How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (26 page)

Foster in particular had always felt that the Television Personalities were never taken as seriously by Rough Trade as they deserved. Their debut single, ‘Part Time Punks’, which Travis had released on Rough Trade, had sold over 30,000 copies, but Foster felt the TVPs had been passed over in favour of the more intellectual Scritti Politti. Green Gartside in particular is still an object of Foster’s decorous ire: ‘They were always pushing their intelligence in people’s faces in the music,’ says Foster. ‘So where is your book? You’re not actually smart enough to write a fucking book are you?’ Now, as Creation’s house producer and provocateur-in-chief, Foster was feeling equally patronised 
by Rough Trade. ‘At the end of the day they just weren’t cool,’ he says. ‘They just liked the kind of cool music that you’d like if you were an estate agent who read the
Guardian
, they liked Bob Marley … fucking hell … yeah, sure you do.’

Creation thrived on confrontation, partly as a tribute to punk and partly because McGee, whose thick speed-assisted brogue was delivered so quickly as to occasionally render it impenetrable, felt patronised by the management at Collier Street. ‘Joe hated them worse than me,’ says McGee. ‘I saw them as condescending middle-class wankers and I just wanted to ram one right up their arse, so it was just war, class warfare, for me, so I didn’t really give a fuck how I achieved my ends, as long as I beat them.’

While despising Rough Trade, McGee would nevertheless have to deal with Geoff Travis as the Jesus and Mary Chain, after months of maximum shock value one-off London shows and the occasional full-scale riot, eventually signed to Blanco y Negro. As their manager McGee, with the band’s full co-operation, had played out his Malcolm McLaren fantasies using
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
maxim, cash from chaos, to stoke both an atmosphere of hostility in the band’s concerts and their asking price for signing to a major. All of this played well in the media, which quickly fell into line with a ‘New Sex Pistols’ reflex. But when Travis met the band in the Reid brothers’ parents’ front room in East Kilbride, it was no more confrontational a signing than if he’d been discussing a new recording with their imminent Blanco y Negro label mates Dream Academy or Everything but the Girl. ‘There was an attempt at provocation from Alan,’ says Travis, ‘but basically the band wanted to sign to a real record company; by then they’d had enough of messing about on Creation.’

Quickly realising that Travis had the best of both worlds by running Rough Trade as well as having access to major-label 
budgets for Blanco y Negro, McGee used his growing reputation to talk Rob Dickins at Warners into funding his own version of Blanco – an imprint called Elevation. The first two Elevation releases would allow two of Creation’s brightest prospects, Primal Scream and the Weather Prophets – Pete Astor’s wispish north London bedsit version of Creedence – to record their debut albums in professional recording studios as well as get a full major-label marketing push.

However, excited to have negotiated a deal out of them, McGee himself was a little adrift within the Warner Brothers Kensington High Street offices. He had, though, found an ally in Mick Houghton, who was handling PR for both Elevation and the Jesus and Mary Chain. ‘I’m sure Alan would say this himself,’ says Houghton. ‘He didn’t have a clue what he was doing, and Elevation certainly killed off the Weather Prophets and all but killed off Primal Scream.’

While Blanco y Negro went from strength to strength, cornering a foothold in the coffee-table market with Everything but the Girl as well as full support from the music papers, Elevation would singularly fail to live up to expectations. Both the Weather Prophets’
Mayflower
and Primal Scream’s
Sonic Flower Groove
would, by Warner Brothers’ standards, sink without trace. There was another crucial difference. ‘I think Warners were a bit scared of Geoff,’ says Houghton. ‘They just thought he was a bit too smart for them, which he probably was. Geoff didn’t indulge in the rock ’n’and roll lifestyle. I always felt like I was in the presence of a schoolmaster who was sort of saying, “You’re a bit too old to be behaving like that.” He was probably right, but at the time it was great.’

Another member of the Warner A&R staff who found corporate life difficult to deal with was Bill Drummond who, having relinquished control of Echo & The Bunnymen, was held on by 
their parent company in an A&R consulting role; negotiating the power politics of the managerial decision makers around Dickins was something he had only a listless, passing interest in, a way of killing time while he was considering his next move. ‘I’d fucked myself,’ says Drummond. ‘I’d even bought a Paul Smith suit.’ Bumping into McGee in Warner Brothers, Drummond found someone who felt even more isolated from the executive processes but whose enthusiasm had remained undimmed. ‘He was totally into it all,’ says Drummond. ‘He’d done the deal for Elevation and it was a complete disaster. At that point he was as bad as me, you know, stick whatever he’s got into a major record company and see what happens and it’s just no good, that’ll never work.’

Drummond had been among the first to hear what McGee was bringing into Warners, and was struggling to see the connection between McGee’s enthusiastic flights of hyperbole and the finished recorded product that was played on the boardroom stereo. ‘I was aware of the Mary Chain,’ says Drummond. ‘We’d have a weekly A&R meeting at WEA and Max Hole, who was head of A&R, played this tape of a cat being taken hostage and I just thought it was rubbish. But McGee started making a presence in the building. He’d come round and get to know me and it’s like he thought, there’s that guy, he was in the Bunnymen.’

Making contact with Drummond was one of the few positive outcomes of McGee’s dalliance with Warners and having caught the ear of one of his heroes McGee was quick to share in the delights of the Creation roster, taking Drummond to one side for a close listen and discussion about the merits of the Moodists, Meat Whiplash and demos for the Primal Scream album.

‘He played me these things,’ says Drummond, ‘and I thought, this is rubbish, this is all rubbish, what are you talking about, “This is the greatest this that and the other.” I can’t hear it, these 
are badly made records, cheaply made records, but I found him endearing, you know, I found him – whatever.’

Finally tiring of Warners and the industry in general, at the ripe old age of thirty-three and a third Drummond decided to retire and issued a suitably self-mythologising press statement.

The very gesture of turning a resignation letter into a
state-of
-the-union address highlighted Drummond’s unique sense of occasion. ‘In some ways Bill was the best manager I think I ever worked with,’ says Houghton, ‘in terms of being an amazing catalyst and such an inspirational figure, but he was an appalling businessman, he really was. I probably did more of the relationship with the record company than he did because he just couldn’t deal with them. He didn’t feel comfortable with them.’

Drummond’s first decision upon ‘leaving the industry’ was to reverse roles and become a recording artist. ‘When I decided I was going to leave the music business for ever, I’m like, I want to make a record: write the songs in a week, make the album, release it and that’s it,’ he says. ‘I went along to McGee and said, “Look, I wanna do this, do you wanna put it out?” He says, “Yeah,” instantly. He didn’t even ask me what sort of music it was let alone, you know, the songs. So I went and did the whole thing and just took it round to his flat. And he was dumbfounded; he couldn’t understand how I’d made this record. Just couldn’t believe it.’

Listening to the album, which Drummond entitled
The Man
, is to be transported to the back room of an out-of-the-way pub in rural Dumfries & Galloway. In a rich brogue Drummond and a pick-up band rattle through eleven songs that combine those self-mythologising tendencies with Highlands surrealism. Its most remarked-upon song was ‘Julian Cope Is Dead’, a frontiersman’s response to Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Bill Drummond Said’. For a rendition of Robert Burns’ ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, Drummond also invited his father, a Presbyterian 
minister, to recite the poem in his authoritarian and empathetic voice, accompanied only by a few notes on a banjo and the sound of wind blowing across the glen.

‘
The Man
is one of the most extraordinary records ever made actually,’ says Mick Houghton. ‘It was a cross between
C86
and Ivor Cutler or something. I don’t think anyone else would’ve put that record out, and equally I don’t think anyone else could have made that record.’

‘It’s absolute genius,’ says McGee. ‘I nearly drowned when I heard it. I had no idea that he was going to be singing in a broad Scottish accent and I’m lying in the bath and it was like “and the eyes and the trees of the nation” … it was all pulling me under the water.’

Like all of the records Creation released,
The Man
was recorded in a matter of days but, with around five to ten years’ experience of both life and the record business and replete with backing singers and pedal steel, it has an alluring confidence in its simple arrangements and Drummond’s clear Lord
Summerisle-style
singing. Compared to the lost-in-reverb fumblings of the majority of the label’s early catalogue,
The Man
sounds like a gleefully recorded middle-of-the-road country and western album. It also, upon very close listening, reveals signifiers of Drummond’s future artistic direction.

‘Apart from it being genius, the great thing is, if you listen to that record you can hear The KLF in that fucking record,’ says McGee. ‘His arrangements of the pedal steel – four years later it’s the fucking KLF. I don’t mean it’s melodically The KLF, it’s the same way that it’s fucking put together. The pedal steel moves are acid house KLF. I couldn’t believe why he’d want to put a record out with me ’cause at that point we’d done fuck all really.’

The sound of Drummond intoning his approval of ‘dirty girls’ on ‘I Believe in Rock and Roll’ over a shabby acoustic guitar may 
be light years away for the stadium house grandeur of The KLF, but there are certainly cadences of some of the imagery that would follow as The KLF developed their myth on the grand stage. In the lyrics to ‘I’m the King of Joy’, ‘I’ve a heart like a Viking with the faith of a child/Have you ever heard the song “Born To Be Wild”?’, the Norse biker archetype that would be a feature of KLF videos is certainly present. Somewhat more prosaically, Drummond admits, ‘Alan might be on to something actually. I only know three chords.’

However much fun he was having by revelling in the
capriciousness
of his heroes, the reality for McGee was that Creation was stumbling around trying to turn its attitude into a coherent release schedule. Elevation had been no small failure, although as manager of the Jesus and Mary Chain McGee had not only earned himself a decent living, but he had also funnelled his share of the band’s income back into Creation. The label was still his priority, but meant little to anyone beyond his wider circle and their imaginary parallel Sixties punk universe. His fingers burned, McGee was determined to carry on his way, writing off Elevation as a failed experiment that had been condemned from birth by the short-sightedness of the suits at Warners. Moving Creation out of his front room, he set up camp in Hatton Garden, in one of the smallest rooms in a suite of maintained offices on Clerkenwell Road, in premises that had been found by Dave Harper while relocating from Rough Trade.

‘It was really cheap,’ says Harper. ‘Alan came in, then Wayne Morris, who managed the Primitives and sort of ran Lazy Records, followed. It was a very vibrant time, because everyone was doing more or less the same things. There was a pub opposite – and we weren’t too far from Collier Street, but believe me that was irrelevant.’

The tenants of 83 Clerkenwell Road all had ambitions beyond 
what they had left behind at Rough Trade. Harper and his partner Nikki Kefalas, with their newly formed Out Promotions, were handling Factory, Mute, Creation and 4AD, and they were regularly approached by the majors, whom the likes of Morris and McGee were perpetually working on to try to fleece a budget for their charges. The sense of hustle and enjoyment and of being in the heart of a more celebratory and less austere part of the industry, at least compared to the dowdiness of Collier Street, was given an added frisson by the character of the other occupants in the building.

‘There was a weird guy there who had been a plugger at a major,’ says Harper. ‘He was really sad, because he used to be Elton John’s plugger. He was desperate for friends and wired, and he had coke, and there was a private investigator opposite that was screwing the daughter of the woman who ran the front desk. He claimed to have worked undercover in Belfast and had had an axe put through his head – it was all very hush-hush. The place was full of all these really odd people – the music ones were sort of normal.’

It was an environment in which McGee couldn’t help but flourish. Despite the prevalence of attitude over anything else, especially record sales, Creation and McGee were, thanks partly to their largesse when it came to hospitality and the
cutting-edge
success of the Jesus and Mary Chain, considered a record company on the up. ‘
NME
at that time was quite obsessed with Creation,’ says Houghton, who was now the label’s PR, ‘and at that time the
NME
was king, not that
Melody Maker
people would accept that, but they kind of were.’

Very much wanting to project themselves as kings of speed, leather and sunglasses – a fanzine writer’s version of a biker outlaw – McGee and Foster along with most their charges were out every night, even if the extent of their decadence was
the upstairs room of a north London pub and a tinny PA. ‘It sort of goes back to journalists actually being very naive,’ says Houghton. ‘At that point there was very little debauchery around the Creation offices. They were kind of like silly schoolboys, getting pissed and taking too much speed, but equally that was the extent of the debauchery of most music journalists. The most debauched band I worked with at that point was Talking Heads and they did it in style, fantastic parties, and they were very smart people. Compared to that, Creation was really quite provincial.’