How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (39 page)

A band out of time, the Jazz Butcher was based around Pat Fish, who sang wry observational and tuneful Jonathan
Richman-esque
songs, with a world-view framed in the Northants area rather than New England. It was in a biker pub in Rugby where Fish had seen a young band of teenagers, Spaceman 3, playing overloaded Stooges covers to a delighted crowd of Hell’s Angels.

‘I heard the tape,’ says Barker, ‘and thought, it’s good but it’s very derivative – but, you know, what isn’t? They had one song – I think it was the last track on the record “O.D. Catastrophe” – and it’s “TV Eye”, note for note, it’s “TV Eye” with different words. When I saw them I knew they had something. They played some show with the Butcher somewhere and you could tell … they’re sitting down … what’s going on … there’s two guys sitting down, the bass player standing up, and, you know, there’s like a ten-minute gap between each song while they’re tuning up and they had all the psychedelic lights going and stuff, which was retro, but no one else was doing it.’

The first Spacemen 3 album,
Sound of Confusion
, was a primitive, garage fusion of the Velvets and the Stooges. The record fell on completely deaf ears in the music press, even John Peel, who granted Loop three sessions, remained uninterested.
The Perfect Prescription
, Spacemen 3’s second album, was a much more measured work. The track ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ gave ample
notice of the band’s drug-orientated perspective. It also sounded exploratory rather than derivative; on at least some of the tracks, their ideas, however pharmaceutically enhanced, went beyond reproducing their record collections.

‘No one give a shit,’ says Barker. ‘I couldn’t even get it fucking reviewed. I think they got a small feature in
Sounds
when
The Perfect Prescription
came out, in which Sonic Boom talked about heroin all the time, and that fucked up any opportunity of going to America.’

Someone who did start to take an interest in Spacemen 3 was McGee who, in typical fashion, decided to manage the band overnight and was now entering a period of perpetual debauchery. ‘I just liked taking drugs with Sonic. We were just both a couple of cokeheads,’ he says. ‘“If you could give me a good night out …” – you were in … do you know what I mean?’

Despite Loop earning a
Melody Maker
cover feature – which saw them permanently fall out with Spacemen 3 – both bands remained a minority concern. They were, however, starting a new underground, away from bands like Pop Will Eat Itself and the Wedding Present that Marshall had signed at RCA. And if the audience back home was meagre, Spacemen 3’s distorted take on the English Opium-Eater archetype found resonance abroad.

‘I admired it ’cause they were in their own world,’ says Barker, ‘and the commitment was 100 per cent. I went to Los Angeles – it was in 1987 – and there was a record shop on Melrose and I see this card up on the wall “Drummer Wanted for Band, must be into the Spacemen 3”. They couldn’t get a review in the fucking
Melody Maker
or the
NME
and yet in Los Angeles, in ’87, just about the time the second record came out, some kid wants to form a band in Los Angeles that’s the Spacemen 3.’

Barrett, the Spacemen and every other band and hanger-on at Creation was being invited to Hackney where the difference
between day and night was beginning to dissolve as Ecstasy took hold.

Any unlikely excuse was conjured up by McGee to justify a three-day Ecstasy bender. In his evangelical zeal he would occasionally go to extreme lengths. In the early summer of 1989, with the days lengthening, McGee felt the need for an epic bacchanalian record release party to rival those thrown by Ahmet Ertegun or Seymour Stein in their Broadway pomp. McGee, determined to make full use of the greenhouse and roof at Westgate Street, scanned the release schedule only to realise he had a problem: Creation had nothing but a compilation by The Loft due for release in September. A Primal Scream album was in the can, but the band were still undecided on acid house music; their release party was sure to be rock ’n’ roll, but not in the manner the newly Ecstasy-saturated McGee was proselytising. Not to be denied the opportunity of a weekend’s hedonism, McGee immediately decided to release a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation of Biff Bang Pow tracks. It was little more than a round-up of their best, if little known, material from the previous four or five years; McGee had nevertheless decided on a title that he felt encapsulated the essence of his and Green’s band:
The Acid House Album
. He ordered 5,000 plain white cardboard sleeves and some Day-Glo paint and the early Clerkenwell spirit of folding paper sleeves into plastic bags on speed was upgraded. Three days of spraying paint on cardboard sleeves pinned against a wall turned
The Acid House Album
launch party into an orgy of blissed-out deprivation. Paint and the painters started to melt together in a mess of white long-sleeved T-shirts and fringes as acid house tracks and early Seventies Stones numbers competed for supremacy over the sound system. Breaking into a smile while recalling what, in a crowded field, may have been possibly the highest point of Westgate Street debauchery, McGee is wistful.
‘There’s a few people who got high off the paint,’ he says, ‘and they were high for quite a long time.’

‘I was invited to those acid house parties,’ says Nick Currie, who, being both drug-free and Creation’s most self-sufficient artist, had not been exposed to the increased rush of hedonism in the label’s offices. ‘The launch of Biff Bang Pow’s
The Acid House Album
was a big and incredible Ecstasy party out at the Hackney office. I think I was the only person in the room not on Ecstasy, which was probably the most extraordinary thing to be, because I could witness these crashing tides of empathy where everybody was just slithering all over everybody else. The House of Love were all in a big human bundle of limbs and I got off with some girl who did the artwork at Rough Trade who ended up marrying Bill Drummond. You’d have these Ecstasy affairs with people and it almost didn’t matter who you were, or what you looked like, because the drugs did all the work for you.’

Once the cleaning-up process began, some time on the Monday morning, McGee beamed with pride as Creation now found itself with a purpose-decorated party space. ‘We now had another back room,’ says Kyllo. ‘This big empty area sprayed in fluorescent paint and it was a bit separate. From then on that’s where all the craziness took place.’

The life-affirming Ecstasy parties were accompanied by the crushing and destabilising drift of the midweek comedowns that followed, a cycle not everyone around Creation was sufficiently well-equipped to handle. ‘We turned a lot of people on to it,’ says McGee. ‘A lot of people tuned in, dropped out and never came back.’

The House of Love were still part of the inner Creation circle and were duly invited to the Hackney parties, but the band were finding life on Fontana difficult to navigate, the pressures of the size of their advance creating an artificial sense of what they
could achieve. The band’s iconic guitarist Terry Bickers found the expectation around the band particularly hard to tolerate and suffered a breakdown, which was accelerated by the band’s drug use. As the House of Love’s recording sessions started to stall, his instability was kept from the press, but within Westgate Street his behaviour was making his problems self-evident. ‘Terry Bickers was very unwell and came into the office with a gun,’ says Kyllo. ‘It wasn’t really aimed at anybody. It wasn’t, “I’m going to take you all out.” I don’t suppose it was loaded but we had to talk him down from waving it around for a long time.’

Bickers eventually recovered and left the band; his fragility was a rare but very real instance of the downside of the Creation partying. McGee had thrown himself headlong into the hedonism of acid house and was starting to move in a different milieu, one that was more typical of his office’s Hackney environs than of the indie clubs.

‘I’d be dancing, if you can call it dancing,’ says McGee. ‘Fucking hopping on one leg more like, but I’d be on one leg talking to some girl who’d be sticking her tongue down my throat telling me it was great and then her boyfriend would give me a big kiss and I’d go, “What do you do?” and she’d go, “I work in a bank.” I said to her boyfriend, “What do you do?” “I rob banks.” In any other culture that’s a joke; in acid house, on stage at the Gardening Club in Covent Garden in 1990, that wasn’t a joke. You knew he was a fucking bank robber, you knew his message was “What’s in the bank?”’

The next logical step as far as McGee was concerned was to fully embrace the culture and start releasing acid house 12-inches as the offices were full of an ever-growing retinue of hustlers and dealers, all ready to offer their advice on the state of the culture.

McGee and the rest of Creation’s embrace of acid house was written in black and white on the label’s release schedule for
1990. It was also a success. Love Corporation, Ed Ball’s nom-
de-acid
house, released the epic ‘Palatial’ 12-inch which sufficiently impressed Danny Rampling for him to remix it. Rampling did the same for another Creation release, Hypnotone’s ‘Dream Beam’, which along with records by Sheer Taft and Fluke was played at nights at the Milk Bar.

The following year Creation released
Keeping The Faith
, a compilation of its acid house releases. Housed in a white sleeve, bearing a newly designed and short-lived fluorescent Creation logo, the album bore all the hallmarks of a dance label release. To the aficionado it was a decent collection of a fast-moving genre; to the indie kids scanning a track listing that included Crazy Eddie & QQ Freestyle’s ‘Nena De Ibiza’, it was a head-scratching introduction into the world to which McGee, who was managing the Grid and Fluke, had dedicated the last twelve months.

‘Everybody claimed to [have] put it together,’ says McGee, ‘but it was Grant Fleming that did it. We were actually pretty good at acid house, but really Grant more than anybody was really responsible for it. He was the one on a Saturday afternoon going round with the white labels.’

Grant Fleming, a teenage West Ham fan, was as far removed a character from the fanzine editors, who still occasionally braved the transport system to visit Creation, as could be imagined. McGee, in an attempt to liven up his relations with the House of Love, with whom he was now thoroughly bored, suggested Fleming join him and the band on the road.

‘I made him in charge of the merch on a big House of Love tour when I was still managing them,’ says McGee. ‘I never used to travel with the band, ’cause I found them too boring, and me and Grant were speeding up and down the motorway – and I use the word “speeding” in its right context. We just had three weeks of debauchery. We came off of that tour and I’d totally had it with
the House of Love. We were more rock ’n’ roll than the band: the band were going to bed at fucking one in the morning having had their eight pints of lager, we were going out, coming back at seven, and then on to the next gig off our nuts for three or four weeks. At the end of that I just went to Grant, “Do you want a job?” and he went, “What?” and I went, “I want to a start dance label,” and he went, “What are we calling it?” “Creation.”’

Sharing space alongside Crazy Eddie and QQ Freestyle on the Creation release schedule for 1990 were three EPs and, in November, an album, by McGee’s newest signings, a quartet of Oxford art college students, Ride. Named after a Nick Drake song, the quartet were as boyish as the folk singer, and equally redolent of Arcadian youth. Enormous fans of My Bloody Valentine and the House of Love, they had arrived at a sound that explored the DNA of both bands: crashing drums, cooed harmonies and a different effects pedal for every chord change. Lyrically their songs were opaque and dreamy and sung with an affecting, if slightly mannered, hesitancy.

Ride’s debut EP
Ride
was released in the third week of 1990, and the band were instantly tipped as an act for the new decade. Ride had struck a chord. In the absence of any new House of Love or My Bloody Valentine material, they filled the gap the older bands had left and started drawing audiences in their image, late teenage or early twenties guitar music fans who read the music papers and were yet to have an interest in acid house. There were many more Ride fans than there were Hypnotone or Sheer Taft fans, and the
Ride
EP gave Creation its first-ever singles chart position at no. 72 and in its newest signings a perfectly timed lucky break.

The Ride demo had come to McGee via Cally Calloman, who had moved from Phonogram to Warners. ‘I was an A&R man then,’ he says, ‘and the scout Ben Wardle came to me with a cassette that just had the word ‘Ride’ written big in Letraset on
it. I tracked them down and watched them rehearse and I just thought, this is the perfect group. I thought, there’s no argument – and I couldn’t get anyone interested in the record company at all, and Ride kept saying they were big fans of My Bloody Valentine and I was going, “But you’re so much better.”’

Word reached McGee that a tape made by a quartet of young Creation fans was being passed around Warners, who duly started chasing the band. ‘Alan phoned up and it was a bit like, “Your girlfriend doesn’t like you very much … do you mind if I go out with her?”’ says Calloman. ‘He was really nice, he said, “This is the sort of band I need to rebuild Creation and I want to do this and I want to do that,” and I thought, oh well, I can’t get anyone interested here, so good luck.’

Ride had a phenomenal run in 1990, ending a breakneck year of touring with an album,
Nowhere
, that entered the charts at no. 11, maintaining a coveted presence for Creation in the music weeklies while ‘The President’ carried on raving. In love with each release, McGee talked up every new signing, whether a guitar band from the Thames valley or an East End chancer with a sampler, as ‘genius’ and ‘the best band in the world’. It would take Primal Scream, who released
Loaded
in March in 1990, to bring the two Creation cultures of acid house and classic guitar music together.