by Mcgee, Alan
‘This is rubbish. I hate it.’
‘I fucking hate it too.’
‘Do you want to carry it on?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t wanted to carry it for four or five years now.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ I asked.
‘I thought you wanted to carry on.’
He’d wanted to go from the beginning of Britpop!
Well, that was that then. It felt like a huge relief.
Sony weren’t happy that I was quitting. Paul Russell would have liked to keep me on and strip the company right back, make three-quarters of the staff redundant, drop all the acts apart from the big four: Oasis, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Super Furry Animals.
But I just wanted out, to quit while we were ahead. Bobby was upset – he’d been involved since day one and believed in what we were doing and he was about to release what he thought was Primal Scream’s best album. We told Oasis in November. Liam was disappointed too. He thought I was abandoning him to the tabloids. There was quite a gap in our ages and perhaps he found it helpful to have me around as a sort of father figure. Noel was much more cool about it. ‘We won,’ he said. ‘They didn’t.’
We were going to shut up shop after the fourth Oasis album in 2000, but Oasis decided to start their own label, Big Brother, and license it to Sony. The Sony accountants looked at the huge operating costs we had and decided to pull the plug earlier than we’d intended. They were going to take the big four successful bands, Oasis, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Super Furry Animals, and let everyone else go. I felt sad for artists like Ed Ball, who lost their musical outlet.
The staff took it badly when we told them we were closing. They hated me for my decision, saw it as a betrayal. I understood that. A lot of people had their dream job at Creation. But the times were changing. They didn’t understand that they would nearly all have got the sack whether I’d continued or not. It was unsustainable and Sony were moving in to drastically change the way it was run. It was a glorious impractical love affair, and it was incredible really that it had lasted so long.
I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone and I’m sorry if I did. But I’d never promised to be their dad.
Shutting early meant that the last Creation album, very appropriately, was by Primal Scream. XTRMNTR. Exterminator. It was released on 31 January 2000. We kept some people on till April to manage that record. But for most of the staff Creation was dead from January. I never went in again.
20: THE LIBERTINES
It was exciting to imagine how my new record company could be. Creation had become as corporate as a major by the end and I wanted to try to recapture some of the fun and energy of the label’s first days, when we had been a small gang filled with passion. We had six months between the end of Creation and the start of Poptones, during which I’d kept busy with Malcolm for Mayor. Poptones was started with six people, with Joe Foster as a partner and the head of A&R, the very man who I’d first set up Creation with. (Dick Green went with Mark Bowen to start Wichita, which he still runs to this day, and which has had lots of success with Bloc Party, the Cribs, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.) I was more and more interested in the internet. Joe Foster and I had been doing internet radio broadcasts at the end of Creation – great fun – and I wanted Poptones to be pioneering in the way it used the internet.
The initial idea for Poptones was exciting but too ahead of its time: a purely digital label. A website, MP3 downloads, a community and straight to the consumer without the need for record shops. I thought we could change the whole model. We were trying to do iTunes before iTunes had taken off. But the technology and the rest of the industry were lagging behind, and so we ended up pressing records as usual. Our first record was Seventeen Stars by the Montgolfier Brothers, a baroque, cinematic classic that almost no one has ever heard.
In September 2000 my daughter Charlie was born in the Portland hospital. We had music playing and she chose to come out to ‘Higher Than The Sun’. It was an amazing moment. Watching a child being born and growing up humbles you. I was determined to be there for her, that this time things would go right. She’s been the apple of my eye ever since.
Our first big band was the Hives in 2002. I saw them on German TV first actually, on Viva 2. I loved them and so did my young colleagues Ian Johnson and Al Hake, who knew every band known to man. It was just my thing, high energy garage rock. They found out they had two albums out but had only sold about 600 records worldwide. We put an album together from the two they had put out already and called it Your New Favourite Band. I chose the single, ‘Hate to Say I Told You So’, and that became their big record that made them famous. We broke them through TV shows, through the four biggest music shows in the UK including Later . . . with Jools Holland. Ended up selling about 400,000 copies. It was a hell of a start.
But ultimately Poptones never became what I’d hoped it would be, a forward looking company with the old Creation spirit. We didn’t have the infrastructure and so we ended up doing a deal with Telstar. This was all right for a while; we sold another 200,000 Hives records.
During this time I missed out on selling 4 million records, something my colleague Ian probably still resents me for. He rang me up and said, ‘Alan, I know this isn’t your kind of thing, but I think they’re going to be big and we should sign them.’ It was a band with a sixteen-page feature in Dazed & Confused. ‘Go on, put them on,’ he said. It sounded pretty good to start with, a bit glam, a good riff, but then the vocals came in, a super camp, ultra-high-pitched falsetto: I believe in a thing called love! I just burst out laughing when I heard it.
‘It’s going to sell, it’s going to sell. Let’s do it,’ Ian said.
‘What are they called?’ I asked.
‘The Darkness,’ he said.
So I did what I normally do when I need musical advice. I called up Bobby Gillespie and played it to him down the phone. He had the exact same reaction as I had, and started laughing his head off when he heard the singing. When I heard that I knew I couldn’t sign them. I thought of the list of the great bands I’d worked with being topped off with a band called the Darkness. We had them ready to sign. Ian had found them. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Ian’s their manager now. I’m sure they still fill decent sized venues and make a good living from it.
At the same time, I was tackling one of the hardest challenges I ever faced: managing the Libertines. It’s a sad story.
I know I’m a good manager of bands. My skill has always been knowing how to convert things into cash, and this is why I still get offers to manage some of the biggest acts around. There are bands approaching me now who’ve been at the top of the industry for years, and when they look at their bank accounts they can’t understand why they’re so low. This is why they want me to come in. I’m ambitious and I’m not scared to ask for what I think a band is worth.
But the Libertines were something else. I still feel I could have done so much for them. My failure to get the best out of Pete Doherty is one of the things that I truly regret. Even though the album I worked on with them, The Libertines, was a number one, sold a million copies, and became their biggest ever record, it still feels to me like I have unfinished business with them; I never took the band to their full potential. I couldn’t exert enough influence on Pete. Pete sober would be the biggest rock and roll star in the world, whether he was in the Libertines, or Babyshambles, or something else. I think his better bet is Babyshambles, simply because they all like each other, and would be a better support mechanism to each other. Whether Carl and he would make a better songwriting team, who can say?
He’s got everything. Songs, lyrics, attitude. He’s so sharp, so quick. He could be monumental. And he’s still young, only thirty-four at the time of writing. When I was managing him he was only twenty-two.
But he’s the most nihilistic man I’ve ever met, and in the end I didn’t know how to reach him. I don’t think we’re ever going to find out how great he could have been.
&nbs
p; I first became aware of the Libertines in 2002 when I was running my night Death Disco at the Nottingham Hill Arts Club (more on this later).
James Endeacott had signed the Libertines to Rough Trade – Rough Trade distribution had gone bust a decade ago but Rough Trade records were back with a bang after James had signed the Strokes for the UK. James gave Danny Watson at Rough Trade a copy of ‘What a Waster’ to play at the club. Straight away it made me stand up and take notice. I started playing it myself when I was DJing. I loved the lyrics, the energy, the attitude.
It turned out that before they signed to Rough Trade the band had been trying to get through to speak to me for ages at Poptones but no one had let them through. One of the problems with Poptones was that there were too many train-spotters there who thought they knew everything about music. These reprobates had been turned away every time because no one thought they were for real.
So I was a fan. I dropped by the studio when they were recording their great first album, Up the Bracket, in 2002. Pete Doherty and Carl Barât were the two front men and guitarists, two best friends and worst enemies who’d been running riot in London since Pete’s sister introduced them. They wrote all the songs together and the lyrics were brilliant, very British, hedonistic and cocky. ‘It’s to the top of the world or the bottom of a canal,’ Doherty said to Barât and both outcomes were equally possible. The bassist was John Hassall, brilliant, handsome, but told to stay in the background and let Pete and Carl shine. Their first manager Banny Poostchi knew they were the stars of the show who could make them massive. Gary Powell was a great drummer, originally from America, who joined the band in 2001.
The album was produced by Mick Jones from the Clash and he invited me to the album sessions because he knew I liked the band. As soon as I got there Pete Doherty dragged me into a side room and asked if I’d sign his friend’s band. He was very charming, kept calling me Mr McGee, but I knew straight away it was an act.
Banny Poostchi had done a great job managing the band (and dealing with what I was about to have to deal with) but she resigned in 2003, and then James Endeacott started chasing me to be their manager. Pete Doherty had previously called me up and asked me to be his manager when it looked inevitable that the band was going to split, but I’d turned him down despite being tempted. Pete was already addicted to heroin and crack and was about to plead guilty to burgling Carl Barât’s house. He’d kicked Carl’s door down and nicked his stuff. Pete and Carl were so combustible together: they were like fire and petrol. If you put them in a room together you got explosive music, but there was always the chance someone was going to get hurt.
After a lot of encouragement from James Endeacott, I caught a taxi down to Crystal Palace where Pete was staying at his sister’s place. Just as I was getting into the taxi, James said to me, ‘Good luck. I’ll be praying for you.’
I nearly jumped straight out. He’d persuaded me to get a fifty-quid taxi miles away in South London and now he was telling me my life was in danger!
I liked Pete immediately when I arrived. Put on your five favourite records, he challenged me. I put on five Beatles songs. Put on your five favourites, I challenged back. He played me five Chas ’n’ Dave records in a row! He was very funny, we got on well.
I was the first person who told him he was going to go to prison. It was obvious, he’d burgled a house. You have to do time.
‘No one else is saying I’m going to prison,’ he said. He was worried but couldn’t really believe it would happen.
‘You’re going to prison,’ I told him again.
The next Monday the judge sent him down for six months.
He served two months of his sentence. On the day he was released from prison, he was met at the gates by Carl Barât. They hugged and made up – although that was nowhere close to being the end of the animosity between them.
I was in New York on the day of his release. I didn’t want to manage them! Everyone had told me they were bad news, pure chaos. But James had kept on at me: ‘You’re the only man who can do it.’ They thought if I could handle Primal Scream’s drug intake and self-destructiveness then I might have a chance of handling the Libertines.
This was in the two years when I’d started drinking again. I had a taste of red wine at the beginning of 2002, and I went straight back on the sauce again until I packed it in for good in 2004 when Kate gave me a yellow card and told me she wouldn’t be married to a drunk. (I haven’t touched a drop since.) But I was still drinking then, over in New York with my friend Nik Leman at Tribeca Grand. James Endeacott was on the phone: ‘Pete’s out – you have to come to the freedom gig!’
‘I’m in New York!’
‘Get a plane!’
‘Fuck off!’
But when I did get back to England I couldn’t resist any more. Pete Doherty wanted me there, and he was such an exciting talent. Even Geoff Travis, with whom I’ve never had a good relationship, wanted me to come and manage them. ‘You’re the only one who can do it,’ I kept hearing, and it was too much of a challenge to resist.
When I first met Carl Barât he was wary of me. He was a bit macho. Someone from the entourage annoyed me and I threatened him. Then someone from the entourage annoyed Carl and Carl threatened him. It was a bit pathetic, but with that out of the way Carl really opened up. He’s a lovely, kind man, and I loved him straight away. The challenge for me now was to find a way to heal his relationship with Pete Doherty and to put them in a room together to write songs. I had a great idea: I’d take them to the house I’d bought in the Welsh countryside, get them away from the temptations of London, and they’d write the next album in a nice peaceful setting.
I took them to the house I live in now, which I’d bought back in the mid-1990s when I was first seeing Kate. I’d bought her a car as a present. It was a little black car; that’s how much I know about cars. It was a sports car and she was a bit embarrassed about driving it. There she was, a good-looking woman in a flash car – a man in a white van threw a sandwich at her once. I’ve never learned to drive and so in some way I suppose the car was a present for me too, as it meant Kate could drive us out of London to the country. I’d bought her a cottage in a village called Crickhowell we could go to – I guess I must have been quite serious about her. Well, I know I was.
One day she asked me if I’d like to go to this bohemian little town, Hay-on-Wye, with loads of bookshops. I’d never heard of the place but it sounded fun, so we drove out there. It was the middle of the summer, August.
Hay is a weird little place. I was looking around and thinking, Yeah, I fucking love it here. I just had that feeling, I can’t explain, like I was being energized by the place.
We walked past the estate agent, and I looked in the window. There was this big fuck-off house with eleven acres advertised for £350,000. Offer accepted.
‘Can we go and see it?’ I asked.
‘Why?’ Kate asked. ‘Even if you wanted to buy it, and you don’t, it’s already been sold.’
‘Can we go and see it?’ I asked again. (I’m thinking Led Zeppelin rock and roll mansion.) This is not long after me banking the big chunk of Sony money I got in 1996.
So we went in and I managed to persuade the estate agent to ring up and arrange a viewing. We were shown in by a posh couple. The place was a wreck, an absolute state.
The posh couple, who turned out to be all right in the end, asked, ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m in the music business,’ I said.
They found this hilarious. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! A bit patronizing, you know. I was thinking, You cunts. Very good.
So I had a good look round. The place probably needed hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of work to make it liveable. But I just had this wonderful feeling about the place. I could imagine being completely relaxed there, on top of a hill, looking down over a Welsh valley.
I’ve got this great lawyer Kate Moss told me about, Howard Granville, who can buy houses in a day. He somehow cuts through a
ll the shit. Kate Moss can beat anyone to buy a house because she found this amazing guy. It normally takes months. I don’t know what he does. Perhaps he doesn’t read the papers, but that doesn’t seem very safe, so he must super-read the papers, who knows? He can put them through in a day.
Kate could see the look in my eye. She said to me, ‘Please don’t buy it.’ She’d only been going out with me for a couple of years, and we were always falling out at this point. ‘Please don’t buy it. Please don’t buy it.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t buy it,’ I said.
So the next day I phoned up the estate agent. ‘How much is the bid?’
‘£350,000.’
‘I’ll pay £370,000.’
‘Sold to you, Mr McGee!’
I told him I’d have all the legal stuff in order tomorrow and buy it then. The estate agent dude thought I was lying.
I phoned up Howard. On Thursday the place was mine. We had looked round it first on the bank holiday Monday.
I phoned up Kate then. ‘I bought the house.’
‘What!’
‘I bought the house. It’s mine.’
‘What!’
‘Yeah, I bought it. Will you do it up for me?’
So, after a bit of persuading, she did. It took her two years. Kate and I got married in 1998 and it was ready in 1999. She started doing it up in 1997.
And I just love the place. The solitude. The view over the hills. I don’t have to see anybody I don’t like. It’s the island that Aleister Crowley speaks about: find an island and fortify it.
No matter what happens, I’ll never move from here. There’s a ley line under us, Strata Florida, which runs straight through the house, all the way from Glastonbury to Aberystwyth castle, with us in the middle. When I bought it, I just saw the house as a holiday home. I wasn’t done with London yet, with the music industry. I was still burning to do something that was as fun as the early years.
And it was to this idyllic country retreat that I took Pete Doherty and Carl Barât.