Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running A Label - Alan McGee (2013)

PROLOGUE

When you’re a drug addict there’s no such thing as jet lag. For years I’d 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 two’s 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. They’ve 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, I’d run out. I took a deep breath. It didn’t matter. I’d 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.