Product Description

At the beginning of 2000 Alan McGee of Creation Records stunned the music business when he announced that he was leaving the label. This is the behind-the-scenes story of Creation and of one man's vision.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470161 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"I always saw punk rock as successful", explains Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records--Britain's most notorious independent record label ever. "I saw punk rock as a way to live your life with edge. I'm an obsessive character. And I was obsessed with Creation and keeping it going. I was putting these records out because I had to do it".

Originally a labour of love, founded by Scottish punk-rocker Alan McGee in a London bedsit in the Summer of 1983, Creation Records painstakingly built up a reputation as one of the most consistent indie labels in Britain throughout the 1980s, surfed the wave of acid house throughout the early 1990s and signed Oasis as the star of Britpop began to rise. At the end of the 1990s, the Creation empire crumbled into dust in the face of ever-diminishing financial returns and the hangover from a decade of rabid drug abuse--one which saw McGee, suffering from a number of debilitating cocaine-related breakdowns that almost saw him drop out of the business altogether. Alan McGee and the Story of Creation Records (subtitled "This Ecstasy Romance Cannot Last"), then, is both a biography and an official Creation epitaph, written by sometime Oasis biographer Paulo Hewitt. Hewitt's prose is more instinctive than incisive; the conversations that he has conducted with McGee and a dozen-odd Creation staffers, relatives and hangers-on are written up verbatim, which, on the positive side, makes this an easy, lightweight read. However, this chatty style neatly skirts any serious critical weight, and since few others outside McGee's immediate circle are interviewed (notable absentees include Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie and Oasis' Noel Gallagher--often referred to in McGee's tales of chemical excess, but irritatingly, never quoted) it occasionally leaves This Ecstacy Romance... feeling like a work in progress.

Undeniably, though, McGee is the fulcrum and it is his fascinating testimony--and weighty ego--that carries the story through. Skirting madness at every turn, Alan McGee and the Story of Creation Records is purest rock'n'roll hedonism, coming straight from the horse's mouth. --Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

Too inside the Creation circle for most?
The book is very unorganised, written as a series of interviews, with almost no sense of chronology.

While the most important bands of Creation are mentioned, one gets little idea of what life at Creation was really like. There is very little focus on the hardships Alan McGee faced when starting Creation. It seems as if he just signed Jesus and the Mary Chain and had an easy time from then on, with very little focus on the horrible financial situation the label was for most of the 80's and early 90's.

Relevant parts to the story, like Alan McGee's imprint label on Warner Brothers (WEA) Records, Elevation, the Creation offshoots, ignition, Rev-Ola and August and Alan McGee's one-time nightclub The Living Room are either skirted around or omitted completely.

For fans of Creation bands the book is redundant, as there is an abundance of information on these bands already online, and for those wishing to know more about the Creation label, it is not in-depth enough. The Cavanagh book, while a good deal longer, is far superior, and is well worth shelling out the extra cash for.

good book
I've read this thing twice now. I really do love it - although at some 650 odd pages it's quite the tome. There are so many anecdotes and observations that I could mention which make the book witty and intelligent. At the Creation parties of the late '80s Guy Chadwick apparently got into the habit of taking all his clothes off - Danny Kelly says it was like having Gollum in the office. Haha. Ok - perhaps not so much witty as disturbing, that one. But you get the drift. There are oodles of interviews and comments from Creation bands and staff, and a lot of compelling points are made. It creates a pretty instructive picture of the label and the times more generally. For better or worse I was sort of appalled by the degree of drug abuse going on. I thought the label was a bit more interesting than that. I do have a fairly major gripe with this book, however - where's the discography?!? Wtf. Seriously - that sucks. A work of this size surely needs a decent appendix.