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Alan McGee has claimed that he liked Noel Gallagher “straight away”, after meeting him at gig before signing the rock band to his label, Creation Records.
The Scottish music boss, 63, details his experiences looking after some of the biggest acts of the Nineties in a new book, Alan McGee: How to Run an Indie Label.
“The nights that change your life are never the ones you are expecting, are they?” he wrote of that fateful night at King Tut’s in his hometown of Glasgow, in 1993.
He recalled how he was at the gig early to watch his friend Debbie Turner play with her band, Sister Lovers, and saw her hanging out with “some band that [she’d] brought up from Manchester] in the back of her van hanging about”.
McGee said he initially mistook Noel’s younger brother, Liam, for the band’s drugdealer: “Bands at that time always had a cool-looking drugdealer with them.”
When Oasis were added in a last-minute slot, McGee was “really surprised” by how good they sounded as they performed “Rock ‘N’ Roll Star”.
“I was thinking maybe the next song will be rubbish but it was ‘Bring It On Down’ and that was great as well,” he said. “Then it was ‘Up in the Sky’ and I was already signing them in my head. This was a band I could release, but I was also aware that I was quite drunk and maybe they were not as good as I was thinking they were.”
McGee asked his friend, producer and sound engineer Mark Coyle, known as “the sixth member” of Oasis, to introduce him to “the leader of the band”, prompting him to go backstage and bring out Noel.
“I liked him straight away,” he said. “He had been hustling since he was 15. That was his thing. When I signed him at 25, he was at his hustling peak. This was his moment. And mine.”
Later, McGee said that working with Oasis was “always genius, wild and unpredictable. You never knew where you were with them. They were so volatile, but I loved it.”
“Oasis were everything I had always dreamt of releasing with Creation,” he continued. “They were rock ‘n’ roll, they had a psychedlic edge, but it was tougher and more working class, and they had those anthems.
“They also had Noel and Liam, who were about to be the two most famous people of the decade. They had the charisma and the whiff of danger, especialy when they were together, which was pure excitement. Even their interviews were explosive... you just didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
McGee’s publisher, Atlantic Books, describes How to Run an Indie Label as “a no-holds barred rampage through gigs, clubs, boardrooms, drugs and booze, mad scenes, brilliant signings, machine gun quotes and a resilient wild spirit”.
The book is released on hardback and eBook on 5 September. B
