''Essential reading for anyone interested in the heady, vulgar, marvellous miasma of British music and culture in the nineties'' - Irving Welsh
''A true believer in the power of music and more importantly a believer in the people that make music. He gave me and many more like me a chance to change my life'' - Noel Gallagher
Alan McGee''s Creation Stories is a star-studded, outrageous, funny and anarchic account of the record label he set up and the bands that defined an era, including Primal Scream and Oasis.
A charismatic Glaswegian who partied just as hard as any of the acts on his notoriously hedonistic label, Alan McGee became an infamous character in the world of music in the nineties. In Creation Stories he tells his story in depth for the first time, from leaving school at sixteen to setting up the Living Room club in London which showcased many emerging indie bands, from managing the Jesus and Mary Chain to co-founding Creation when he was only twenty-three.
His label brought us acts like My Bloody Valentine, House of Love, Ride and, of course, Primal Scream. Embracing acid house, Alan decamped to Manchester and hung out at the Hacienda. His drug-induced breakdown, when it came, was dramatic. But as he climbed back to sobriety, he oversaw Oasis''s rise to become one of the biggest bands in the world. Alan himself becoming one of the figureheads of Britpop. Having sold the label to Sony to stave off bankruptcy, he became disenchanted with the increasingly corporate ethos and left in 1999. Since then he''s continued to be an influential figure in the music industry, managing the Libertines and setting up a new label, 359 Music, with Cherry Red.
''Studded with diamond anecdotes . . . From mixing sound for My Bloody Valentine on mushrooms, via driving motorists off the road by commissioning billboard posters of Kevin Rowland flashing his pants, to escorting Carl Barat to A&E with one eyeball hanging out of its socket, the book bursts with tall-but-true tales.'' - NME
Industry Reviews
McGee was our Malcolm McLaren and Tony Wilson. An instigator and motivator, a born upsetter. I've never met anyone like him and neither have you. This is his story -- Bobby Gillespie McGee is a true believer and a complete one-off. I doubt anyone else could have built an entity like Creation and ran it for so long, making it all up as they went along. Essential reading for anyone interested in the heady, vulgar, marvellous miasma of British music and culture in the nineties, before it was all swamped by the surgical spirit sterility of the global marketplace -- Irvine Welsh In the 1980's Alan McGee saved British music by pumping ambition, passion and chaos into the independent scene. Without him Go West and Living In A Box would have won. A brilliant read for anyone interested in music -- James Brown It's fast and loose and as insane as the label, full of great anecdotes and machine gun prose - it tells it like it was and it doesn't flinch from the truth -- John Robb A true believer in the power of music and more importantly a believer in the people that make music. He gave me, and many more like me, a chance to change my life. A pity he supports Rangers -- Noel Gallagher
