After King Rocker the other week, Mrs Stroke Bloke indulged me by sitting through Creation Stories, a biopic of sorts about Creation Records main man, Alan McGee.

Creation Records plays a big part in my, er, origin story, as indirectly noted by an old school friend.

A youthful @ricky_ballboy on the left there. https://t.co/wY8xf3Z1yV

— Allan Tanner (@weesandy) January 4, 2021

[The Apoplexy Tiny Letter is hiding the best song associated with Creation Stories]

The movie’s fun, and the songs play a key part in telling the story. I wrote about how songs played a key part in my writing of Stroke: A 5% chance of survival for my Undercover Soundtrack for Roz Morris’s website.

Looking through the Creation Records catalogue, I could pick a different set of favourite tunes for every night of the year to tell a story. Here’s tonight’s ––

Yeah, Al’s right. I did and still do kneel at the altar of shoegaze, and Ride was my Dianetics. They’re probably the reason this middle-aged stroke survivor still shambles around Edinburgh in a long-sleeved t-shirt pretending to be the archetypal skinny white boy to this day.

I know, good luck with that, grandad.

In Creation Stories, Alan McGee is traumatised by being locked out of the studio by My Bloody Valentine as Kevin Shields burns all the label’s money trying the recreate the perfect sounds in his head.

In fact, he seems as traumatised by Only Shallow as my dad was when I took it home and put it on his first, new CD player ––

Is that thing broken ALREADY?!

Paw Brown, 1991

Looking through the Creation catalogue, I’m struck by the number of records in it that got me through rough times. When I lived thousands of miles away, it didn’t hurt that so many of the Creation bands were Scottish.

When I was racked with doubt, Teenage Fanclub could mellow it out. (Boooo! –– Ed.)

Right. That’s enough mellow.

The Jagz Kooner remix of Swastika Eyes starts pretty intense, and cranks it up remorselessly for a full seven minutes. In my Undercover Soundtrack, I mention writing while Swastika Eyes plays in the “background”. The resulting short story is coming out later this year.

It’s gonna be pretty intense.

I think a lot of the intensity that’s feeding into my writing and musical choices right now – and, let’s face it, the disgust simmering under the last apoplectic.me post – arises from the current state of affairs in Scotland and Britain.

So, I suppose it’s nice to look back to a time when dissatisfaction might be reasonably expressed by getting a song featuring 52 F–bombs into the Top 40.