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Dazed and Confusedwords Sarah Hay - photos Juergen Teller.They won't say it so we will. There's no band in Britain today that has the rich, kick arse history of rock'n'roll careering through their veins, attacking their brains and consuming their hearts any more than Primal Scream. Every single reference from Gillespie's acrid, psychedelic lyrics to the succinct allusions to cult films, books, musical hero's, politics and even the art on the sleeve of every album that they've ever done comes with it's own weight. So kick start a revolution in your head, start looting the knowledge as it's a firing head trip courtesy of Primal Scream and, if you care to notice it, everything's for free.Bobby Gillespie knows this all too well: ten years of interviews where he's dropped the same hints, ground the same axe time and time again in the hope of waking and shaking people out of their apathy. Today, when probed on the politics of both the State and the mind he directs conversation straight to the music. Perched on a stool, strumming his guitar, its as if the Glaswegian pied piper is saying, well, the messages are still there if you want them but because of their past excesses, because as a band Primal Scream became a huge, human sledgehammer that slammed hard into the dark recesses of the last decade (it's a story that'll bring tears to your eyes) and because they purged themselves of their anger with Exterminator, their personal, new euphoric headspace demands that, armed with the first true British rock'n'roll album of the century, they stick to the music and get on tour. With Andy Weatherall, Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) and Kate Moss all on board, they're absolutely gagging for it. And as Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant arrives at the studio to play harmonica on new album, his presence encapsulates the bands boiling energy that's perfectly summed up by Plant's past lyrics. Dig out Led Zeppelin's Black Dog, turn it all the way up and it'll reflect Primal Scream's visions of what it'll be like as they burst onto stages in this, the summer that Mani predicts will be the third summer of love. 'Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove!' "Two years ago when we started this record, I was pretty fucked up in my head," comments Gillespie who recently became a father, "a lot of the ideas came from then. Then I guess things change so right now I'm dead happyit's taken a while." Rewind to '93, when the band and Britain was beginning its hedonistic fall-out from Screamadelica and the second summer of love respectively. In an odd situation where no-one could have forecast what the next seven years would bring, Primal Scream were sitting by the pool at the Chateau-Marmont hotel, LA. "Arthur lee was there," remembers Gillespie on the day he met the lead singer and songwriter of 60s psychedelic band, Love who, along with The Byrds are one of his all time biggest influences. "I was wasted, everybody was pretty fucked up, I don't think he was but I said 'Arthur, if I play Signed DC will you sing?' I started playing the chords, he sang two verses and a chorus then put his hand into his pocket, pulled out a harmonica, played the break then sang the rest, it was fucking insane!" One of the most aching songs to have ever been written about drug addiction, the band were shocked as Lee took the guitar from Bobby and continued to give them an impromptu show. Released the following year, the third Primal Scream album, Give Out But Don't Give Up went down as one of the albums in recent history as most wrought with rumours of heavy drug abuse. As America reeled from the death of Kurt Cobain, Britain's celebrities careered towards the front cover of Vanity Fair magazine that cried 'Cool Brittania' and in brackets, all the cocaine abuse that went with it (see the same named chapter of How To Lose Friends And Alienate People by Toby Young), Primal Scream and, inevitably, Creation Records were setting the stage to battle their own demons. "If you look at Screamadelica as euphoric," comments bass player, Mani, "Give Out But Don't Give Up was when they were going through a really bad period of drug abuse, Vanishing Point is the paranoid come-down and Exterminator was like, we're angry cos what the fuck have we been doing?!" With Exterminator it was as if the band had wakened from their Morphic slumber, rubbed their eyes and were shocked at themselves and the world around them so they produced an angry album that ran on two trains of thought. "We were trying to plant bombs in peoples minds and get them politicised again cos that's what Thatcher drummed out of people," says Mani. "Superpower foreign policies are just so fascist, destabilising governments and starting revolutions just so that they can build McDonalds all over it. Serbia and Bosnia are both just aircraft carriers for the USA to planes off from. We never invited them to our party, what are they doing? Why are they fucking it up? I didn't invite 'em anywhere." Gillespie treads another more cursory path. "XTMNTR, even then was more about nihilistic drug culture and control. I have two theories about drug culture. The first is if you made the choice to become an addict, in effect you neutralise yourself so really it's like you become no threat to anybody. That heavy drug culture, maybe it's sold to you, maybe you buy into it, the fact that its a rebellious thing to do but now I can just see it isn't rebellious, it's counter-productive if you want to do anything of any use. I'm criticising narcosis of a sort, self inflicted, so that was the closest the record came to being political song and even then it was just kind of personal you know?" Two years on and the latest album has just the slightest touch of the destructive embers finally settling to rest while conversely the band are on a new celebratory, (13th Floor) elevatory trip. Somehow everything from 60s garage bands like the Seeds, Moby Grape to anarchic, electronic bands like Throbbing Gristle, DAS to Can, Faust, punk, Jerry Lee Lewis and Country & Western are all wired into this new album yet it all makes sense and works, no more so than on the first single, Miss Lucifer. "That's the electronic rock'n'roll," says Gillespie who moves onto a haphazard attempt at explaining the whole album. "It's more sarcastic, more hateful but it's more funny aswell, more up, maybe not as angry, something else..sexier I think." Mani your turn. "We've moved away from the politics, we got that out in the last album. This I think is just a celebration of life, I dunno that might sound a bit cheesy and blas? but we're just enjoying what we do so much right now." OK, one track at a time. From the ashes of Bomb The Pentagon comes Rise produced by Kevin Shields who was given the musical brief of The Plastic Ono Band meets P.I.L. Following the media furore caused by the original title and it's chilling message of prophecy that was yanked into the spotlight as September 11 unfurled, Bobby says, "There's a song called Rise, there's no song called Bomb The Pentagon, that's the best way to put it. Songs mutate into other songs, I want the song to live and breathe in its own space and not be tied to one thing so it's now called Riseso there's a balance." Euphoric, electronic and kaliedescopic, Bobby chants image heavy lyrics like a howling Shaman over Mani's driving bass. It's all you can do but to hold onto your senses and pray to God you don't go blind as the track explodes like a flashing, psychedelic cannon-ball straight through the back of your head before finally disintegrating into a chaotic dirge. Deep Hit Of The Sun is ragged and industrial with a freight-train heart-beat pumping throughout. Guitars wail like sirens singing backwards (Mani, "backwards shit, all sorts of trickery, whatever you can throw at it, it's all there" and courtesy of studio trickster Andrew Innes) while Indian drums and electronic beeps tumble effortlessly towards the intense build. It's taken over a decade and only Primal Scream know how close the band came to jacking it all in the mid-nineties but uplifting and flush as this song is, a line can now finally be drawn between the joys of Screamadelica to the present day. Significant in this is the return of Andrew Weatherall as producer on three of the album tracks, one of which is A Scanner Darkly. Named after a book by Philip K Dick (author of 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep'), it's the disturbing story of main protagonist Bob Arctor who's so embroiled in his addiction that he can't distinguish between his job and his junkie lifestyle. Delusions, schizophrenia and hallucinations all mix into the fold of this heavy story about one man and his mania's that spin out of control. Gillespie speaks gently and economically about the books themes (later, stumbling upon a line in the book that reads, 'he felt, in his head, loud voices singing: terrible music, as if the reality around him had gone sour,' the significance gains more power than if Gillespie had explained it himself) but quickly he becomes elated while describing the track as Captain Beefheart over Throbbing Gristle with Robert Plant on harmonica. "We all fucking love led Zeppelin, no worship Led Zeppelin!" says Bobby an hour before Plant arrives at their North London studio. Gillespie's getting animated, laughing and clapping as he anticipates the lead singer of one of the world's biggest rock bands guesting on their album. "Robert Plant, what an amazing rock'n'roller, amazing singer?! The Zep fucking invented rock'n'roll behaviour! Maybe even better than the Stones, sexier maybehey d'you know what, they're not better than the Stones, but fuck me, they're as good as." As Robert Plant arrives in the studio, a warm gust of blonde hair, jokes and smiles, Primal Scream are visibly beside themselves. Plant listens to the track once, takes a harmonica from Throb, the lead guitarist and goes into the next room to record his material within minutes of arriving. "There are Howling Wolf style blues on this track and we know Robert's a big fan so when he passed by the studio a couple of weeks ago we asked if he'd like to play," says Bobby who's jumping around as Plant shows a real feel for the dirty, sexy qualities of the track right from the get-go. Another take and Plant adds some long, skitzy notes and then that's it, he picks up his coat and prepares to leave but not before discussing the fame and misfortunes of other rock stars with the band. "You can't live for disaster," states Plant. Gillespie looks up from his guitar and laughs, "well, we tried". Quick as a flash Plant floors the band by replying, "my God, I should know, I was in Led Zeppelin for chrissakes, I never slept for years!" Knock out. "Well, before I go," says Plant, "I'll just have one final go" and walks back into the other room. This time Percy's absolutely cracked it and Andrew Innes has got a grin wider than the Watford Gap as he records Plant blowing evil, deep down under delta blues into the microphone. Once Plant's gone, Duffy, the keyboard player says that it took everything he had not to get emotional. "It's moments like that," says Andrew Innes, later in the pub, "that keep us together, that make it all worthwhile". Another guest to appear on a cover version of Lee Hazlewoods duet with Nancy Sinatra, Some Velvet Morning is Kate Moss who, after Denise Johnson is Primal Scream's second chanteuse. "It's a psycho-sexual, psychedelic cowboy song," says Gillespie, "hopefully we're going to get it mixed by Georgio Moroder. Us, Kate Moss and Georgio Moroder, fucking great!" Friends with Kate since she was fifteen, Gillespie only discovered that she could sing a couple of years ago when she was late in writing a ditty for a website. "There was a guitar there so I said I'll write you a song. She had these diamonds so I said alright I'll write a song called I Got The Diamond Blues Honey," says Gillespie. "It was good laugh, she's got a good voice, good timing and she's a good dancer. If you're a good dancer then you've got timing. Singing's not about being in tune, it's about timing." Then, as he scratches his mop of black hair, "and you need to have the right attitude, you know?" A fact that Gillespie himself has only just become truly accustomed to. In the early nineties he'd do take after take with his vocals. "Since Vanishing Point I've done everything in one take. (Before that) I used to get a bit, maybe I was a bit insecure about singing and stuff like in my head, how it sounded in my head to how it sounded on tape was different so maybe I'd get a bit uptight. Live I was always pretty good so I just thought, you know what you've just got to get it down as it is. So I started just writing the lyrics then writing and singing right away, when I did that I suddenly became really confident." This is a rule by which the whole band now work. "The first time I'll hear a song is when I'm tuning my bass up. I just make it up on the spot," says Mani. "It's keeps it fresh doing it that way, you don't always get it like that first time but it's more often than not for me. When you're stuck in a studio with a lot of boys for a long time it's not good is it?! I'm a bit of a ladies man myself so I just try and get my stuff done quickly and then, obviously, it's off to the pub." So, a belting seventh album in tow, the whole band's in-sync and, in their words feeling better than they have in years - Primal Scream are bursting to go on tour. "When we record in the studio I love it," says Gillespie, "but really I'm always thinking, this is going to sound great live!" For the next minute imagine yourself as the sixth member of Primal Scream. "If it's a really big gig," rushes Gillespie, "a really important gig, backstage we're playing James Brown records then we'll have the sax boys and the cornet boys playing along, everybody's just working themselves to go onstage, whatever it takes to get it right. Then the guy goes right, you've gotta go onstage and you walk down the corridor and you're just waiting to go and you can just hear the fucking crowd and all of a sudden someone says go on and you run on, that's fucking ama-azing that feeling, the best feeling in the world! It's like slow motion, it's like being in a movie!" Come on the Scream. Though it's not without some trepidation that they're preparing to tour. "We once went on tour for twenty-two weeks when Get Your Rocks Off came out," says Gillespie, "it took me two years to recover." And so did the hotel rooms. Buried in the history of Primal Scream is one story with two versions. Photographer, author of Higher Than The Sun and living legend, Grant Fleming claims that it was England being knocked out of the World Cup while Mani claims that they were in Japan, it was his birthday and he'd rung his wife only to find that she was out. Either way a whole room was demolished. The sofa, chairs, table and TV all went out of the window. "The window was only so small," motions Mani, "I went fucking bananas, broke up the couch bit by bit and threw it all out. Some guy came to the door, there was a cleaner going past so I grabbed the hoover off her, chased the guy down the corridor with it, got me cock out and pissed all over 'em. Not like me at all." A benefit gig was played to pay for the damage. "Typical Primal Scream behaviour," comments Fleming, "while other bands were playing gigs to benefit charities they played a gig to save the promoters arse". None of the rock'n'roll attitude has faded "We love it on the road," says Mani with words that have more depth than he's aware, "We half kill ourselves but now we're bullet proof." Separately, Gillespie adds to the sentiment, "the band's better than it's ever been, personalities, musicianship, attitude, nobody's fucked up either which is pretty important." Which leaves just one final prophecy to be made about this next album and it has to come from the lyrics of one of Primal Scream's dearest and biggest idols: 'A movement is accomplished in six stages And the seventh brings return. The seven is the number of the young light It forms when darkness is increased by one' A very special thanks to Sarah Hay for sending me the article Originally appeared in Dazed and Confused, February 2000. Copyright © Dazed and Confused. Back |
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