In October 1999, Alan McGee was the most famous record label boss in Britain. Creation Records, the tiny indie he’d co-founded in 1983, had put out era-defining albums by Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub before the Scottish impresario even got around to stumbling across some band called Oasis. After Britpop made him a household name, McGee was recruited as an adviser by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was trying to make ‘Cool Britannia’ happen. When Blair invited him for dinner at fancy country manor Chequers, McGee wasn’t sure what to expect – but it certainly wasn’t the gurning, cigar-wielding spectre of Jimmy Savile.
“He bowled in going: ‘Now then, now then’ and proceeded to run the whole fucking dinner,” remembers McGee, who at the time had no idea about Savile’s years of predatory sexual abuse. “I didn’t know he was a fucking paedophile or anything like that, but I was sat there thinking: ‘This guy hasn’t been famous for 15 years, what in the fuck is he doing here?’ His behaviour was letchy. He was a fucking horror, man.”
That bizarre glimpse inside the British establishment is just one moment from McGee’s rollercoaster ‘90s that makes it into Creation Stories, a new biopic directed by Nick Moran from a script by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. In the film, Savile’s sinister presence is used as evidence of the rot eating away at the heart of Blair and his ‘New Labour’ project. In truth, the real McGee’s feelings towards the former Prime Minister are more ambivalent. “Irvine put his own viewpoint into the film and Blair gets cunted off,” he says. “I didn’t change what Irvine was saying because it fit with his script, but I have zero problem with Tony Blair. I know him personally and I quite like him.”
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 