed by the whole experience. We were proud that it existed, but we were never going to do it again. You can only do so much crying on the phone. It wouldn’t have worked a third time.
The third masterpiece of the year after Screamadelica and Loveless was Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub. It was a brilliant record, a lovely pop record, with great harmonies.
This was the biggest surprise because when I signed the band I never thought they’d ever be more than ‘indie big’. Their last single ‘God Knows It’s True’, released by Paperhouse in the UK, had been indie big, played on the radio in the evenings. I thought we’d sell 30,000 copies of an album.
They sold 400,000 copies of Bandwagonesque worldwide. Half of those were sold by Creation in the UK and Europe: the other half by Geffen in America. America got them straight away – it was their classic rock sound, with the heavy guitars of grunge. Kurt Cobain was a fan. They did great live shows, full of banter and charisma.
I always thought they didn’t become as big in America as they could have. They could have been massive. The reason why they weren’t bigger is actually quite simple: they just didn’t want to be.
Teenage Fanclub didn’t want to play the game. It’s not for everyone. There were people jumping out of the cupboards who they didn’t want to know. The real music business in America took interest, and these people are different to the guys you find on indie labels. They’re not cool. They’re corporate as fuck.
In the end Teenage Fanclub were happier being the big group in Glasgow, a big group on Creation, than in smashing America with Geffen. Success isn’t just about talent, it’s about aspiration. Noel Gallagher wanted more than anything to be in the biggest band in the world, and he wouldn’t stop believing that. I wouldn’t stop believing it for him either. It wasn’t plain sailing for them – Liam and Noel were walking off US tours to start with, but when they realized what they had to do, they did it. With Teenage Fanclub, there was an element of self-sabotage in the way they went about their next album. It’s a Glasgow thing, of wanting to be cool rather than big. It’s why I offend the Glasgow music scene so much – because I’ve never hidden that I’d rather be big than cool. It sounds crass to go on about wanting success, but there’s nothing wrong with ambition. It was why I loved it in America and they loved me. It was so refreshing. In Britain you have to be embarrassed about any success you’re having. Americans loved me because I didn’t have any of this embarrassment. I’d say it straight: I want to make loads of money, how do I do it? What do I have to do to become successful? Someone would tell me who to talk to, and I’d knock on their door and talk to them.
I was flying to America at least twice a month by 1991. I loved it. But I was flying on seriously heavy fuel by now and, high as I was, I wondered sometimes how long it would be until I crashed. There would be a big explosion if I ever did.
10: MILLIONAIRE
By 1992 I was flagging. The pressure hadn’t let up for a second. Dick didn’t want me to be crazy Alan McGee all the time in the office but he needed me to be that with the Americans, to turn up mouthing off about having found the biggest bands in the world. He’d try to make me look at the figures and take his advice but I wasn’t willing to listen to him most of the time. I’d decided I was going to do it my way. My energy came from booze and pills and lines and whatever else might give me a bump. It was a lonely lifestyle sometimes. That’s why meeting Tim Abbott was such a relief for me. It didn’t make me any less tired, high or deranged, but at least I had some company. I first met him in Birmingham. I’d gone up one night with Bobby in 1991 when ‘Come Together’ was in the charts. We were there for a Heavenly gig, Saint Etienne and the Manic Street Preachers, which Tim was promoting. Nicky Wire had a dig at Bobby Gillespie during ‘We Love Us’, shouting, ‘Yeah, let’s all come together!’ before going into one of their mad punk songs. Bobby didn’t care one bit. We went back to Tim’s gaff for an afterparty, whereupon he produced ten more Es. I liked his style immediately. He was working as a management consultant and running a club called The Better Way at weekends. He knew where to get brilliant pills and was one of the few people who still could in 1991 and 1992. Anyway, I invited him to the office in Hackney to do an audit of something or other. Not the type of thing we had spent a great deal of time worrying about in the past, hence the financial disarray we were often in. I ended up offering him a job and he moved down to London.
He had some good ideas that saved us money – like stopping outsourcing the artwork and getting our own art director. He definitely saved us money there. He was good at his job, though a lot of people in the office hated him. He was an unknown quantity. He’d arrived from nowhere and started doing time and effectiveness studies on them. Nothing of the kind had ever been attempted in the Creation offices. They were thinking, Who the fuck are you? The fact was, he was my mate and I was in charge, so I could bring him in if I wanted. And I wanted to. They didn’t have to like it and they didn’t. I think they all thought I’d given him a job just because he loved drugs and bad behaviour as much as me.
Well, if that was true to begin with, what was wrong with that? People not liking what I was doing was often what most firmly convinced me to do it.
For two years we ran riot together. I moved him into ‘the Bunker’: the office Dick and I occupied in the basement. It was a bit of a boys’ club in there. My wall was covered in pictures of Helena Christensen and Kate Moss and other supermodels. It’s just totally sexist! said Belinda, whenever she came into the office. Yeah, she was probably right.
Abbott’s wall was worse though: pictures of prison riots and mutilated people, people shot to bits in America, sick stuff like that. And there was a big homage to Chris Eubank there too. Abbott and me loved his fuck-you attitude to the world.
Dick’s wall was a bit more practical. Some charts. Release dates. You’d look at Dick’s side of the room occasionally and surprise yourself by remembering you worked for a record label.
Sex on my wall, death on Abbott’s, flowcharts on Dick’s.
I wonder sometimes if we pretty much invented Loaded magazine’s idea of lad culture down there. This was January 1992, before that kind of lad iconography was fashionable. We were the trailblazers. I think James Brown might have copied that from us when he launched his magazine a year later. He must have been down to the Bunker. And he did call his magazine
Loaded. And he did become addicted to drugs.
It wasn’t unusual that Abbott would rack out a line of coke at two in the afternoon. And if he did one, I’d do one. And then I’d pick up the phone and rattle off whatever abuse came to mind at whoever came to mind. That was when Creation was fucking great fun. We spent a couple of years on the absolute razzle dazzle.
Poor Dick. He must have been thinking, How have I got myself into this situation with this pair of loonies? I wouldn’t have liked to meet myself in those days if I wasn’t on drugs. I don’t know how he coped with the pair of us. I think he had enough of me then to last him a lifetime. I love the man very much, but it’s probably not a coincidence we’ve only seen each other three times in the last thirteen years. Having to cope with my behaviour on a long-term basis might have had an adverse effect on the friendship.
Having said that, I don’t want to make out that Dick was boring. Far from it. He’d come out and enjoy himself too. But not like us. He had a family back home. We didn’t and we were extreme. Abbott was single (he normally was). Belinda and I had moved in together that year to a flat in Rotherhithe but she would always be leaving and going to stay with her parents in Sheffield. In the end I moved out of the flat we shared and into a penthouse flat in the same block with Grant Fleming and Karen Parker. I loved Belinda, don’t get me wrong. I did. But we were on and off. She’d come and stay with me in the penthouse for a while but she was always leaving me. I was too much for her. She couldn’t keep up with the lifestyle. I’m not proud of that. No one could keep up apart from Abbott. We were running riot together.
These days, we ring up and moan to each other about our backs. How the train to London hurts mine, how his bag hurts his – and he tells me we’re like two characters from Last of the Summer Wine. But in those days we lived it large.