ALAN MCGEE
ED BALL: The first time I met Alan was at a club. It must have been the Living Room. I’d been forewarned because before that I’d been in this group. The TV Personalities with Joe Foster and Dan Treacy. Dan had said, ‘Watch out, there’s this guy around at the moment and he’s just incredibly pushy, he’s very charming and you won’t know what’s hit you when you meet him’. And I thought, ‘Oh yeah!’ This was ’84. We’d been making records for seven years because we had started in 1977 and when you get to about 23 or 24 years of age, you think, nothing impresses me now. But I met Alan and I couldn’t believe his enthusiasm. I actually thought, ‘He’s taking the piss’. He said, ‘Your LP, This is London, is a fucking genius album, it’s brilliant. You should do that song “If Only”, as a single. You should do it with me and we’ll rope in all the other guys, we’ll get Bobby to do something on it’. And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, alright then’. So that would have been the first time I met him.
JOE FOSTER: Yeah, I was in The TV Personalities which started because of Punk and I played guitar and sometimes played bass, it depended. It was Ed Ball and a guy called Dan Treacy who were in the band, he was the lead singer. And Ed and I would do different things depending on who was around, who was in the band, what was going on.
Sometimes we were a three-piece, sometimes we were a five piece, it depended who we really had, how much money we had. We did one of the first kind of Indie singles, ‘Part-Time Punks’, that was quite big.
It sold a lot of records, it wasn’t a hit. You didn’t get hits in those days, you just did other stuff. Three or four albums and that was that. I kind of dropped in and out as I was trying to be sensible and go to college and stuff. Early on Dan and Ed wrote most of the songs and I started writing stuff later on.
EB: We’d done one album as The TV Personalities called And Don’t The Kids Just Love It with John Steed and Twiggy on the cover. Dan and I were taking it from The Beatles and The Kinks and obviously The Jam. Through The Jam, that’s when we found out about The Creation. And this is how flash and how arrogant we were. We wanted to try and release The Creation’s back catalogue. So there’s these 20-year-old herberts ringing up and saying, ‘Yeah, well, you know, we want to license this stuff off you’.
JF: We liked The Who. We liked the American bands, The Byrds and the Velvet Underground and obviously all the Punk bands. We were very in with The Clash and the Pistols and stuff. Ed was always a huge fan of The Jam and The Buzzcocks because we thought they were really quite impressive. Especially The Buzzcocks for the way they had these really bubblegummy songs and just put them across totally straight faced. I found that really admirable, it was like quite brave. We would veer off in different ways, do different things. Sometimes we’d do very kind of ’60s-type pop, sometimes we’d do very funky things, sometimes we’d do quite odd avant-gardey type of things, it just depended how we felt really. The only time we stuck with something was when there was a kind of phoney psychedelic revival going on and all these people picked up on us and we thought, ‘Alright, fair enough, we’ll play that shit for a bit.’ This was 1981 or 1982. It was quite good, we spent most of our time in Germany. We were kind of minor pop stars in Germany and got loads of money and were driven around in limousines. Then we’d come back and play somewhere in London and it’d be like the Hope and Anchor which was pretty funny really. But it was kind of important later on for Creation Records because now there was this kind of readymade audience for it in Germany.
EB: There used to be quite a mixture of people down there [the Living Room]. You’d get a smattering of Mods, you got a few sort of Smiths-type bands, a few Rockabillies. There were bands like The Stingrays, The Mighty Caesars, The Milkshakes, all those kind of bands. You wouldn’t call them rockabilly, you’d call them Hamburg Beatles-type groups, you know, that sort of thing. And yeah, it was a good crowd. I mean it was a good mix. Never violent or anything. It was always sort of up. When we played at Alan’s club, the Living Room, we played there a couple of times as The Times.
JF: Yeah, the speed thing came with The TV Personalities. We were all drug fiends. That was a result of being in Germany, really. Well they used to give us all this shit and someone used to go and make all the tablets and shit just to keep us going. One place that we played was like a nightmare version of The Beatles in Hamburg. We played this fucking place in Berlin where they’d opened this new club and we had to play all fucking night. It was completely bonkers, the place was full of trannies and nutcases. There was one guy who was apparently some kind of police officer and he spent the entire night with his head in the fucking bass bin, like, all night. You’d get there about half-eight at night and five o’clock in the morning he’d still be there. Being in that kind of atmosphere we sort of gravitated towards a sordid side of life.
EB: One day, Simon Smith who was our drummer had been in The Merton Parkas and he’d been in Mood 6 and turned and said, ‘Why do we keep playing this grotty little pub?’ I said, ‘Because I think this guy McGee is gonna fucking do it. There’s something about him.’ And Simon reminded me of that the other day. He said, ‘You were right about him. You could see the guy was gonna do something.’
JF: The Living Room was just a room above a pub. He would put on gigs at other places. He was doing alright, there was a bit of an underground following for Indie-type bands which nobody really acknowledged at all. As I recall, it was quite an exclusive kind of scene, which then went straight on to being very mainstream. So there was hardly any time for people to get into it as something that was cool. I think that people were frustrated and they wanted something to be happening. People always want some kind of scene to be happening.
EB: Biff Bang Pow, that was the group Alan was in. I thought the first couple of singles were punchy but I thought ‘There Must Be a Better Life’ was a great record. I think what he did a little later on, about ’87 or ’88, when he developed a sort of like a Neil Young strain to his writing, I thought that was good. Yeah, I liked his songwriting. I actually thought for a long time that maybe he was the most accomplished writer on the label, although I think Innes brought quite a lot of melody to things.
JF: We got to the gig at the Living Room and I got sent off to get some equipment for all the different bands, so I hired a big estate car and threw it all in the back and when I got there I only had £6 on me, I’m here with ten fucking amps and absolutely completely bankrupt, and I’m like ‘I want my six quid for a cab.’ It seemed reasonable enough.
If I’d had a pocket full of money I’d have waited till a couple of hours later but you know. I hadn’t been warned about him, I’d just heard he was our kind of guy. He was the kind of person who liked the things we liked, you know, liked music and he had a band with a similar kind of thing but nothing really happened with them.
EB: I stopped playing with The Personalities about ’82. And then did The Times and my own stuff for about four years until about ’86. I’d see him on and off throughout that time. We were just bumping into each other. I’d go down to the office. They had an office in Clerkenwell Road. So around that time, about ’84, ’85, I was in the office and it would have been Yvonne, Alan’s wife. It was basically the two of them in the office running this label. And of course, Dick was there. I always liked Dick. And still do. So we’d come in. It wouldn’t be so much hanging out though. It wouldn’t be sort of like going out to gigs or anything.
JF: It was all pretty much ready to go, so it was just a question of finding somebody and making a proper record, which I suppose was The Jasmine Minks. I can’t remember what order they came out in. I think that was a bit of an attempt to see if it would work, and to do this label he made a completely different distribution deal, and all that. I don’t think it was a case of, ‘Is it going to work? Am I going to put something out that I’ve poured my heart into? Is everybody going to say it’s shite?’ So he just did this thing with The Legend. He just cut a few tracks and put them out. He was quite satisfied with the way the distribution all worked.
JEFF BARRETT: He got me out of Devon. He was doing a club called the Living Room and he put out a record which was shit. I was aware of it – I obviously read the music papers and there was something about this Living Room thing that I liked. There was something seedy about it. Although, I didn’t know anything about it.
JF: I was pretty much the producer in those early days. We used to use really grim jingle studios and things because they were cheap. We also found that the engineers in the places would very rarely have this thing that they thought of themselves as the record producers.
Because they’d been doing a toothpaste advert the day before, if you went in there with a cool band, usually they’d be delighted. They didn’t really care whether they liked it or not, it was like, ‘This is great, you’ve got guitars and bass and drums and shit.’ They’d always be really helpful. When we had slightly more money we started using Alaska, Pat Collier’s place, under the arches in Waterloo. I think it’s still there, it was quite a good studio and the first proper recordings we did were with The Jasmine Minks. I think they rehearsed there and could get a cheap deal, so we cut them there and then we thought it’s only fair to let other people have the same opportunity to cut stuff there. And we got on very well with people there.
JB: I was working in a record shop in Bristol and the back room was a distribution office so everything came in early, all the pre-releases, white labels, and promos. So these white labels from Creation came through and it was The Jasmine Minks, Biff Bang Pow, Revolving Paint Dream. I liked them. They were rough ten-bob recordings, garage records, but I liked them. There was something moddy about it, something ‘60s about it. It was garage stuff I guess, but accompanying these things were these handwritten promo notes.
Now press releases usually say that ‘so and so’s from there and they play gigs here and this is their second release, and blah, blah, blah.’ The Creation ones were like: ‘Fucking play my fucking record, turn off the radio and fucking listen to this NOW.’ I liked that. So at that point I got really into it because there was something going on. I was reading more reviews, there were groups like The Stingrays playing there and The TV Personalities seemed to be getting reviewed all the time. It struck a chord with me at the time. The only other British group around at the time that I liked was The Smiths. I decided at a certain point round then that I was going to go back to Plymouth and I was going to put bands on. I was going to do a club. I was going there most weekends and I found myself a location. I got poached by this HMV shop to go and be assistant manager, so I had this great plan I was going to take that job, rob them blind and set up my own stall on the market selling records. Which I did. Just before I was leaving, I rang this guy up from Bristol, I said ‘Hi, can I speak to someone from Creation Records?’ This guy whispered ‘Who’s that?’ I said ‘It’s Jeff Barrett, I’m calling you from Bristol, I’m going to be in Plymouth and I’m starting a club. I want to put some of your groups on.’
A thick Scottish voice replied, ‘Are you taking the piss?’ I said ‘No, I’m not. What are you talking about? Am I taking the piss?’ I said, ‘No, seriously this is what I do. I’m familiar with your stuff through the press. I know you do the Living Room and I know you do this fanzine called Communication Blur.’
JF: I had 10% of the company and I think Dick had 10%, or something like that. I don’t know, Alan had most of it, but it was ideal. At the time we didn’t really have contracts. It was like a 50:50 split on net which was fairly standard at the time.
JB: Communication Blur was a very important fanzine, a fanzine that was as Pop Art as you like. Him and Joe Foster were ranting and raving and shouting and swearing and slagging everyone off while writing about The Fire Engines and about Johnny Marr and The TV Personalities. One of his first releases was a flexi disc with The Pastels and The TV Personalities. It was quite important on the London scene. Kevin Pearce [writer and early Creation supporter] was part of that scene and there was a guy called Simon Bereznik who, funnily enough, I saw the other day walking towards me, dressed as a woman. I was like, ‘Fucking hell’. I mean, what do you say to someone you haven’t seen for 15 years when they have a dress on?
So I rang this guy and he thought I was taking the piss. He was just a paranoid fucking guy but I liked him. He must have taken me seriously because the next day he sent me through some fanzines and we struck up a relationship. I went back to Plymouth and started the club and I did put his groups on. I put The Jasmines on a couple of times. I liked them. I put The Loft on which was Pete Astor’s group with Bill Prince and got on really well with them. Plymouth is a long, long way away but we weren’t stupid, we were hip, we knew what was going on. But, you couldn’t go and see a band every night so it was a big thing, a big event. We made something happen and suddenly we had a lot of friends. It was a really good crowd and these guys loved it. They used to come down a long way from London to go and do a gig which they got paid nothing for, but they enjoyed it cos it was a responsive crowd and everyone got drunk, stayed at my house and had a good time. So me and McGee started getting on really well and he said ‘Come up and stay with me in London’. So I did. I went to Tottenham, just off Seven Sisters Road, me and my girlfriend stayed with him and Yvonne.
JF: Alan was very similar to the way he is now. Enthusiastic and helping people do stuff. If he felt that someone was good at doing something he’d really encourage them. He felt very much like that about all the acts, that they were all great. Every record was crafted and it was a big part of our lives. We had to put them all in sleeves, you mustn’t forget that. We used to do it at Alan’s house.
JB: To tell the truth I thought he was quite strange. He was very obsessed with music. He had an average record collection. He was obsessed with The Television Personalities, he loved them. But his pad was just like a domestic scenario, two young Scottish people move to London to work. But he wasn’t a real drinker or a drug user. He wasn’t rock ’n’ roll, he wasn’t that clichéd or anything like that.
I was a little in awe simply because there was this guy in London putting out records, doing a club which is something that I aspired to. I don’t know what I expected. He was a nice bloke and we became friends. He was really good to me. But I expected something wilder I think. Joe Foster was the wilder side of things really. Alan then told me about The Jesus and Mary Chain, we went along and saw them play at a pub called the Three Johns in Islington. They were absolutely brilliant. Mind blowing.
ALAN MCGEE
PAOLO HEWITT: How did you first meet The Jesus and Mary Chain?
ALAN MCGEE: Right, Bobby said...
PH: Is Bobby still up in Glasgow at this time?
AM: Bobby’s still in Glasgow. Bobby hasn’t come down yet. He doesn’t move down here till the end of ’87, till he comes to Brighton. I mean my marriage was – my first marriage – was breaking up because we were like two completely different people. Yvonne wanted me home for my dinner at 7 p.m. and I wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll legend. It was the typical relationship. You go out with somebody when you’re 18 years old and you’ve got that bond. By the time you get to 27, you’re a nice person but you’ve got nothing in common with them. So it was one of them.
PH: Where did you meet Yvonne?
AM: At British Rail.
PH: She worked there as well?
AM: Yeah. So I suppose that was one of the things that we had in common with each other. And I think it was quite a competitive relationship in some ways. It was a good relationship and I had some of the happiest years of my life with Yvonne when it was good. But the truth of the matter is that she was a great-looking girl right, you know, Italian-looking girl, and I think I was a sort of geeky-looking invisible-looking kid so she sort of had the power. In relationships, somebody has the power, you know, whether it be with looks, sexuality, money or power, whatever.
We loved each other but she started dominating me more than I dominated her. And then I started getting famous because of the Mary Chain and really she couldn’t deal with that. So the relationship really did fucking start to fall to pieces, do you know what I mean there? So that was kind of the beginning of the end.
PH: So where do you meet the Mary Chain?
AM: So what happened is Bob and a guy called Nick Lowe from Scotland...
PH: Nick Lowe?
AM: Yeah, not the Nick Lowe. He basically like said to Bobby, you know, there’s this band, I’ve made a tape of them. You might like them but to me they remind me of Generation X, but on the other side of the tape there’s this amazing Syd Barrett bootleg. So he gave it to Bobby and he put on the Syd Barrett bootleg and it was fucking amazing. And then he turned it over and he put the tape on and he loved it. And he went, ‘they’re a great band McGee, get them down to your club’. So he told the Mary Chain, ‘I’ve got a pal who’s got a club in London and will put you on.’ And they were like, ‘I’ve heard it all before mate.’ And sure enough I put them on. And they were so great and there was such a great bond between me and the brothers, William and Jim Reid, we just immediately started working with each other.
PH: What bond did you have?
AM: Punk. To be honest they were Punk rockers. I mean, the sound check the first song they ever did was ‘Vegetable Man’ right. Second song they ever did was ‘Somebody to Love’ which they never recorded and, to this day, is one of the great Mary Chain unrecorded songs. They should have put that on tape. And they did ‘Ambition’ by Subway Sect. Along with ‘Upside Down’ and ‘Never Understand’ and that was the sound check. And after the end of the sound check I went up – cos I was kind of like a little bit cocky now and the papers loved me by this point because I had the great club putting out these cool psychedelic records and sub-Punk psychedelic records – and said, ‘Do you want to be on my label?’ So that’s how it started with the Mary Chain.
PH: What did you say to them? ‘I can make a record for 200 quid’? I mean what deals were you doing then?
AM: None, it was all handshake deals. That was the joke. Right. Like when around Be Here Now [third Oasis album] came out in 1997 and the Sunday Times were running these articles about how fucking strict I supposedly was. Do you remember that? I was supposedly the Peter Mandelson of Pop? Paolo, up until 1990, we never even had record contracts with the groups. We’d been going six years. That is not the work of somebody that is a control freak. But we’ll get onto that later on. So anyway, it just all sort of like, you know, the label just developed. So what bit do you want me to pick up from?
PH: The Jesus and Mary Chain
AM: The Jesus and Mary Chain, right. So they came down, did the two shows, blew everybody away. Danny Kelly, [NME journalist] was in the pub, I don’t know if he was upstairs or he was downstairs. I suspect Danny was upstairs.
PH: This is at the Living Room in Conway Street?
AM: It had moved to the Roebuck. It got moved because Conway Street had been shut down. It’s at the end of Creation LP001, Alive in the Living Room. Which has got to be one of the worst recorded albums. And Joe Foster recorded it on a 2-track. Fucking...
PH: What is it? The last ever gig at the ...
AM: Yeah. It’s just like a compilation of loads of bands that played there. And it’s basically taking the piss. It should never have come out.
PH: When did it come out?
AM: I think some time in ’84, about a year after the Living Room closed I think. I think. Yeah it sort of closed about then. Or maybe it came out in ’85. You’d have to check from the sleeve. I can’t remember. And then we brought the Mary Chain down for about four or five shows in September. Alice in Wonderland which was in Gossips. And the Mary Chain were so pissed and they were so nihilistic, they got taken off for their own safety. I was the manager. And I had just met them. And they were so drunk. And it was like they were a danger to themselves and to the public. So they were taken off and at that point I was on a massive, massive Pistols trip. I was living it, right. I was thinking, ‘I can’t be Johnny Rotten but I can be Malcolm McLaren’. It was immature but at 25, you know, we’re all immature. So it was great fun and of course there was the media. London was boring. It was like ’84 after all and there was fuck-all happening. Suddenly you had this group of guys that were just lunatics. Like sort of Cramps meets fucking Subway Sect or something like that. And then we put out ‘Upside Down’ as a white label and the place went fucking mental. John Peel played it for like three weeks in a row basically, you know. Before we put it out there was like 20,000 orders.
PH: Had they played that gig at Holloway Road by then? The one that ended in a riot.
AM: No, that was March ‘95. And the week that they put the record out I became pals with Jeff Barrett. He was working in this shop with James Williamson, the guy that went on to run Creation Books which I’ve got nothing to do with. Barrett worked for him in this record shop. We used to send out these fucking press releases that me and Foster wrote and they were like, ‘Kill all hippies’ and ‘Fuck your next-door neighbour’. Just sheer hatred. We didn’t realise we were so fucking unique. Because all these other record companies like Phonogram would have press releases that would say, ‘The band formed in 1981. The bass player is the brother of the guy in Curiosity Killed the Cat’. Yet we were going ‘Fucking shag your next-door neighbour and fuck your granny’, and ‘Punk rock lives’. The bile – Foster was worse than me – that we were sending out! Barrett got attracted to it because he liked the music but he also loved the press releases and thought, ‘these people are insane’. He loved the Mary Chain. He’s a music fanatic, he really is. And he phoned me up and we’d talk on the phone and I liked him because he was such an enthusiast. And I just went ‘Come up to this gig’. And he brought himself and his girlfriend at the time, Valerie, up to see the Mary Chain. And the Mary Chain did this gig in a room about the size of this. The Three Johns I think it’s called. In Angel, next to Angel tube.
PH: Is it the one at the back?
AM: That’s it. And the bottom line is the Mary Chain were there and there were about 20 people there. But it was all journalists. It was a Thursday night. And the Mary Chain did the set and this was Bobby’s first ever gig with the band.
PH: Because he joined as drummer didn’t he?
AM: Well they kicked Murray [original drummer] out because he wanted £100 a night and we were like, ‘You’re tripping mate’, you know, it’s not the cabaret circuit, it’s rock’n’roll! It’s like, you know, you’re playing to 20 people. So they kicked him out. And they went ‘We’ll get a drum machine’, and I went, ‘What about Bobby?’ He was an Altered Images roadie.
PH: He was an Altered Images roadie?
AM: Yeah. I know Clare. If you want to interview Clare I’ll give you her number. But he was an Altered Images roadie. And Titch, the drummer, was a temperamental little guy. So whenever he was being a prat Gillespie would fill in. And he would do a Mo Tucker and stand up and play. [Mo Tucker pioneered this style of drumming with The Velvet Underground.] I said to Bobby, come and do drumming. So he came and suddenly it looked like a fucking band cos he was totally cool with his shades and within three songs they had trashed the entire set. The drums were at the back of the room and they were kicking things about and it was all feedback and tangled leads. We then went off to do a tour of Germany with Jasmine Minks, Biff Bang Pow at the top of the bill and The Jesus and Mary Chain at the bottom. Although after two nights we all agreed that Mary Chain should be the top of the bill because they were just the real deal. So they immediately got elevated to top of the bill even though they didn’t have a record out. We came back and basically the reviews went like this, ‘the most important band since Joy Division.’ That was the start of the whole fucking fuss.
PH: How was it in Germany?
AM: That was the beginning of the drug phase. It was a turning point when we were flirting with it. We were getting all this cheap speed and we were doing all this Russian vodka. I remember having a punch up with Dave Musker of the band.
PH: Who’s Dave Musker?
AM: He was the keyboard player in The Jasmine Minks. An intellectual copyright lawyer. Joe Foster can get you in contact with him. I had never really done drugs but speed made me so fucking aggressive and I was so mouthy anyway. And I remember I tried to bottle Joe Foster on tour at a gig one night because he annoyed me so much. I tell you who you’ve got to talk to for your book and that is Adam Sanderson. I’ve got his email address. He’s now a producer at the BBC. And he was a singer in The Jasmine Minks. And he has got a memory and he will remember a lot, ’cos he told me things in emails recently that I was like, ‘How did you remember that?’ Cos he told me that he worked at Creation for six months, in the late ’80s. I don’t even remember him working there.
PH: Where does your aggression come from?
AM: Where does my aggression come from? I don’t know man. Punk, I suppose, really.
PH: But it must have been there for Punk to act as a catalyst.
AM: I know. I don’t know. I mean...
PH: Was it the Scottish working class thing? You know, us against the world and fuck the lot of you...?
AM: Aye, it was, it was. When I first came to London... Paolo, I was mental. I mean, I’m nothing like this now. I mean, I say incredibly really fucking horrible things to people occasionally but I’ve got to be really, really, really provoked. But I’ve got no violence in me whatsoever unless someone’s hitting Kate or a close friend. Then I’d defend them but other than that I mean I would never start it with somebody. But I remember when we were first down in ’81 and somebody would like say something to me as I was walking in a record shop and I’d just go, ‘Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll put you through the fucking window’. Stuff like that. And I was like, I think back then and I think, ‘Man, that was mental’. Because you don’t know who you’re saying stuff like that to. You can really meet somebody who can put you through the window. So I kind of like was pretty lucky to get through the ’80s.
PH: Bobby was like that as well?
AM: But I’ve never seen Bobby get into a fight in my life. See, the only way that he’s not been smacked from here to kingdom come is that he’s Bobby. And people probably don’t belt him. I remember one time at the height of doing fucking Es about ’91 when we were in Douglas Hart’s place in Kentish Town. We’d met up with Roddy Frame. Roddy Frame now has got the fucking soul of a nice kid but he went from being a sober nice little kid on Postcard [record label] to this pop star who had a huge opinion of himself. And he was a cheeky cunt. Really fucking cheeky. And we met up with him at this club Kinky Disco. Do you remember that?
PH: Yeah.
AM: And after he ended up coming back with me and The Primals. And he said something to me about being old. He said something to Gillespie about his haircut or something like that. He said something to fucking Throb about his guitar playing or, fuck, his hair or something like that, I don’t know what the fuck it was. And I remember me, Bob and Throb all going into the kitchen saying, ‘He’s a cheeky little cunt, we’ll just do him.’
It was a serious discussion at four in the morning. Just invite him in here and just do him over.
But I said, ‘Look he’s out of order, right. But at the end of the day it’s Roddy Frame and it’s like it’s gonna look as if it’s about his music or something.’ And I reckon that’s how Bobby’s never been belted. Because he’s been so fucking over the top with so many people that you go, ‘You’ve got to have lost your teeth by now mate’. And the bottom line is I do think it’s because people basically go ‘It’s Bobby Gillespie.’ I don’t think you can get away with being as outrageous if you’re not in bands. You know what I mean? Do you not think I’m right there?
PH: Totally. But looking at you now it’s hard to detect that aggression.
AM: Being absolutely honest, I think it was coming from Glasgow and thinking English people are soft. Deep down I would never have been like that in Glasgow. In Glasgow I was a lot more in my box. But I think coming to London I had this thing that people from London are a bit soft ultimately and I’m pretty Scottish and a Scottish accent – especially the Glasgow accent – definitely did scare some English people. I don’t think it does any more but I think it did in the ’70s. Jimmy Boyle and all that came along. You can blag your way out of a lot of situations just by being Scottish, and just talking in a really aggressive way. But there were a few blow-ups that I had kind of like late ‘80s. And I think that was a lot to do with the fact that I was breaking up with Yvonne. And Creation wasn’t going well. And it just ended up in a big punch up.
The famous one was James Brown [ex-editor of Loaded]. I ended up fighting James Brown at John Peel’s birthday party. I had had three or four fights that year and I’d won every fight so I kind of fancied myself as Muhammad Ali, right. I was cocky, thinking, like, three out of three, you’re all soft. I was hurting through my marriage to be honest. I just used to knock people out. But eventually it all came to a head at John Peel’s birthday party. I think it was his fiftieth birthday party.
I was going out with this girl called Belinda who was a really, really beautiful-looking girl.
She was on the cover of like a lot of Biff Bang Pow sleeves. And Brown said something really snide to me like ‘What’s the difference between Alan McGee and a rhinoceros? A rhinoceros is better looking.’ I replied, ‘Very funny, you little cunt.’ I had a few more drinks. And, you know, usually if sober I’d not bother. But because I was drinking it just really started getting inside my head. So then I went up to James Brown and I went, ‘Ah, so you think you’re funny do you?’ He replied in a smug way. ‘Right.’ Little did James Brown know at the time that I’d been shagging his girlfriend. Behind his back. She will remain nameless. So I went up to him and said, ‘Well, I just want you to know James, you might think that I’m a cunt but, at the end of the day, every time I fuck your girlfriend she still swallows my cum.’ He just fucking, really lost it. This is the girl he was really keen on and I’d been knocking her off. And not only that, but I’d gone up and told him. So the bottom line is James then gets like that. [Alan stands up and mimics the stance that Brown adopted. His fists are clenched and tilted as if ready to pounce.] I had a glass so I went, ‘Yeah’ and I threw it over him. And it was all over him. I walked away but Brown turned around and walloped me with a fucking punch that sent me against the wall. And then he came at me. He was a little fucking tiger. One of those little guys that is hard to fight. And he was just raining punches on me. So then I started fighting back. But Paolo, I’ll be honest with you, I’m glad it got stopped. Because the truth of the matter is, I wasn’t winning. It was 60:40 right. And I was glad it got stopped. And at that point I thought, ‘You know something McGee, your violence is over and out mate, it’s not worth it, you know.’
PH: And speed was bringing that out of you as well, was it?
AM: It was drugs. It was a lot of E really. You know.
PH: Alan, don’t know if you’ve heard but Es are meant to peace you out!
AM: I know. But... me and James Brown never got on for about two years after that and then to his credit right, we ended up becoming good mates. I think that if you have a really bad argument with somebody you end up being good mates. I don’t know what that is. Me and Gillespie had that and we’ll get on to it later. You don’t really know this, but throughout the whole of the ’90s, up until about a year or a year and a half ago, me and Gillespie hadn’t got on since Screamadelica. The relationship dilapidated when he became a rock star. He was really selfish, incredibly self-obsessed. I became a drug addict. And we grew apart.
PH: OK. We’ll tackle that later. Let’s get back to The Jesus and Mary Chain. What year would the German tour have been?
AM: German tour. 1985. No, no, November 1984.
PH: And what albums had Creation put out by now?
AM: Yeah. We did three albums. We’d done Live in the Living Room. Then we did Wild Summer, which was a sort of pop art sort of compilation. The newspapers slagged it off. Then we did Jasmine Minks which the music papers loved. Then the fourth we did was Biff Bang Pow and they sort of all came out in ’84. That kind of made sense financially for the label because Biff Bang Pow and The Jasmine Minks sold about I think about three or four thousand each.
PH: Did you have offices by now?
AM: We had.
PH: Where did you actually start Creation Records?
AM: I used to live at 98 Beaconsfield Road, Tottenham N15. And then I started managing the Mary Chain so I got the broom cupboard in Hatton Garden. What was the number? It’s right on that corner of Hatton Garden, Turnmills Road, it’s on the corner of that road. 83 Clerkenwell Road. I had the broom cupboard and I managed the Mary Chain. And that was the Creation office. Me and Foster used to stay up when we were doing a bit of speed. We’d stay up, we’d do a line of speed and put records in covers. But it was so pretty fucking innocent with drugs. It was just so that we’d do the sleeves. It was maybe like three lines to fucking see us through the night you know? So that took us up to ’85. And then we signed a load of more bands, you know, like we signed Felt, The Weather Prophets, and The Bodines.
PH: All big groups at NME.
AM: Yeah, they were. They were huge fans at NME.
PH: They loved them. You were such a hero up there.
AM: All that was great for us. And then Psychocandy came out and that was Album of the Year.
PH: Would Psychocandy be one of your Creation top ten albums?
AM: Yeah. But it’s not on Creation.
PH: Of course, you go to Warner Brothers with the Mary Chain.
AM: Well the reason I had to do it was that Creation was in Beaconsfield Road. In my house. In a private, housing scheme thing.
PH: But signing them to Warner, didn’t that kind of compromise the whole indie ethic?
AM: It did. But they were leaving. They wanted a living out of music and I couldn’t give it to them. They wanted to work with me. So yeah, it was compromising the Indie ethic. But the way I looked at it was, I love this band, I’m probably going to make 40, 50, 60 thousand pounds a year out of being their manager. My house was a £15,000 mortgage in Tottenham. I thought I could probably make another 10 or 15 Creation records from the money that we made out of managing the Mary Chain. So that’s why I did it. It made it possible for other stuff to go on. But I wish it had been on Creation because it was a classic album.
PH: I understand that but doesn’t your philosophy allow you to have it both ways? There’s one part of you that’s saying the ‘I want to be a rock star and I want the big house and I want all the girls’ traditional rock star success stuff. And then there’s the other part of you saying ‘I wanted to be a Punk rocker.’
AM: But I always saw Punk rock as successful. I didn’t see Punk rock as not success. I saw Punk rock as a way to live your life with an edge. I’m an obsessive character, I become obsessed by different things. And I was obsessed with Creation and keeping it going.
PH: So along the line did you think ‘this is it, I’m gonna get the huge fucking house now?’
AM: No. Honestly. Never Paolo, I never have, never. I mean, I was putting these records out because I had to do it. It was like having to have sex or having to go to the fucking bathroom. It was like, you have to do it. You know what I mean? It was a need. I thought I can make a little bit of money. I can supplement my lifestyle and I’ll probably have a bit more money than my mates because I’m putting records out. I always had money, to be fair. But when I say money, I don’t mean money that I could buy a million pound house or something like that, but money that would enable me to go in the pub and buy a round of drinks and buy a girl dinner. It was like that. I never thought that it was going to be anything else.