This weeks Ten Questions were thrown at Alan McGee. I first met Alan in 1991 in a pub in Hackney. He was seated at a table chatting with Lydia Lunch. I have no idea what we talked about but he put me up in a hotel that night as I had missed my train back up North. Over the years since we’ve had a up and down relationship but he remains, as the founder of my favourite Record Label, Creation Records, a big influence on my teenage years. Now retired, he looks after his daughter and, if his Tweets are to be believed, spends the rest of the time drinking coffee and giving the Finnish staff and assorted WAGs who frequent his pool inspirational talks on the benefits of Sushi.
1. Where are you? Describe your immediate surroundings.
on couch in london till i move to wales in july
2. Anybody following you on Twitter would think that you are a crass, rude, arrogant, money obsessed, caffeine fueled,
sushi gobbling bully, but in person you are a sensitive, generous and articulate man. Do you consciously adopt a public
persona or does it happen naturally after so many years of fighting your corner?
i agree on all points the thing is i truly don’t give a fuck
3. Which year at Creation Records do you feel was your best in terms of artistic/business satisfaction?
1991 1992 for the music we never got rich till 97 i liked the end bit best video ever is kevin rowland video we rocked
4. You once described ‘Wake Up Boo’ as an ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ which, as I’m sure readers will know, was the title of a J.G Ballard novel.
He’s dead now and, let’s be honest, you have to shoulder some of the blame for that. What other records (records, not bands) that came out on Creation would
you rather have come out on another label, if at all?
Loveless isn’t anything and soon I hate mbv I wish I had never signed them tuneless garbage
5. You’ve retired. Is that for good? C’mon you can’t sit around drinking coffee forever. What’s next?
the school run and the great thing is i don’t have to go in
6. If Creation had folded after a couple of singles what do you think you would be doing now?
on a park bench
7. The thing I most like about you is the fact that your interpretation of Rock’n'Roll is whatever you happen to be doing at any given time. Is the idea of
four-pale-young-things-with-guitars-as-rebellious-act redundant now?
no because glasvegas and the grants still make me believe it’s possible
8. I’ve noticed on your tweets that you regularly lambast LA and Shoreditch as being ’shitholes’ yet you live in St John’s Wood which is really just a Beatle-
themed graveyard. Where in the world do you feel most at home?
i actually live in primrose hill all the celebs moved into my road so i moved into another of my properies
9. How many readers of your guardian blog could you fight in one go?
i’m 48 martin then again probably so are they
10. “Fate is kind to me” exclaims Grigory Petrovitch Liharev in Chekov’s ‘On the Road’ ; “I am always meeting splendid people”
Which person were you most glad to meet?
dan treacy of tv personalities he is still a punk rocker and showed me even a twat like me could run a record company
Marylou and I spent thursday morning at Akira’s house singing and playing guitar on this big song he has called ‘The Answer to the Anti-life Equation’ a composition that veers from melancholic introspection to big beat hip hop and a strange bit that I haven’t got me head round yet. Sounds like something off ‘OK Computer’ which is not what you’d expect from Adam which is always what you can expect from Adam. Jeres came round to work on his Son of King Rebel album and we sang harmonies on ‘I Don’t Love Jesus No More’ which has an ace chorus, I can’t wait to hear the finished thing. Adam works hard, I think he had three or four sessions going on that day. Respect. I made everyone breakfast and Adam poured scalding coffee all over his hand and cooker. Sweet. 
Then Mary and I drove over to Clapton to see Stacey and he kids and show them the DVD we got from the 4D scan place which freaked the kids out and bored me to tears. When Penny told us she had seventeen minutes of footage what she meant was that she had three minutes of footage repeated six times. Poor. He’s a lovely wee orange blob though, I think we’re going to like him. I’ve known Stacey’s kids since the day they were born and I love them even though Betsi is always trying to get me involved in dollhouse games and Hank doesn’t appear to own any clothes.
Cait and Pete are away so a couple of her younger siblings threw a party which was still going when we got up the next morning. It was full of Cambridge nobs and the music was intensely bad. If you’re trying to sleep at four in the morning and the Stereophonics are grating away at punishing volumes then pray there is no shotgun in the house because if there is somebody is going down. Nobody died and the police didn’t come so it wasn’t really a party, more of a debate with booze. There was a serious amount of alcohol being consumed, they are that age where it doesn’t touch the sides. I get giddy on a couple of Kronies nowadays so hats off to ‘em. Apparently Jimmy, Cait’s teenage brother, got his fruity little leather satchel on at 7am, announced he was an important banker and set off down the hill towards Crouch End. Now that’s class. Jimmy is studying Theology at Cambridge and has spent his whole summer holidays studying the Bible so a breakdown was deffo on the cards. He calls me ‘lad’. When he’s speaking to me I can never work out if he thinks that I’m his Grandad or if he thinks that he’s my Grandad.
I was up until three doing this weeks illustration for the Times which involved a Tory MP seated at a kitchen table with his family with his head blown off in front of a depiction of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus (ahh) in her arms only I’d put Thatchers face on her and Cameron’s face on him. There is no way they’re going to accept it but I submitted it anyway because I’m a curly haired sleepy rebel.
So after not much sleep I had to climb into the back of a BBC cab which picked it’s way through the morning traffic before arriving at White City and the home of the British Broadcasting Company where I was to talk about Bandstocks on Radio 5’s Victoria Derbyshire’s show. I was there early and I had downed two huge coffees by the time I, Bandstocks founder, Andrew Lewis and fellow Bandstocks artist, Jersey Budd were ushered into the studio a good half an hour after we were due on. We then had to listen to the news, weather, sport and traffic before being introduced. With precious little time left to explain something relatively simple but new (new is hard to explain to most people it seems) we were interrupted almost immediately by Derbyshire reading out the breaking news story that was this year contestants on Strictly Come Dancing. After she had read it out she asked me why I had had my head in my hands throughout. What I wanted to say was that in doing what she had just done, interrupted a discussion on a new way of presenting music that benefits both the Artist and the music lover to read out a list of low rent ‘celebrities’ that are appearing on some reality tv show she had shone a light on what is so badly wrong with our culture, or lack therof, today. But I didn’t. I dunno, maybe I bottled it, maybe I didn’t want to waste precious time arguing but I mumbled something about not recognising most of the names (not true) and holding a torch for Cherie Lunghi (I’m afraid that is true).
So finally we were on, I don’t remember much about it. They played a couple of Boo Radleys songs which was absurd and some woman texted in to say that good music will always win through and why should she pay for our recording costs. I don’t know who she thinks pays for recording costs now but it sure ain’t the bands or the labels. That one question worried me, are people really that dumb? Are they happy to fund record company execs coke habits rather than be a part of the whole experience. She’s happy to pay a tenner for a record that won’t make money for her or the band but won’t countenance paying a tenner for a record where both she and the band could make money, where owning the record and having her name on the sleeve is the very least she could expect. i don’t want to get evangelical about this, that was never my attention but complacency and fear of the unknown are two things I cannot abide so I might have to start standing on mountaintops wrapped in a sheet, wielding a mighty shitty stick and chucking about lightening bolts of righteous fury. I’ll need to rethink my hair though, it’s not being taken seriously for the artistic statement that it immutably is.
Afterwards, still angry, which surprised me, I met up with Marylou. Her embrace chased my dark thoughts down Great Portland Street and kicked the shit out of them in some dark alley full of cardboard boxes and fire escapes. Then we met up with my old friend Keefo and his lovely wife Jen. We had lunch in the Clachan where Keefo and I have been going since the mid nineties. We talked about babies (they have a young boy named Hamish who, at the advanced age of two, is a sturdy and handsome wee chap) and Joy Division and Bandstocks and Queen and Fleet Foxes and the Creation book (not the Bible) and babies again. Once home I checked my mail and my illustration had been accepted without further comment which saved me some time which we used by passing out cold on the bed for a couple of hours.
Then to Hackney for dinner at a friend’s house. Nicki is an interior designer and a friend of Mary’s from Cardiff. She cooked a lovely meal and we met some ace people and I’m afraid I got drunk and had to be taken home and put to bed. Amen.
