"You Know What I Mean?"

"Is it ever difficult being reimmersed in his own life? 'Well, I don't really regret any of it, if I'm being honest. I know I should, but it was great. Coming from the background I came from, I was expected–at best–to become a taxi driver. And that didn't happen, and now they're making a movie about me. So you've got to just embrace it."

John Harris at The Guardian discusses Creation Stories, the new movie about Alan McGee.

"If Kevin Had Worn a Suit, We'd Have Sold a Million Records"

"'I'm ashamed of that Coldplay statement, because I thought that was as bad as it got in 2001 and then it got a lot worse! I've got zero beef with them. Compared to what followed, they're fucking Joy Division! I don't know what would have come out of my mouth back then because it was full of prescription drugs!'"

Gary Ryan at the NME talks with Alan McGee.

"I'm Just Doing It Because I Like Doing It"

"The Clockworks and Shambolics are 10/10 bands, but I'm picking them up from Instagram. You've got to accept that the music industry and media don't want young, punky indie rock n' roll bands. They just don't. That makes it easier for me, as the quality I'm signing up is incredible. I don't know if it will ever change, because the culture is just so different now. There are other people doing great stuff. The new bands network This Feeling is wonderful. I don't know if there's a happy ending for the industry if it stops putting out records by hungry indie punk rock 'n' roll bands."

John Earls at the NME interviews Alan McGee about McGee's latest label, Creation 23.

Was There Then

"'I was caught up in the excitement of it all,' Lester says. 'I'm so sorry to everybody for that review, but the enormity of it was captivating. We were reviewing a moment in history and staking our part in it. It was like seeing the great behemoth of a spaceship in Close Encounters. You felt awed into submission.'
"'You want the record to be good because you're into the band,' says Hopkins. 'And you want it to be good because that means it's going to sell well and that's going to help the magazines sell well. But I was surprised that there wasn't a dissenting voice. When a band gets to that level, there's always someone who says, 'Hold on a minute,' but there wasn't [for Oasis].'"

In a 2016 Guardian article, Dorian Lynskey revisits 1997's Be Here Now.

Higher than the Sun

"Whereas before, the band had mostly written with their guitars, the new material was based mainly on keyboard chords, while key to the creative process was an Akai S1000 sampler. 'That changed everything,' Innes recalls. 'Suddenly we could experiment. You're a rock'n'roll band, but you can take a James Brown drum loop and play along with that; you can add horns, you can add strings. The engineer would give you a floppy disk with some tablas on it and you'd stick that in the sampler and try that. It was like we'd been painting in black and white and suddenly we had a full palette of colours to play with.'"

In The Guardian, Caspar Llewellyn Smith revisits Primal Scream's Screamadelica album two decades later.

"I Never Regret Having a Trip, Good or Bad"

"Yeah, that or showing up at every single gig until they signed. That worked with Ride. I just showed up every night until they signed. But usually we'd get them off their nut. They'd have such a good time they'd think: 'Do we really want to sign to some boring fucker at a major or some lunatic who will put us in the charts?' Then when you end up taking whatever refreshments are available at 4am in a Jacuzzi you think: 'I made the right decision.'"

Tim Jonze in The Guardian interviews Alan McGee in anticipation of the new documentary Upside Down: The Creation Records Story.

Three Days of Peace, Love, and Microblogging

"@abbiehoffman Get off the stage, asshole, I want to watch the Who! Not saying 'yippie' to yr shenanigans."

Christopher R. Weingarten, aka CannedPete, at Rolling Stone.com twitters Woodstock.

Gail Collins in The New York Times reviews Pete Fornatale's Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock and Michael Lang with Holly George-Warren's The Road to Woodstock.

Chuck Eddy on the Rhapsody blog imagines an alternate lineup.

And Alan McGee on The Guardian's music blog calls for the release of the Harlem 69 documentary on DVD.

The Boy in the Paisley Shirt

"TVP's live sets were incredible; shambling, full of whimsy, camp and fey, but under the influence of the amphetamine-crazed mod rush of the 60s. Treacy's appearances were legendary and he became a kind of pied piper for London music fans. He captured British pop culture in a particularly unique and musical fashion, and where he went I followed."

Alan McGee on The Guardian's music blog praises Dan Treacy and the Television Personalities.

You Won't Find My Name in Your Book of Who's Who

"Even though the Monkees wrote, produced, and played on subsequentpopular albums (Headquarters, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd, and The Bird, the Bees and the Monkees) their lack of authenticity hung over them until they sought cred in the rock world. What followed ranks as one of the weirdest displays of self loathing in the music world."

Alan McGee on The Guardian's music blog defends the legacy of the Monkees.