Kevin Bronson on July 20th, 2011

3

Story and photos by Matt Draper

In 1983, after his fanzine and club night had culminated, a Scot named Alan McGee formed an imprint he called Creation to release records from like-minded friends. “73 in 83”, a single from art-rock band The Legend! became the label’s first release after McGee secured a £1,000 loan. Though I can bet you’ve probably never heard of this particular group (they sound like the Normal meets Gang of Four), the label’s next releases proved massive and beyond anything its founder could have imagined. On a shoestring budget – and with a small, inexperienced staff and a crazed, drug-addled label boss – the imprint brought the world some of the most seminal records of the last century. The catalog is staggering: One tiny U.K. imprint giving birth to the likes of the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, Teenage Fanclub, Ride, Primal Scream and, of course, Oasis. All signed to Creation, all thanks to McGee. With more success came more excess, and through debt and drugs McGee and his team steered the threadbare indie down a tightrope to a 50-50 deal with Sony and an eventual dissolution in 1999.

A fantastic new documentary about the label, “Upside Down: The Creation Records Story,” was released in the U.K. earlier this year. The film stitches together interviews with key artists – including McGee, Bobby Gillespie and Noel Gallagher. At the film’s West Coast premiere at the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles late last month, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mark Gardener, former lead singer of Ride. Second only to MBV’s “Loveless,” Ride’s 1990 debut “Nowhere” is a considered one of the best in the guitar-focused, shoegaze genre. Through four albums, world tours, internal strife and the bubbling of what would become the Brit Pop Wars, Gardener and his band remained exclusively signed to Creation. Now 41, the musician has kept busy with solo releases and production work. Responsible for the original score for “Upside Down,” he joined the film’s director, Danny O’Conner, at the Mondrian screening for a Q&A and brief acoustic performance.

Looking fit and glad to be in California, Gardener is wearing flip-flops, a tight V-neck tee and shorts when we meet, the afternoon before the screening. Below is our exhaustive conversation, covering Ride’s sound, formation, success and breakup, his relationship with McGee, soundtrack music and what it was like first hand to be a part of one of the most influential labels of the last 30 years:

You seem excited to be in California.

I’m a big lover of California and stuff, but I feel a bit like, “What’s going out here?” [Gesturing outside] I couldn’t feel further away from this. It’s quite nice; life is interesting when you put yourself in situations that you wouldn’t normally be.

You’re probably used to a range of questions – from Ride, to Creation and now.

That’s absolute fine, I hear some guys that are like “I don’t want to talk about that.” That’s not me, I find that actually really weird, because everything is valid for the last 25 years. … I have no problem talking about any of it, really. I’ve exorcised demons so ”¦ [laughs]

Being said, let’s start at the beginning. You were born the day of Altamont right?

I was, it’s true. For me, I always thought it was weird that I came into the world when that sort of event was going on. That whole period is a big influence to me. Basically the first music I was played for when I was 6, 7 years-old by my uncle were people like the Beach Boys; he was a massive fan, he used to write and have a correspondence with Brian Wilson strangely.

That’s odd.

Yeah, it is odd. My uncle would do things like send him birthday cards – just weird things that Brian seemed to find quite entertaining. It was weird, and of course then, Brian would send like these massive Beach Boys cards and ship them over to my uncle. Sadly I lost my uncle when I was quite young, which really gutted me. He was sort of buried, even with “Surf’s Up” and some of those records. That was the start of it for me. I was like 6, 7, 8 years old and I was introduced to this music. It was the first time someone had cranked up loud, rock ’n’ roll music. [It was] that, Eddie Cochran, even people like the Stray Cats at the time ”¦ Blondie. He just was into his music and he had a guitar, which I ended up playing so he kind of sowed the seeds for me becoming a bit musically obsessed.

So Andy [Bell, future Ride guitarist] said you guys saw a Smiths gig; to you was it the same as the infamous Sex Pistols’ Lesser Free Trade Hall gig?

I have to say, I didn’t see the Smiths, Andy saw the Smiths. If I’d seen the Smiths, yeah. Andy and I got to know each other at school, because I sort of gravitated to him because I realized he was a great guitar player. We got to know each other when I was about 14 and slowly we became really good pals. I realized first that he played great guitar and I was learning how to play more and more as a result of the episode with my uncle. It’s kind of embarrassing, [but] the school actually did great theater productions and quite a lot of people would come watch these – I was Dooty in “Grease” and Andy played guitar. It was the first time I kind of properly went out in front of an audience and sung you know, “Those Magic Changes” and “Grease is the Word” and stuff like that – actual solo songs. I opened the show, and Andy of course is playing the guitar and I guess at that point, he was like “God that guy can sing” and I was also quite surprised as well. It was funny times but that was school and before we left, Andy and I got on stage and we’d play “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop – a couple songs and then sort of walk off. It was a mutual enchantment I guess, with what I could do and with he could do.

We used to go to each other’s houses a lot and start playing songs that he’d written, more than I at that point. We both landed at the same art school, which wasn’t that hard as it was a choice of two, but we thought, “Okay, we both landed at the same art school, all good groups come out of art school,” and lo and behold one of the first guys we meet is [Laurence] “Loz” Colbert. I remember playing him some of the music I’d been doing with Andy on a cassette tape. He said he’d played the drums a little bit and we thought that was interesting. We knew Steve [Queralt] anyway from Oxford, he was actually a couple years above us and we knew he was a good bass player [in] reggae/dubstep bands. We engineered Andy being in one of these bands for a little while playing guitar to basically get Steve out of there and to be in our band.

So then it was the demo that got you in the hands of Alan?

The demo thing actually came from a manager that we worked with who also worked with Steve. He worked at a record shop, so he was a bit of a feed of very new music like the Creation acts at that time – Mary Chain – he was very much on it straight away so we got to hear this stuff quite early on, which was an influence on us.  It was the first music that was starting to speak to us in a different way and sound exciting and fresh. Basically we pulled enough money together from two or three early shows we played to record a demo in Oxford, and it was that cassette tape that was sent to a guy in Warner Bros. called “Callie” who immediately jumped at it [and] phoned me up. I was at home coming back from art school. I was retaking an art exam, like art history; literally I was making a bit of food [and] the phone went and it was this guy at Warner Bros, “I’ve heard this tape that you’ve done with your band and I’m very interested in signing you.”

So there was a bidding war then?

Well, it’s quite funny cause the film tonight explains it – well, McGee explains it. I’ll tell you. We already were not going to be signed to a major label at that time because we’d seen bands that we liked just be wrecked by major label policy, so we already knew about labels because Steve was feeding the records straight to us like Creation, 4AD, Mute and what the Smiths did with Rough Trade, so we really respected the fact that those bands created their own environment. It didn’t seem to be anyone interfering with the creative process, and we were very, very single-minded and strong. It was good that we felt like that because that’s why in the end Ride sounded fresh and different in a way.

We knew we weren’t going to sign to Warners but we were quite chaffed to get that sort of attention, you know, straightaway. Basically “Callie” stupidly had some sort of conversation with Alan at some point that he was doing his scouting around and that “I found this great band from Oxford that I’m going to sign.” As soon as he said that, McGee jumped on it. We were playing a few shows too and he realized it wasn’t a done deal. He came and watched us live two or three times, loved it and then he kept coming to each show, Alan, and we just talked to him after each [one]. We just get to know him, we weren’t really talking deals or whatever, it was just more about our favorite music.

You mentioned bands that you liked on labels like Creation created their own environments. How do you feel now, having been a part of it, having so many of these seminal cult bands like Slowdive and Teenage Fanclub? Do you feel Ride was also one of those bands? Was it because of Alan?

Totally. Alan believed in the people that he signed very much and he trusted them. Quite quickly I became friends with Alan – on a social level, which is where the drugs and bits and pieces come into it, you get to know each other pretty quick and it’s not in a “Oh, we’re rock ’n’ roll” kind of way because it wasn’t this lifestyle of drugs, it was actually just a lifestyle of people that were very passionate about music. We were beginning to find each other and we were far too busy to be … I mean, I was basically a bit of a smoker so that was what kind of kept me, out there or whatever.

I was just absorbing a lot of music then and got to know Alan. I’d have a lot of socials with him where’d I end up back at his flat just going through records and listening to lots of music- that was the kind of background to it a bit. Me more so than the other members in Ride, I got to know the label personally; when you get to know people that well, there’s a trust and Alan did that with a lot of his bands, I mean, even up to Oasis. He couldn’t do that with everyone, but he was very close with Noel [Gallagher] as well. You’ve got a mutual trust, through business things and all that. You’re also aware that you’re dealing with the guy that runs this label. I did get to live the nightmare after Creation of being with major labels. It’s terrible, even people that have done a great job will be moved on so that people higher up the chain are seen as the only common denominator. When you actually work out how it all works, it’s fucking horrible. Really, really horrible business on so many levels in that sort of major money thing so in a way I’m not that sad that it’s destroyed now in some ways.

I read an article and in it Alan says that he hates all aspects of the contemporary music.

Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far because I think I’m getting to work with some contemporary music [and with] some bands that I think are great. It’s a different way now. You have to use your own savvy; you can basically not need a label so much. Now the recording can be done so much cheaper. You can get things made. A lot of it is not of the highest standard, sonically of whatever, but sometimes it doesn’t really matter. It is very different now and I think it’s a lot harder in a lot of ways. When you think about the sorts of deals that were going down; I mean we got some pretty big deals from Sire Records over here – and they were just putting out the records we were making for Creation – so we had a perfect deal in the sense that we were signed to Sire, an independent label within Warners. I totally respected Seymour Stein and Joe McEwen when I met those people. To be honest with you, I couldn’t have imagined better ”¦ Alan McGee, Seymour Stein, Joe McEwen and those people were like the people that my band was signed to. They don’t come a lot better. You don’t realize that so much at the time, but you certainly do in hindsight.

So you had a pair of successful EPs and then you did [Ride’s 1990 debut album] “Nowhere.”

Actually what we did was those recordings that are on the demo, a couple of them, “Drive Blind” and “Chelsea Girl” I think actually made the first EP. We then did another two EPs – the “Ride” one then “Play” EP, which had “Like a Daydream” and a few others I can’t remember now ,and then the full EP [which] basically had “Dreams Burn Down” plus three others. After those three EPs, we went to make “Nowhere.”

That album came out and the “shoegaze” tag was stamped on it pretty hard. It was a media creation – a NME tag – and you guys didn’t like that term.

It was quite bizarre. I think it was bit after the “Nowhere” time [and] the problem we felt was that quite a lot of bands were suddenly doing a similar thing to ourselves even with the little, short names. So it was a bit like “What’s going on?” I felt a lot of them were rubbish [and that] they didn’t have a lot of their own ideas. As a band you know you’re going to be tagged and we were trying to avoid [it]. We started to get this tag and it seemed pretty bizarre because actually if people had been to our shows, the idea that we weren’t making an effort, that we just stood there looking at our shoes is a bit sort of stupid because a lot of shows were fucking rocking and great. Also you realize that [with] certain interviews and reviews, people were not even at the shows – good reviews and bad reviews.

Quite quickly we realized that NME would build people up, as they did with us, and then knock them down. This was only in England that we got this. At this point we were doing world tours, so it’s quite bizarre, you come back to England and it’s like “Now we’re being called ”˜Shoegaze’ or ”˜The Scene That Celebrates Itself.’” We were like “Oh well, we’re off to Japan tomorrow so I’m not going to ”¦” [Laughs]. When you got Nirvana and the grunge thing that suddenly comes and blows everybody away a little bit, it made English journalists say “Well, our bands are a little bit sort of coy or not as rock ’n’ roll compared to them.” That was the turning point, the main thing. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes through it does, it shows up as rocking in a very raw, great way. We were rocking in a way, but it’s more psychedelia rock. I think that was the changing point, journalists were suddenly – it was all about Nirvana and their kind of groups. The grunge thing was kicking in and it was making us look a bit nancy or whatever.

Do you think now that the shoegaze tag has been more legitimized outside of being just a press creation and actually a scene with confines and styles? There seems to be a bit of revitalization as it mixes in psych, or mixed with kraut – do you think it’s not so much a made-up tag?

Or dance stuff, yeah. I think it’s fine. It’s quite funny because people now are proud to be shoegaze, you know what I mean? [Laughs]. At some point you’re like, “Oh wow, did that all change around ”¦” I mean at the end of the day, I’m happy with my life because my music has stood the test of time and that’s all I care about. Whatever tags get thrown at you, it didn’t stop the records to keep selling. [Nowhere just had celebrated its 20th anniversary with an expanded reissue.]

I feel like much of your music is built on this dichotomy between delicate harmony and noise.

Exactly! That’s was something we were very interested in. One of the vital groups behind it all that blew Andy and I [away was] the Velvet Underground. That was late school days and we were really fascinated by that whole approach where you make this incredible noise and people either will stay and dig it or they’ll get out. I thought there was something so cool about that music. Beyond that we were all brought up with parents that were kind of Beatles fans.

Even now, with the bands I work with I’m always trying to get more harmony [and] vocals into it because it does something that ”¦ It’s just got a power that helps that whole levitational process sometimes, if you get those harmonies. Good harmony is, a melody is – you’re on to a winner. But, with that, I love that you explore this idea of beautiful, colorful, nice harmony against noise. If you put something happy against something sad then it polarizes things. The sadder thing feels more sad. It’s just trying to butt different extremes up against each other to make more of the lightness or more of the darkness rather than just being like, one-dimensional, dark thing all the time which ”¦ the Verve and people like that ”¦ I don’t know, I liked what they did but ”¦ even people like Spaceman 3, Spiritualized, I just find it a little bit kind of one and it’s good, they do that thing really well. I find that with quite a lot of the groups I hear that our citing shoegaze as an influence. I sometimes find it a little one-paced and one-dimensional; it’s alright and it’s still good but I think when we were really good and flying, we had a lot of influences, we had a lot of stuff going on and we were just sort of managing to butt it all together. That’s when we were really strong and when we were working well together, myself, Andy, Steven, there was a great few years.

Music is very transparent. I think a lot of people don’t realize that you can kid yourself so easily with this game, but you can’t kid people. The music is so transparent. Not to mention names, but there are people nowadays that I think, “Why are you still doing music, why, what are you doing?” It just feels like this is work for you.” Any feeling of passion is gone. At the end of the day, when I started to feel that thing disappear with Ride, [it] was a really hard time. I have to say, the whole Ride existence was ecstatic high times balanced with really low times.

There was definitely some strife in the later years. You mentioned exploring different sounds – you got really into dance music around “Tarantula”[Ride’s fourth and final album in 1996].

Yeah, for sure. I still couldn’t properly tell you the tracklisting from 1 to 11. That was an album that was not a nice process to be in. By the time it got there, the bubble had burst in a way. Between us, we had been living in each others pockets for so long and we just desperately needed to sort of breathe our own air and find out who the hell we were, especially myself and Andy. In the end, for growth, you’ve got to just cut it and I think that’s totally fine, I’m totally down with that. Ride, when it was over, we left the stage. So many people, they still carried on and now they perform and they get back together and it’s like, “God, what has happened?” I was saying this about Glastonbury – they’ve got U2 headlining and it’s like “What’s going on?”

The story of Creation is pretty incredible and like Factory, the entire label was riddled with debt. Was there any impact that had on Ride?

No, McGee would always find a way even if that meant not being able to pay the studio for ages and being able to part with people that would come into Creation, going “where’s our money” all the time. He’d make sure we’d find a way; he was great for that, whatever it took. It was always teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Creation, but of course Sire Records coming in did help so we could use some of the advance money for recordings, which helped us personally.

It seems like it’s a pretty rock ’n’ roll story. The rumor goes that the label was bankrupted by the recording of “Loveless” and McGee’s drug problem.

That had a lot to do with it, yeah. When you’ve got people that are that out of it – although they are making amazing, creative music decisions all the time, cause you’re very instinctive – it strips the layers, you get to the core of people really quickly when you’re in that heightened, druggy sense.

Alan said in an interview of the film, “I’d be permanently off my head on cocaine, ecstasy, speed and acid. We’d be awake for three days.”

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, “Twisterella” is about dipping in for a mad weekend here and there in London with McGee and that, which I did from time to time and it was great, but it didn’t become a kind of lifestyle; it was something nice to sort of dip in. “Why’s this bus taking me back again, if I’ve seen it all before,” that’s exactly what that’s about, it’s the bus from Oxford to London to just go and have a mad weekend with them all. My saving grace was that, well, one, I lost my uncle from drugs at an early age, so I got this inside thing that that shit can mess you up. And also after a Friday or Saturday night, I was on a bus back to Oxford, back to the studio. That was my saving grace but then you realize actually, it’s just carrying on for some of those guys and in the end that’s going to catch up with people big time.

Ride broke up and you did some solo stuff.

I did a project called the Animalhouse, which was short-lived and a lot to do with signing with BMG, the “Big Mean German” –  all my nightmares came to haunt me. It became a band, but was never really a touring band. It was shortly after dealing with BMG and the majors that I went “Pssh, I don’t want to be anywhere near this industry for a while.”

Ride broke up at the pinnacle of Britpop and you just left that whole thing and went to France. It must have been a liberating experience.

It was, yeah. The thing is, my house and my life had become a bit of a party. Ride, which kept you very busy and focused, became a norm – that existence of touring. It’s a mad life and I think it took a lot longer that I thought to totally, properly come down from that. Once you’ve been used to that existence, normal life seems very anticlimactic [and] you have to readjust everything. You realize we’ve been a bubble for seven years; you come back and see friends that weren’t in the band and they’ve moved on with their lives and you haven’t really. I’m not complaining, because I’d do it all the same over again but yeah, I certainly hit a point in 1999, 2000 [where] I really need to shut up shop and get away from this for a while, so, I packed my car and drove to France.

France was somewhere I used to go occasionally during the Ride times when I had one, two weeks away. There was another guy I was close with in art school that ended up living in a lovely old mill, a 14th-century moulin in France. It was beautiful. That was what things like “Moonlight Medicine” [opening track to Ride’s third LP, “Carnival of Light”] were about – being in these places and obviously [having] a few psychedelics around. It made me feel so good when I went there for a couple of weeks, so what I am going to do is go there for a couple of years and really feel good and detox this whole thing out of me.

I also went to India for six months, which is all a bit cliché – it’s all part of cleansing. To be able to properly move on you’ve really got to detox totally. I guess that was what “These Beautiful Ghosts” [his 2005 debut solo record] was about. After two years in the medieval worlds of France and traveling around India, I started to feel ready to do acoustic stuff. I got really stir crazy at the end in France, it was way to isolated which was very needed for a couple of years, but once you’ve got the good out of that situation, I really needed to get back to the land of the living. I kind of ended up making “These Beautiful Ghosts” in New York really, with Bill Racine and Dave Fridmann. Kindly, when I was around, the Flaming Lips sent us all their gear to use in the studio, it was really cool.

You did some production work with Anton and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

That was good. I went over twice for a week. He’s in a zone [in Berlin now]. He’s not drinking anymore [and] quite different. I have massive respect for Anton. “Monkeypowder” was literally us being up all night and me walking into the studio and us doing the first garbled thing that came into my mind. It was totally off the cuff, he liked to do things like that. He’s really been good at bringing me back to a certain way that I worked which was good. I’ve got loads of time and respect for Anton; he keeps it really fucking real, that guy. He’s such a creatively driven force and clever guy that just gets what is going on in the world. I think his whole take on politics and the way he understands that the real creative place not controlled at the moment is still online so we should make the most of that before various people start controlling that.

You did the soundtrack for the film right?

Yeah, [all the original music]. I hope to do a bit more soundtrack [work]. I’m trying to make things a bit more interesting, a bit more challenging, in a film if something is going one way, certain music can really help intensify that feeling without personally even realizing what’s going on. It’s such a powerful tool. I actually saw “The Social Network” coming over on the plane. The music [Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross] behind that was fantastic. That really helps that film massively, cause in the end, it’s kind of geeky computer guys. It set good atmospheres where maybe the actual thing of someone having a lawsuit or whatever isn’t so interesting. It was great working for Danny [O’Conner, director] for “Upside Down” because, obviously ”¦ I’m kind of qualified. He liked the idea that someone in the middle of it that now has a studio and was starting to branch out into more soundtrack work would do the music for it, so I jumped at the chance. Again, you don’t really notice it; it’s all between the songs that we know from the bands. I’m not a guy that went to classical school of music; I’ve always approached music quite experimentally, I like things in boxes, keys, and guitars – things that make noises. It’s nice [being in my studio] I like to feel kid in a toy shop.

Is Creation a distinctly something “British”? How do you think it’s transferred over here? Do you think American audiences will get the film?

I think it’s very British, yeah, but I think also, from what I gather with the way bands here seem to love The Valentines, ourselves, Swervedriver, some of those people, I think that when they see this – like when you see the story of Motown, the story of Stax – it just blows your mind. For me this documentary is definitive, I don’t think anything else needs to be made about Creation Records and that period of music to be honest with you.

I think on that level it’s a story that everyone will relate to and there’s a lot of humor in it as well. I hope the accents aren’t too strong. The humor helps carry it. There’s no narrative in it, it’s just everybody telling their story and it flows nicely. It speaks for itself and is a great story. I think people can understand that actually, yeah, it was just mental. It was about – as Noel says – just about a big celebration, lots of partying. Obviously the drugs came into it [but it’s about] really passionate people and their music. It you ask most of the bands if they’d go back and be on Creation again, pretty much all of them would say, “Yeah, I’ll have some of that again.” I wouldn’t because I’d probably be dead in two years [laughs] but at that time, in your early twenties, you couldn’t have been in a better situation really. The right people found the right people. It’s young teenage boys becoming men fulfilling their dreams and McGee recognizing certain people and funding you to live out and fulfill it all and not to compromise. That’s good shit- it has a good resonance. “Upside Down” as a film will really resonate on those factors.

It’s fitting we’re talking at the Mondrian about to show this film and in ’94, McGee had that thing at this hotel. (After a flight to LA, he felt so ill he called the reception desk. He was taken to hospital in a wheelchair, wearing an oxygen mask. He checked into a clinic and disappeared from the scene for nine months.)

[Laughs] I don’t know if they know that here. I have to say at the time, when we were operating Creation, it was teetering on the brink, it was like being on a tightrope. I think that’s a very creative place, cause again when everything’s teetering on the brink … even our shows and our music to a certain extent had that. It’s like a quote from an amazing DVD, “Man on Wire” [and] Philippe Petit, when he says, which I so totally recognize with, ”˜You have to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every idea as a true challenge – and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.’ I say that a lot and that was the whole feeling I had with Creation and with my band and lots of those bands, it just felt like that. That’s why I think amazing things came out of that period.

Ironically, and it’s not a band I’m dissing, because I did love what Oasis did, but strangely Oasis became the huge band in the end that did start to repeat themselves. It’s funny that [the band] that became the big deal beyond what anyone could have even imagined, at that time when were we were all like “Bankruptcy,” was Oasis. Noel wrote some amazing songs and by no means am I dissing what Oasis did, but in the end for me, it just started to get in a repetition, feeding the mode. That’s almost, as the film says when a thing becomes so huge, that’s when it all starts to fall apart. Like any great thing, it has a start and it has an end. That’s why [“Upside Down”] works because it’s not an unfamiliar story.

It was near-death experiences and you know, that “Life on a Wir,” [thing] and also the guys’ relationship between Bobby [Gillespie, Primal Scream] and Alan which was key to the whole thing. There were a lot of key relationships on that label: Jim and William, Andy and myself, which [was] very strong for a period and then very fractious. Kevin [Shields, My Bloody Valentine], within in the band, didn’t have that other thing you butt up against.

Andy and myself definitely had that cliché singer-guitarist thing. I think Andy in the end wanted to get a more classic sound about Ride and I just didn’t want us to have a sound other than ”¦ Ride. [With] “Leave Them All Behind” and “Going Blank Again”–I love that album – we were starting to find our own thing and that’s what kept me more interested. I didn’t want to sound like Small Faces at all. Although, strangely, Andy was right in a sense that after that period, everyone started to sound like that and that was Britpop and it did really well and then obviously Andy became part of Oasis, so that’s fine. I guess I’m the guy that always ended up scrabbling around in the dirt a bit more, but I’m alright with that.

We’re both pretty broke really, Danny, especially as a result of making this [film], and me as a result of working with bands that don’t have budgets. I’ve got things, I’ve got a studio in my life and that’s fine, I still get my royalties in a bit from Ride. There’s something in life that’s has served everything over the last 20 years [and] kept me hungry and I think that’s really important. I actually think it must be really, really difficult when you’ve done something that’s gone so massive, [like] what Noel and those guys did – it must be really hard to sort of put that aside and carry on with the same sort of ”¦ I think it really is difficult for people. I’m alright with my story.

Matt Draper is a writer and photographer based in LA. He’s regularly found drinking lots of coffee and thinking far too much about things. He blogs at Mishka and The Holloweyed. Follow him on Twitter @mdrapes.