The story of how Alan McGee discovered Oasis by chance when he turned up early at an 18 Wheeler gig at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut while the band forced their way onto the bill to play for him has become so shrouded in misinformation and myth that many now believe the story to be apocryphal and that Alan was, in fact, tipped off weeks in advance by Sony.
Noel: "We were playing 'I am the walrus' and we could never work out an ending for it so Liam used to leave after he'd sung his bits and I would put some effects pedal on and I'd leave and then we'd go to the bar and watch the other three trying to work out a fucking ending". At this point, Noel assures us, he was approached by McGee, offered a deal, and chatted about the Pistols and The Beatles. "[We had ] mutual friends in Manchester and that was it."
After a classic deal-sealing handshake, Oasis signed to Creation four months later and Oasis were swiftly sequestered into Creation's cocaine culture.
Noel recalls, "The first day going into Creation, scrawled on the wall behind Tim Abbot's desk in big black felt pen was 'Northern Ignorance' and I thought, 'That kind of describes me, fucking love this place already, I've not been here two minutes'. It was all about the music, the business side of it was looked after by someone else. It was all about the music and the clothes, the drugs, fucking football and going out and having a great night out, and who would not want to be in the middle of all that?"
Andy Bell (Ride, Beady Eye): "They'd redefined what pop music was. We felt about 20 years out of date immediately".
Nobody could have foreseen what would happen with Morning Glory. Fame and money beyond McGee's wildest dreams. He says: "It changed all our lives forever. We all managed to live the way we wanted to live. If you want to be crass about it, we lived the dream. Funnily enough, by the time I was allowed to live the dream, I'd already lived it! Hahaha! Probably the most exotic thing about Britpop was that I was fucking sober!"
From the outside, it seemed as if Millionaire McGee had replaced his drugs excesses with flashes of Abramovichian financial and egotistical extravagances. He took out a centre-spread advert in NME simply to print his own review of a Sex Pistols gig. He bought Noel a Roller on a whim ("I'd promised him one night that if he sold so many million records that I'd buy him a Rolls-Royce!"). He hired Learjets to fly him and Innes to Italy to DJ at Fashion Week. And, seemingly gone totally Howard Hughes, on his return to the office he bought himself an entire building across the road that only he and Bobby Gillespie were allowed to enter. Alan laughs. "I bought an office block, I've still got it. I had an art gallery and Gillespie used to come in and talk to me every day. Me and Bobby used to sit there and go, 'Weird being big, isn't it?' I used to get told around '92 or '93, 'You've got £80,000 to sign a new band'. Then in '95 or '96 I got told I had £8 million to sign a new band! So I signed Kevin Rowland! I had a wish list that went 'Neil Young - taken; Paul Weller - tried, never got a meeting; Kevin Rowland - signed'!"
As the '90s wore on, Creation became synonymous with a different form of excess. Bands' whildest whims were indulged: Super Furry Animals were given 60-foot inflatable bears, a somewhat unfriendly single release including over 50 uses of the word 'fuck' and a tank decked out with a soundsystem to drive around the festival scene for a year: "We were questioning why he was spending £20,000 on a half-page advert in the music press," says Gruff Rhys, "when we could buy an armed vehicle for £11,000, put your name on it and have far more impact for your money".
And, of course, there was the ultimate ego-stoking extravagance: Knebworth.
"Knebworth was too big", says Alan, of that modest 1996 Hertfordshire gathering of Oasis' close friends and family. "It was like being at the Town And Country Club [now The Forum], and that was the VIP bit. It wasn't that much fun for me, not really".
