Creation Stories

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER,

BARBARA M C GEE. R.I.P.

When youre a drug addict theres no such thing as jet lag. For years Id fly two or three times a month between London and Los Angeles. The party in London would end when I dragged myself away from Noel or Liam, Bobby or Throb, and poured myself into a taxi to Heathrow. Neck some Valium on the plane, get an hour or twos sleep, then back into the action. You get off the plane, get drugs, get pissed and the same party continues. And it is the same party. Theyve all blurred into one.

That night in 1994 I was out with Primal Scream, who were rehearsing in a room in Waterloo. I think Oasis had left town the night before. This was before their first album was out, and they had a ferocious appetite for the rock and roll lifestyle they knew was theirs now for the taking. Every time they arrived in London it was the start of a two-day bender. I had the flu that night I should have been in bed. But I was taking coke with Throb Young. He racks out lines as long as your arm. Almost as thick, too. Just before my taxi arrived, I made the mistake of doing one.

I was taking my sister Susan with me on this trip. I was going to show her a good time in Los Angeles, introduce her to my cool friends out there. It was going to be great fun. Creation Records was the most hedonistic good times rock and roll label in the world, and it was modelled in my own image.

In the taxi to Heathrow I began to feel unusual. I checked my pockets, looking for a Valium or a Temazepam. Shit, Id run out. I took a deep breath. It didnt matter. Id done this trip a hundred times before. Another deep breath. It would be fine.

It was the last time I would leave Britain for three years. It was the moment that everything changed.

My father hasnt gone out of his way to help me much in life but he did give me one useful piece of advice when I was young: If someone tells you theyre going to hit you, theyre probably not going to. Dont worry about the ones who threaten you. Its probably all theyll do.

He was right about that. Even in Glasgow, in the violent 1970s, the mouthy dudes werent the problem. It wouldnt be long before Id become one of them myself. And that advice would stick in my mind years later when I was negotiating with the most powerful people in the music industry, people who were telling me they were going to take away everything Id built up.

My father didnt give warnings. He gave me something else. From the day I left Glasgow Ive never been scared of anyone, because I know what being scared really feels like.

I was born on 29 September 1960 in Redlands hospital, in the West End Road area of Glasgow. My father John McGee married my mother Barbara Barr in 1953. He was twenty years old; she was nineteen. They met when my mum was doing the books for the car mechanics where my dad worked as a panel-beater.

Both my parents were from working-class families. My grandpa on my mothers side, Jimmy Barr, worked in the shipyards in Govan, on the Clyde. I never met him; he died in 1953 from a heart attack. Members of my family tend to check out when theyre in their fifties. A bit worrying for the fifty-two-year-old writing this book. But thats Scotland, the diet, the weather, the booze Ive put all that behind me. Grandpa Barr was, by all accounts, an abusive alcoholic. My mum says he made her and Gran Barrs lives a misery. From where I was standing, that was all too easy to believe. Ive never met a more miserable woman than Gran Barr, and no wonder that after growing up with her my mother wasnt too happy herself. Gran Barr had been raised in one of the now notorious Quarriers homes for orphans, founded in the nineteenth century by a Glaswegian shoemaker, William Quarrier. They were a byword for abuse. Her mother had died young of illness and then her father had been killed in the First World War. Gran Barr and her brother were sent to the Quarriers home then. I didnt know much about this when I was a child and only found out about this later, when my father saw me putting money into an envelope to give to Quarriers. Never let your gran see that, he told me. I never found out exactly what had happened to my gran in those homes. There was physical abuse; that Im sure of. Gran Barr could be a vicious piece of work, but with a beginning like that, she probably didnt have much choice.

I never knew my dads dad either. He was in the car trade, like my father, and died in his fifties before I was born. We didnt see much of Gran Gee, as we called her. She was slightly demonized at home, for reasons kept from me, and didnt have much of a relationship with my dad. She died when I was fourteen. My dad had one brother, who passed away not too long ago. Hed been shot in the head in Cyprus during the Second World War. It didnt seem to hold him back much.

My father was a seriously handsome man, with dark Cary Grant hair and piercing blue eyes. As a wee child he was my hero. He was strong from his work as a panel-beater. In fact one of my earliest memories is of him lifting me out of bed and carrying me downstairs when the roof of our house caught fire because of some dodgy wiring in the attic. The firemen arrived and saved the day; the house survived. As I grew up, I saw less and less of him. He was always at work. There was his day job at Wileys, then hed come home, have a quick tea, then be off to do a homer a cash job to sneak past the tax man or to go to the Masons.

It was sometimes hard to keep track of what my mum looked like. She changed regularly, her hair a different cut or colour from one month to the next. She kept herself well turned out and was very thin. She was a looker herself, but probably not in the same league as my dad, and it wound her up to see the attention he enjoyed from other women. She smoked constantly, especially when one of her moods came on.

And they came on a lot more when Gran Barr moved into the house. This was just after we moved from Govan Hill in Paisley to 36 Carmunnock Road in Mount Florida in 1963, just around the corner from Hampden Park, the national football ground. Gran Barr had been burgled and was too scared now to stay in her house. With no brothers or sisters, my mum was the only one who could help, and so Gran came to live with us. The mood at home went rapidly downhill. I can imagine what a prison sentence it was to my parents, and how much they must have resented the sacrifice they had to make. That was when I was three years old, so Gran pretty much set the domestic tone for my whole childhood. I would live in this house till I was sixteen, when my dad made it impossible to stay there any longer. (Well come to that later.)

My mum worked hard to make money as well as my dad. She worked wherever she could, in a sports shop as well as doing the books in the mechanics; she was a jack of all trades. She was the clever one in the relationship, but it wasnt in the days when it was possible for women to break through to a position of power. Not working-class women from Glasgow, anyway. I wish shed been born twenty years later when she would have stood a chance to use her intelligence. Shed have found life much less frustrating. She argued all the time with my dad she knew exactly how to wind him up.

Nevertheless, until I went to secondary school, I had quite a happy childhood.

I went to Mount Florida primary school 200 yards up the road. School was fun. My sister Laura had been born in 1963; too early for me to remember. To begin with she looked up to me, though our relationship soon became more competitive. I must still have been cute enough then not to annoy my parents, small enough for it to seem unreasonable for them to give me a belt. I loved football and we lived five minutes walk away from Hampden Park. Dad would take me there as a treat to watch Queens Park or an international against England. Those England games were the most exciting things on earth. They were just mental: 150,000 people standing, singing and swaying twenty yards to one side, twenty yards to the other the Hampden sway. It was seriously dangerous, exhilarating. My dad would have to hold on to me to stop me from getting trampled to death. He hated it. Later, I supported Rangers, which was further away thirty minutes to the west, just south of the shipyards where my grandfather had worked. I went on my own from the age of eleven, and saw them every second Saturday.