Available Formats
Hardback
Published: 2nd January 2025
Paperback, Export/Airside
Published: 4th March 2025
Hardback, Main
Published: 4th March 2025
How to Run an Indie Label
By (Author) Alan McGee
With John Robb
Rare Bird Books
Rare Bird Books
2nd January 2025
United States
General
Non Fiction
Small businesses and self-employment
Music recording and reproduction
Music: styles and genres
381.4578149
Hardback
320
Width 153mm, Height 229mm, Spine 20mm
How To Run an Indie Labeltells you everything you need to know about how to be a creative force.
Music is like no other business. Its about being at the right place at the right time, following your nose and diving in feet first. Its about being plugged into the mystical electricity and about surfing on the wild energy. Its about how to fuck up and how to survive and be sustained by the holy grail of the high decibel. No-one captures this wild feral spirit better than Alan McGee whose helter skelter career through music has made him a major force. Wilder than his bands, more out of control than his most lunatic singer, more driven than his contemporaries and closer in spirit to the rock n roll star he could never be himself, McGee was always in a rush. Creation would sign people and not just the music. McGee understood that running an indie label is mainly about the charisma, the game changers, the iconography and the story. Its about never being boring. His ability to start a raw power ruckus brought the visceral danger back to a moribund mid-eighties music scene. His nose for danger and his ear for classic guitar rock n roll brought us Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fan Club and Ride before topping out in the nineties with the biggest band in the world, Oasis. By no means a conventional instruction manual or business book How To Run an Indie Label tells you everything you need to know about how to be a creative force.
Alan McGee is the best known label boss of the post punk era. His label, Creation Records, has become iconic launching the careers of bands like Oasis, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and many others. He also manages the Happy Mondays and The Libertines and many more. He is brilliantly quotable and has endless anecdotes about his time in music. In a time when music has become safe, he is one of the last of the great mavericks.