A trip back in time with the ‘president of pop’
Creation Stories
No cert, 100 min
★★★★★
Dir Nick Moran
Starring Ewen Bremner, Jason Isaacs, Leo Flanagan, Richard Jobson, James Payton, Leo Harvey-elledge, Steven Berkoff, Clint Dyer, Ed Byrne
‘I’m a situationist,” crows the Scottish record producer Alan Mcgee (Ewen Bremner), while savouring his legacy. “I make things happen.” The real Mcgee’s label, Creation Records, may have only lasted from 1983 to 1999, but in those years it bankrolled the indie bands everyone was talking about: The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream. And, all-importantly, Oasis, whom Mcgee discovered in his native Glasgow in 1993, at a tiny gig at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.
Mcgee’s 2013 memoir – titled like the film, and subtitled “Riots, Raves and Running a Label” – told the story of his rise from musically talentless punk to self-described “president of pop”. As adapted here by Irvine Welsh, Creation Stories will give you flashbacks to Trainspotting, which emerged from the same acid-house culture Mcgee became obsessed with in the 1990s. It’s also indebted to 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s tonguein-cheek 2002 celebration of the contemporaneous “Madchester” club scene.
Did Mcgee, for instance, really have a night out in Los Angeles with some posh twit of a film producer called Ralph (Jason Isaacs), who loaded them up with cocaine and lured them to a rancid crack den? Mcgee has said it’s pure fantasy. But it’s absolutely the kind of thing he admits he did, and blanked from his memory, during peak 1990s madness.
Beyond Welsh’s insider-eye survey of the era, the joy of the film is what a fast, fresh job Nick Moran has done directing it. Characterisation happens in swift visual strokes. Everyone looks absurd in exactly the clothes you want them wearing, whether it’s a droning, shell-suited Liam Gallagher (Leo Harvey-elledge) or a down-withthe-kids Alastair Campbell (Ed Byrne), with whom Mcgee awkwardly allied himself during the 1997 Labour election campaign.
This satirical treatment lets nobody off the hook – not Thatcher, not Blair (a simpering James Payton), and certainly not Mcgee. Bremner, perfectly cast and moving as well as funny, makes the producer an unrepentant showman who’s also an addict high on his own success.
It’s refreshing, after the arduous self-pity of Rocketman, to watch a British music biopic which doesn’t wallow in finger-wagging regrets. Alan chews the ears off his poor therapist (Clint Dyer), and if there’s one thing he does regret about the moment Oasis went massive, it’s that by going through rehab he missed all the parties.
The revolving-door supporting cast keep planting smiles on your face. Leo Flanagan is fantastic as the young Alan, a skinny ginger rebelwannabe. Steven Berkoff has an immaculate cameo as a hallucination of the mad occultist Aleister Crowley, gibbering away in the bathroom during someone’s house-party. Moran’s own scarf-wearing bit as Malcolm Mclaren is a peach.
And best of all, as usual, is Isaacs, whose hilariously camp performance as Ralph revives a Withnail spirit of clammy aristocratic debauch. There are a million Ralphs in LA, Alan explains; the film plucks this one at random, and you wouldn’t want it any other way. TR