Oasis to Primal Scream: Alan McGee's legendary record label

ALAN MCGEE’S record label Creation created the sounds of a generation before it folded up in 1999. It included acts like the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Oasis, as well as his oldest and best friend Bobby Gillespie’s band, Primal Scream. McGee, who was born in 1960, a year before Gillespie, grew up around the corner from him in a working-class neighbourhood in Glasgow.

As he writes in his book, Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label, McGee couldn’t stop the bands from stressing him out, but he could always buy another gram of cocaine. If he was on a business trip to the United States and couldn’t get any coke, he’d jack up on legal speed in diet pills. The drugs might have made him mouthy, but he had the Midas touch when it came to ordaining music bands. McGee puts his self-belief, in part, down to a troubled upbringing, which imbued in him a ferocious competitiveness.

“It was so negative, it was a positive for me,” he says. “The upbringing was violent, but I don’t like to make a big deal of it because I’m sure there are guys of my age in Dublin who had as violent an upbringing. It just made me want to prove every fucker wrong.