Return of the real McGee

So why has he been keeping such a low profile of late? Is it because he feels the English media’s comments border on racism in their attacks on him and his business? Only last week he was dismissed, along with a crowd of rock celebrities attending one of the endless processions of showcase concerts staged in London for new acts, with the line: "Will these people never get proper jobs?"

Neither - having never worn his heart as his kilt pin - has he seemed to care a great deal for what people here thought of him and what he did. Many Scots who find success abroad are wounded by a lack of appreciation for their achievements at home. Not McGee. He frankly never seemed to give a stuff what the folks thought back in Glasgow or anywhere else for that matter.

But today, he is slightly more willing to enter into the fray rather than just give rock ‘n’ roll’s two-fingered salute: "I have had an incredible amount of stick from the English media, probably just because I am Scottish. Poptones has gone okay - it’s been pretty good without being amazing, but still pretty good compared to so many other people who have tried to start up smaller companies."

The only predictable thing about McGee’s story is that the job of British Railways clerk, which first took him to London from Cathcart 20-odd years ago, would fail to occupy such a lively mind for very long.

Certainly not a mind capable of building Creation Records on the back of a single record which cost just 172 to make.

Certainly not the same rather more used and abused mind the prime minister was recently desperate to enlist for the government’s think-tank on the creative industries.

Which is what makes this new-found sensitivity to criticism so hard to fathom, because in 18 years of wreaking havoc in the record business’s epicentre in London, McGee has revelled in the role of the illegal alien making up his own set of rules. Only recently has the press down south made him start to feel as if he really must be from another planet.

Perhaps it started when he decided to finally cash his Creation chips in with Sony Music in 1999.

Or was it when he announced his return to the record game with Poptones, which he styled a modern, radical, record label, which would exploit the new forms of distribution now made possible by technology. "Poptones is very much still alive and kicking, with The Hives selling 90,000 copies of their album, which is well on the way to being a double platinum record in just two years, and I would ask what other new labels have enjoyed that kind of success."

The Hives are an almost cartoon-like Swedish rock band with punk leanings. McGee cunningly packaged the best of their work that had been released in their native Scandinavia, and launched what has proved to be an award-winning career for the band in Britain and beyond.

How did he spot them? Is there a common musical link dating back to the band he fronted in the beginning of this success story, Biff Bang Pow, and running through all the acts he has worked with such as Oasis and Primal Scream, which somehow arrives at The Hives?

"Hah! Timing! Biff Bang Pow couldn’t play in time and The Hives could. Unfortunately, Ken Popple, our drummer, bless him, did not have any sense of metronomic timing whatsoever. The Hives are like a f*****g metronomic machine," he boasts.

He and Biff Bang Pow’s bass player, Dick Green, started a club called The Living Room in Tottenham Court Road, because McGee says he did not know anyone in London, and by inviting the bands he liked to come and play he might meet them.

His social circle duly expanded, but it was a young band from Scotland that launched the Creation phenomenon.

At the time he said they would have still been sitting at home watching TV in East Kilbride if he had not put their record out. But The Jesus And Mary Chain’s ‘Upside Down’, initially a hand-folded paper sleeve folded into a plastic cover, eventually sold 50,000 copies. Such a maverick success was almost unheard of then and certainly would be now. Alan McGee never looked back. Until now, that is.

His response to the recent carping and sniping has been to create a club called Death Disco, at which he teams up with the genuinely legendary Irish publicist and photographer, BP Fallon, whose greatest claim to fame is being namechecked as "purple-browed beep" on T Rex’s huge hit, ‘Telegram Sam’.

Fallon also worked extensively with Led Zeppelin, U2 and Thin Lizzy, whose Phil Lynott said of him: "He is brilliant, although I am not entirely sure what it is that he does." His role in the collaboration with McGee is happily easier to work out.

"It’s basically just me and BP playing records, and in London it has proved popular by default.

The three main clubs are Trash, Nag Nag Nag and Death Disco. For the first two it is all about dressing up, but with Death Disco it is about being able to dress down, to be 40 and get pissed and fall flat on your face. It has also been about coming to terms with my past, because when me and BP first toured America I couldn’t have played an Oasis or Primal Scream record, but I can now, alongside stuff from the Stones and more obscure records like Fred Sonic Smith’s ‘Sonic Endeavor’."

Returning to running a club might have been a response to the business analysts always trying to second guess his next move, which the briefest review of his career history would have suggested is a futile exercise.

After the initial success of the first big hit single, he knew expectations would be ridiculously high, so he made Creation’s next release a joke record. He took three girls who were working in a record shop, gave them the mildly controversial name of Baby Amphetamine, and had the group record the slightly more controversial song, ‘Chernobyl Baby’. McGee could laugh some of the way to the bank when they made the top five in the Independent Singles Chart.

By 1992 his label had been sufficiently successful to warrant Sony buying a 49% stake, the year before Alan happened by King Tut’s in Glasgow to see Oasis play an unannounced early evening show, the band having talked their way on to that night’s bill at the last moment.

The timing of the decision to sell half the company was given precious little explanation, and nor was 1999’s deal which saw Sony take complete control, with McGee and partner Dick Green walking away from Creation for the last time.

He only half jokes that Death Disco is the only way he can recapture the feeling of the label’s early days, before it started making money and all got too serious to be fun.

"At the club we really just play whatever is in our record box, and it is sort of like a hobby that has become real.

"Creation was the same for four years - it was my hobby. But after we sold 120 thousand copies of the band House Of Love’s albums, it plainly could not just be a hobby any more," he says.

"We never set out to do anything with the club nine months ago other than be the one night of a week when we play records, have a laugh and get drunk, while listening to bands like The Cortinas and songs like

‘Substitute’ by The Who. It was never on the agenda to be a business, more of a case of where do we fit this into our lives?

"Funnily enough it could end up being a viable business concern because we are not really trying to make it one. It is just that all the people who are in bands in London like coming because it is not designed for people wanting to show off their new clothes. Anyway, they are way cooler than that."

As indeed is Alan McGee, who knows he is fooling no one with his new found self-deprecating, "I’m just a wee baldie guy" patter.

His relationship with the mainstream music industry may always have been a little strained, but it has never been less than lucrative.

In hitching Creation’s wagon to the well-oiled Sony machine 10 years ago, he made sure he would retain ultimate control of his and the company’s own affairs.

Having all the corporate backing with precious little of the attendant corporate interference encouraged the perception of McGee as the last independent, but one who had become a major player.

People still come up to him now wanting to shake his hand, saying, "Alan, you changed my life."

"It happens a lot in Ireland at the club, where we sell out the Ambassador in Dublin, which takes more than 1,100 people. The first time, it happened maybe 15 times.

"These four big beery guys, you know, proper big neddy boys, came up and said something like that. Me being me, I thought they were just taking the piss, but after the 14th occasion, I realised they meant it, which was a bit hard to take."

What he currently cannot stomach is what he perceives as hostility in the English media, although keeping his head below the parapet until it blows over has never really been McGee’s style.

It is born of frustration, and while nothing will dissuade him from continuing to develop the Poptones label, he understandably has little or no desire to defend his recent track record.

These are changed times, and perhaps one of the greatest testaments to McGee’s ability is that he guided the Cosmic Rough Riders’ rather ordinary debut album to silver status. The Glasgow band may have sounded more like rock’n’roll’s past than its future, but people bought it anyway.

Perhaps it was the old punk instinct to subvert from within that prompted him to accept Tony Blair’s invitation to participate in the appallingly named Creative Industries

Taskforce, and less clunkily titled Music Industry Forum, purely to influence policy on the New Deal and Welfare To Work schemes for musicians, with the suggested changes finally coming into effect last year.

Some believe this was the old rebel finally conforming, and he was ribbed mercilessly for it. "I am supposedly the enfant terrible, but again, being Scottish has a lot to do with it, and I think it is pretty racist that they have it in for me, just because I keep doing what I want to do."

He hopes these feelings of persecution will be alleviated by bringing Death Disco to Scotland for the first time, which will also mark his debut as a DJ on home turf.

McGee’s instinct tells him that he has tapped into 2003’s big thing. He retracted the famous "bedwetters" insult he hurled at Coldplay when they first emerged with their sensitive approach to rock, but his club’s sloganeering, such as "death to the new acoustic movement", suggests that was a rather hollow gesture.

With his new pal BP Fallon riding shotgun, he is quietly confident that they can prove it is still all about attitude rather than age.

"I am 42, he is 54, and we are playing punk rock records, old and new. There are new bands coming through, but no one else seems to realise that rock music is in the middle of a Zeitgeist just now, and kids who are 19 just want to get off their nut and go crazy.

"It is about having a great time. No matter how bad a job Tony Blair is doing of running the country, tonight we are having a party."

Death Disco is at the Barfly in Glasgow and the Gilded Saloon in Edinburgh on Friday December 13 and Saturday December 14 respectively.