Alan McGee, the man who brought the world Oasis, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream, compares acting to managing a band.

“It is a bit like when you first start managing a band and you have no idea if you could actually do it. I had no idea if I could be in a film and pull it off. But I loved it.” Proof he pulls it off comes in a scene where he’s berating Dixie (Jonny Owen) - the Welsh postie who has moved to London to chase his dream of managing a band - to “get off his arse”. “That went on for about an hour,” says McGee. “They’d say what we want you to do is to scream abuse at him. They would do eleven takes of me and by the 8th or 9th time you forget you are acting. You are just screaming abuse at them. These are the takes they took.”

He is speaking to The Guide, from his current base in Dublin where the rejuvenated The Jesus and Mary Chain are in rehearsals before celebrations of next year’s 30th anniversary of Psychocandy.

He can’t decide if the cameo is a slice of method acting or “post ironic”.

“I suppose – if you want to intellectualise it at all – I was being post ironic by playing myself. In reality, I suppose for a lot of actors that is all they ever do anyway. They look at the part and they play themselves playing that part.”

McGee sees little comparison between Dixie’s management style and his own, which famously included keeping up with the Gallagher brothers’ cocaine habit and, in what became the stimulus for the end of a seven-year drug addiction, having to be met stepping off a flight to LA by an ambulance and men in orange outfits carrying an oxygen mask for him. He’d been on a two-day bender.

“I would have got the band,” he jokes, referring to the film, with his Glaswegian accent thick as ever, despite living south of the border since running away to London aged 16.

“He didn’t get the band. He walks away and gets the girl instead of the band. I would have got the band and the girl. I would have got both prizes.” McGee’s bravado characterises his management style. His hero was Mancunian publicist Tony Wilson, less so Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis.

“I don’t go out to self promote. I say what I think, which sometimes becomes famous comments.”

He’ll never be allowed to forget calling Coldplay’s output “music for bedwetters”, which he calls a “throwaway comment”.

“Do I wish I had never said it? In some ways I do - even though I think that it is music for bedwetters.”

He says good managers believe in what they’re trying to sell and are looking for good songs and good attitude. “I like human beings. If I get on well with you, you will get a second chance.”

He refused to give up on Primal Scream after six fallow years and the Scottish band thanked him by producing the era-defining masterpiece Screamadelica. A few years later Oasis sold Creation Records 50,000 units a week for four years.

Perhaps his greatest achievement is getting a record out of The Libertines. Despite Peter Doherty’s drug problems, the Londoners had a million-selling number one album with the follow-up to Up The Bracket, The Libertines. McGee had by that time wound up Creation Records and was working as Creation Management again.

“Working with them was the most difficult one. We were successful but I never managed to keep the band together. So I am not sure I was successful with The Libertines, but then I’m not sure I was unsuccessful. They just went and did Hyde Park to 60,000 people.”

With Doherty he feared he might preside over his first death.

“I was really scared we were going to have death on our hands. I probably underestimated his constitution for taking chemicals.

“But he did look like a guy going to have a heart attack and I thought, ‘f**k, we have to try to rein him in a wee bit’.

“Obviously I was wrong.”

Q&A with Alan McGee after the screening
 9pm, £7.50. Call 0871 902 5747.