Primal Scream . Webadelica

It's a Total Trip

'Screamadelica' was an epochal LP. Then Primal scream descended into heavy drug abuse, turned their backs on dance culture and came out with the rockist 'Give Out But Don't Give Up'. Since then, they've struggled with drugs and depression and returned with a post-ecstacy walk on the darkside called 'Vanishing Point', a record Bobby Gillespie describes as 'the sound of now". Writer: Rob Fearn. Photographer: Eitan.

First, an accusation. When 'Screamadelica' appeared in 1991, it was Year Zero in more ways than one. Primal Scream hadn't just reinvented themselves as acid house evangelists - they'd crystalised the experinece of a generation. More than anything, 'Loaded', 'Come together' and 'Higher than the Sun' summed up that whole blissed-out, pille-up, acid house revolution - when more and more rock kids and indie kids fell under the spell of dance culture. It seemed we were on the brink of a new era, that music would never be the same again. 1994's 'Give Out But Don't Give Up' was a very different album, a return to Primal Scream's rock n' roll roots. Bobby Gillespie would probably say it it was a 'dance' record. It was certainly a party record, recorded in Memphis, Tennessee, where Rolling Stones hedonism met George Clinton's Funkadelic. Produced by Black Crowes' know twiddler and sagging under the weight of its influences, The Primals seemed to let their 'Stone' fetish run away with them, while their desire to be authentic swamped any chance of being relevant to their dance oriented audience.

How could Primal Scream hand those balding rock critics an excuse to boogie on dance music's grave? When Primal Scream released Give Out...' it felt like a betrayal. As if they'd let us down.

Bobby Gillespie: Good! That's good... That's good, that's good, because we don't do anything that anyone expects us to do. We're not showbusiness. We don't give a fuck! That last record, it fucked up because we never captured the mood of the band. We didnae. It was too bland sounding. I feel we let ourselves down, because we didnae make a good record. No' because of the style of the record. As far as a change in style goes, I think that's a good thing, because it's just like 'fuck you' to everybody. We do our own thing and we dictate the terms. That's why you start a band. To create your own world, your own rules. I can see why people were disappointed. I was as well, but for different reasons. It wasn't emotional enough, it was over-produced. In sound and feel it was too one-dimensional. We tucked up. But, hey, we know that."

PRIMAL Scream are here to talk about their new record, 'Vanishing Point'. Or at least, two of them are. Bobby Gillespie's a paper-thin bundle of intensity. The Black Crowes garb of 'Give Out...' has glven way to a sharp, soulboy look loafers and blue jeans. At 33, he looks far better than could be expected, especially given the last few years' famously u,'healthy lifestyle, slightly pallid, perhaps, beneath that messy mop of black hair, but undeniably cool in his crumpled Stussy jacket. Even now, he's the only one who really looks the part. Martin Duffy, the Primals' affable Brummie keyboard-player, is wear- ing what looks like the same oversized zip-up coat of three years ago, a Silk Cut constantly on the go. Throb (guitarist Robert Young) is taller, heavily-built, looking as if he's here for a Whitesnake photo-shoot. And, as soon as the pictures are finished, he's off. "A man of few words, Throb," says Duffy.

Even less keen on interviews these days is Andrew Innes, guitar player and engineer for 'Vanishing Point'. With Gillespie and Throb, Innes founded the Scream in early-8Os Glasgow. But, according to the band's PR, his stand on meeting the press consists of "not wanting anything to do with those cunts". Meanwhile, Mani - the ex-Stone Roses man Duffy calls "the grooviest bass player in the world" - is AWOL in Manchester.

'Vanishing Point' is the album that marks Primal Scream's return to the dance fold. Kind of. Because, while 'Screamadelica' epitomised the bussed euphoria of the E-rush, 'Vanishing Point' is the warped, paranoid comedown. Recorded by Innes in the band's North London studio, then mixed with Brendan Lynch (best known as producer on Paul Weller's 'Wild Wood' album), it's a btilliant but inescapably dark album. The drug-fuelled beats of 'Screamadelica' are sucked through the nightmare psychedelia of 'Burning Wheel', the juddering behemoth 'Kowalski', the dehumanised vocoder-dub of 'Stuka', the sb-mo groove of 'Trainspotting' (mixed with Andy Weatherall for the Irvine Welsh film of the same name). 'Medication', meanwhile, is '70s New York punk at its most rabid.

"We got back to listening to a lot of music with some space in it, and bass in it," says Gillespie. "Very experimental music. I think a lot of that came out subconsciously when we were making the record." After the marathon touring stint that followed 'Give Out...' - a record that actually out sold 'Screamadelica' with Creation now distributed by Sony - the Scream started listening to records again. Public Image Limited, hip hop, Can, Burrang Spear, Peter Tosh, dub, experimental composers like Bartok and John Cage, Dr Octagon - "DJ Automator's done a mix of Kowaiski!"- and Tricky's bleak, tortured 'Pre-Millennium Tension'.

"That Tricky album was amazing," says Gillespie, "because it was so modem and so dark. It was a blues record, man! The mothertucker made a blues record! People don't get it!

The current single, 'Kowalski', is inspired by a '70s road movie, also called 'Vanishing Point'. "It's a great speed-freak road movie," says Gillespie, smacking his hands together as if to emphasise the point. "There's a guy called Kowaiski, who's an ex-racing driver. He's gotta drive a 1971 Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco, he's got two days tae do it, and he just keeps poppin' amphetamines. And he's getting chased by Nazis, cops, gangsters, freaks, weirdos. And he just keeps going, man, nothing can stop him. He's a total tucking outlaw. The music in the film's happy music and we thought, this deserves something more edgy, paranoid and speedier, let's write some mothertucking music for it. And that's how we wrote 'Kowlaski'."

Bobby Gillespie delivers his answers with an intense rush of words, and an equally intense stare. He has a disconcerting habit of throwing questions back at you: 'It's your turn to get on the end of the fuckin' fork!" But ask him to explain how the hedonism of 'Screamadelica', the party-rock vibe of 'Give Out', gave way to such darkness, why he's flipped into 'bad trip' mode, and he freezes. "Aye. It is a dark record. A lot of people have said that. It's just an honest expression of how we were feeling....I ask him to explain the lyric to one of the album's darkest songs, 'Out Of The Void'. It's a brilliant track, the beats foggy and subdued, Gillespie's voice fragile and thin.
I can't slip my skin, I'm full of dust, I'm chemically imbalanced, I'm cancer... If I were a child again, I'd be holy and not insane, I've got the fear I can't escape out of the void, into the light.
"It's... I gue... I mean... I mean it's... Sometimes... do you ever get the feeling that you're... not... I dunno, it's a hard one to talk about... Some people are gonna take it as a real drug lyric, which it could be, but to me it's more about acceptance. I mea. . you know...And then finally, "It's about being ill in your head... sick in your head and sick in your soul. It's a real bad depression. I mean, it's a mental illness. Have you ever had long-term depression? Ever had that self-hate? That completely useless feeling?"

In 1994 Creation Records boss Alan McGee said that Primal Scream were a fundamentally honest band, that "whatever they're feeling at the time is what they're gonna do". In 1987 and '88, Primal Scream had done a lot of clubbing, a lot of Es, and the result was 'Screamadelica'. Three years later, hallucinogens and clubs were losing their shine, and they made a different type of record. "I think they're pretty environmental, basically," said McGee. "Put them in an environment that's good and they'll recreate that environment on record."

Bobby Gillespie's says much the same thing when he complains that 'Give Out...' failed by not capturing the band's mood at the time. And, judging from the swampy psychedelia that makes up much of 'Vanishing Point', it must have been a very black mood indeed. Even when 'Give Out...' was being recorded, stories were filtering back about the drug-induced mess the band were in. One incident has been particularly well documented: the time Duffy was found stabbed in a nameless New York bar, in an attack he couldn't even remember. Duffy was too drunk to realise the knife had just missed his kidney.

"It was amazing we even got a record out of that time," says Gillespie. "It should have been an EP. It would have been a great EP - R.I.P. We were all in a state, the whole fucking band, I don't wanna go into it, it's a long, long story.

"I learned a lot about myself," adds Gillespie. "I learned how bad I could be as a person, how selfish I could be. Here I am in this hole. Am I gonna stay in this hole, or am I gonna try and get out of this hole? I don't really wanna say what the lowest point was. Some of my pals nearly died, do you know what I mean? A lot of times you don't realise how far out things of gone. I'm not criticising that behaviour, I'll do it again. I might have done it last week, but what I'm saying is, it's good to know your limits. I'm glad that I'm still alive."

Is it true that Primal Scream made the new album straight? "We werenae on heroin when we made the record. That's as straight as we got. It's not a smack record, I'll tell you that much. The last record, that's a smack record. Or it should've been a smack record."

WHEN pushed, Gillespie explains Primal Scream's descent into darkness and despair in terms of "psychic fall-out". "There was a psychic explosion at the end of the '80s. Now you're getting the psychic implosion."

When drugs go from being an underground, minority pursuit to a mass-movement permeating all levels of British society, there's bound to be a pay-off. You can only stay up for so long. As Bobby Gillespie points out, drugs have become part of the fabric of society, and the fall-out is inescapable. As a nation, we take something like two million Es a week, you can find heroin in every inner-city estate, cocaine in every city centre pub.

"We're no' unique in that we've been excessive in drug use," he says. "It's just that we're more famous than most people because we're in a rock n' roll band."

You can't imagine Bobby Gillespie singing something like 'Higher Than The Sun' anymore. But do any of us feel like that in 1997? Ironically, it seems that Primal Scream have fallen back into step with dance culture just in time for the post-E comedown. Like the Tricky album he admires so much, like dark, techstep drum & bass, 'Vanishing Point' represents the flipside to the dance big bang.

I ask Gillespie what will be on the album's cover. The images on its predecessors so completely matched the music - the smiley face reinvented as burned-out sun on Screamadelica'; the neon Confederate flag backed with a shot of dead Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel on 'Give Out...'. He explains 'Vanishing Point' will have a "fractured, schizophrenic" cover, cutting up photos of the band's Dodge Challenger (they bought one for the 'Kowalski' video) with images of the mixing desk and analogue synths in their studio.

"I cannae think of any record this year that's been as exciting as this record," says Gillespie. "It's just got a fractured fucking sound. I think it's a beautiful record. You can dance to it, you can fuck to it. You can fucking... shoot policemen to it. It's an insurrectionary record. It's five dimensions, it's six dimensions. It's electronic. It's futuristic, it's the sound of now. It's a total trip."

And when he puts it like that, you can hardly disagree.

The Bobster's track by track guide to The Scream's triumphant return.

Burning Wheel
"Burning Wheel is a total psychedelic dub, total LSD-25, a total acid record. We love stuff like Syd Barrett and the Electric Prunes. The whole way this was put together was symphonic - layers of samples, strange sounds, live electric guitar and keyboards. There's computers crashing in that track. The song's about having your head on fire..."

Get Duffy
"It's a beautiful mixture. Innes put the horns through wah wah pedals, and it made them soft, like a dreamy sound. It's dead Beach Boys and also Marvin Gaye. 'Trouble Man'. And at the end it goes dead dubby, like a Lee Perry track. Then it's got that film soundtrack theme. I'm not gonna tell you how we got that sound. That's a secret."

Kowalski
"It's like a junkyard, isn't it? It's got that fucking gigantic metallic, fucking junkyard sound to it, careering, just careering. 'I feel like Kowalski in Vanishing Point.' That's what i was singing. 'Soul on ice.' It's paranoid, but it's aware."

Star
"It's quite an emotional, uplifting record, but also quite sad as well. That kidda happy-sad duality. 'Higher then the Sun' had that. It's for revolutionaries: 'Every brother is a star, every sister is a star.' Like the Liverpool Dockers. To me, they're all stars, people who've worked these jobs for 30 years, and the dock owners are gonna let scabs take them, just because they refused to cross a picketline. That's why it's an angry song."

If they Move Kill 'Em
"It's dead exciting, dead hard, violent. It's just funky spooky and scary. It's sounds like a Martin death-ray, from a flying saucer: If They Move Kill 'Em. It's more of a s Sam Peckinpah reference, really - slow motion violence, lots' of shooting. It's total penetration, right in the centre of the fucking skull."

Out of the Void
"The darkest lyrics I've ever written? Aye Aye. When I 'I'm full of dust...' I dunno...It's all there in the lyrics. I feel alot better now, but it could happen again."

Stuka
"A Stuka is a German World War II airplane, part of the Blitzkreig. We've got one above our mixing desk, a toy plastic Suka. We wanted the album to sound like jet fighters taking off and bombing. When it was dive bombing it'd make this screaming sound, put the fear of Lucifer into people. The doorbells? I'm telling you where that came from..."

Medication
"That was written and recorded in about an hour. The Stooges? Yeah it's 'Raw Power', basically. The lyrics London at the moment" 'Everybody stepping on each other, shooting, snorting, smoking all they can. I wish that blood was thicker than water. 'cos drinking dirty water kills a man.'"

Motorhead
"It's just speed madness, isn't it? It's our homage to the Obengrupenfuhrer of speed, Lemmy."

Trainspotting
"It's got a lot of space, that song. It's dark, but there's a lot of space. It was great working with Andrew [Weatherall] again. That was the first time in three years that i really went, 'Wow I'm really proud of this group again."

Long Life
"This song's only been played once. It's real motion, really sexy. It's redemptive. Almost karmic and redemptive."

Primal Scream go clubbing

Martin Duffy
"It's really about putting your glad rags on, going out, and getting into it, having a good night out. In London you get a bit spoiled because there's so many clubs, every night of the week. You're never gonna grasp it all. wWhen you're in your teens you can go out clubbing every of the week. You don't give a shit about walking home four miles. I'm Brummie In exiIe, really. Before acid happened there'd be the blues patios in Handsworlh, Port Sully and the garden partys in the Surnmer. Then all the acid house kicked off... I'd go up there maybe every other weekend, there's same good clubs up there."

Bobby GiIIispie
"The feeling when you're dancing to your favorite record. that feeling is just the best feeling ever. It's just pure self-expression. It's about going out, meeting people, talking to people, dancing to your favorite records, getting on an E, taking some speed, letting yourself go and having a fucking riot."

"That's what it's all about. It's part of British youth culture, part of working classa culture - from the Mods Northern Soul, soulboys in the `8Os, then acid, right up till now. It's also an affirmation of culture. It's about bringing people together, not aboul separating people."

"Recently I've just been listening more to reggae and old soul, getting my kicks out of that music. I've been down the Social a few times, and Big Kahuna, but the music doesn't really do much for me. It's all about how big the beat is, a bit emotionless. A lot of times, that can be great, but most of the time I like end up next door in Smithfields for the records in Jerry Dammer' club 'cos I think they're better. Hip Hop an' stuff."

"If I go to the Social, I go to see people I know rather than listen to the music. I'm more into my reggae. I don't realty go to reggae parties, just the ones I have in my house... The Scream Team? That was just Andrew Innes and a couple of mates. It was just a joke really. They DJed at Disgraceland one time. They just got bored with it. I think there were a couple of bogus Scream Teams knocking arcond for a while. I thought that was quite funny."

Originally appeared in Mixmag, June 1997.
Copyright © Mixmag.

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