The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Creation myths and memories Ewen Bremner on Alan McGee, new film Creation Stories and why he doesn’t get football
TEDDY JAMIESON
ASK Ewen Bremner what he makes of Glasgowborn music supremo, entrepreneur and raconteur Alan McGee, the man he plays in the new film Creation Stories, and the actor could easily reply which Alan do you mean? “I think there are various stages of Alan,” he suggests down the line from New York.
“There’s the spunky kid who has a passionate need to be out in the world and be part of something important and lay claim to his position in that stratosphere of music back in the 1980s.”
Then, he adds, there was McGee the unlikely businessman. “As a business prospect, on paper, he looks like a disaster. But he’s the opposite. He’s been hugely successful.
“He doesn’t do anything the way you’re supposed to. And all of the bands he works with are absolute liabilities. Nobody would touch because they were
so explosive. They were always breaking into fights.
“He had an appetite for that kind of energy where a fight could break out any minute or gold could be found.”
You can find both of those different versions of McGee in Creation Stories, and a few more. There’s also McGee the chancer, McGee the talent scout (you know I’m going to mention him discovering Oasis at this point, don’t you?), McGee the hedonist, McGee the addict and McGee the ex-addict.
Today, Bremner is doing a day of press for the film. Journalists are stacking up like planes. I hear the tail-end of the interview before me and the next journalist pops onto the line just as I ask my final question.
BREMNER, who for most of us will forever be Spud in Trainspotting, makes a very decent McGee (or McGees to continue the idea we started with) in Creation Stories to be fair, even if, as he was born at the start of the 1970s, some might say he is a little old for a role in which he has to play a man in his twenties. (And we won’t even mention the fact that he’s from Edinburgh.)
Creation Stories is a movie that’s as much myth as memoir. With a script by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, it’s perhaps inevitable that to a large extent it takes the legend and runs with it.
“It was not a documentary we were setting out to make,” Bremner points out. “We were trying to make something that is high-octane entertainment, that’s funny, dark and mad.”
The result is, at times, cartoony. But it’s also willing to show the vulnerability of the man behind the myth, Bremner suggests.
“I think the world of Irvine Welsh’s writing allows for all of that to be contained; for stuff that is really cartoon-like and outlandish and at the limits of ridiculousness, coupled with the real gravity of the human condition and the limits of our ability to function socially and to be a loving person and to survive adversity, whether that’s poverty or violence or heartbreak or whatever.”
Directed by Nick Moran operating under the usual no-time, no-budget exigencies of British cinema (“It was absolutely kick, bollock and scramble,” Bremner admits), Creation Stories is a pop culture movie; a movie that takes in indie music, the birth of rave and Britpop and travels from the riots at early Jesus and Mary Chain gigs to McGee’s chance visit to King Tut’s in Glasgow where he saw Oasis for the first time.
To its credit, it’s a film that is as interested in The Television Personalities and My Bloody Valentine as it is in the Gallagher brothers.
And it is, like every other historical film, from time to time, something of a