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10 questions for Bobby GillespiePrimal Scream's outlaw leader tells Keith Cameron of militarism, men with pasts and a boy called Wolf. Portraits: Jamie Beeden.When Primal Scream began you were also in The Jesus And Mary Chain, which at the time was a far more successful band. Why did you eventually leave the Mary Chain? I played drums with the Mary Chain from '84 until the start of '86. I played on Psychocandy. I had an amazing time. I loved those three guys, I loved the group, I loved the music. But they called us up and said, "We want you to be our full-time drummer and leave Primal Scream." And I was really broken up about it, because at that point I was having a better time with the Mary Chain than I was with our band, but I knew I could write songs, and I don't have the audacity to think I could have written songs for that band. I wouldn't have even tried, they were so incredible. I just thought, I love being in that band, but I think I'm a better songwriter than I am a drummer. It broke my heart, but... it's worked out all right. Jim [Reid] sings Detroit on the new Scream album. I tried to sing it a couple of times and it wasn't really hap- pening. He's got a really sexy voice, but it's also quite melancholy. He's a blues singer. Is there a lack of ego in Primal Scream? On some of your best records, you don't appear to actually do anything... That's true, but even if I don't sing I can help write the music. And even if I haven't helped write the music, if it's a great piece of music it's a great piece of Primal Scream music. Like on the new album, the song 'A Scanner Darkly' - I was there when it was recorded and written but I never contributed anything except to say that's good or that's bad. But it's Primal Scream music. I'll get my tuppenceworth when it comes out. If it's a good song and I cannae sing it we'll get somebody else. Whatever it takes to make a great fucking rock'n'roll record, we'll do it. You cannae be too precious about it. Iggy went from The Stooges to doing 'The Idiot' with David Bowie. Is it any less authentic because the Asheton brothers aren't there? It's a great record. You've got to do whatever's best for the music. Was there ever a time when you thought the band was finished? v A few times, actually. In the summer of '92, there was a lot of heroin use in the group, and around that time I thought it was finished. In '94, halfway through a 22-week tour I thought I've fucking had enough. It's not what I wanna be involved in. Everybody was still fucked up. Maybe not on heroin, but other things. But you come through it, you just get on with it, and it's not a big deal. I hate all these articles, y'know, My Drug Hell. Just fucking shake it off, keep working. Like anything, it makes people stronger if they all come through it together. (Laughs) It's so Spinal Tap! We struggled on! Mani's been on board for five years, Kevin Shields seems solid in the ranks: are Primal Scream a rock'n'roll Foreign Legion, where men with 'pasts' can find a sympathetic home? I'm more romantic, I tend to think of it as The Wild Bunch. Each time we go on tour I think it's gonna be the last bank job and we're gunned down by the Mexican army. Throb's gonna get captured and we're all gonna have to go an' get the guy even though we know we're gonna get massacred... I think we've got a good policy, musically. Because we've been honest about our drug use, a lot of times I think the music's been overshadowed by the lifestyle choices. And I think it's a testament to the musical ideology of the band that we've got people like Mani and Kevin playing with us. Y'know, it's hard to get Kevin Shields to do any thing. Ask Island - 10 years and he never gave them a record. 'Screamadelica' is widely regarded as one of the all-time classic rock'n'roll albums. Yet even you admit its two predecessors were far from great. Do you find that hard to account far? Naw, but at the time you're younger and you think, I'm only gonna get one chance at this. When we started the group we wanted to make a record as good as 'Forever Changes' by Love. And our first album wasn't. We were really heartbroken, we felt like failures. With Screomadehca I think we made a fucking great record and we felt amazing that we'd made a great record, and we loved the fact that people loved it. We were really proud of it. The first album was too studious. It was nice but we weren't having much fun playing it. We just wanted to have fun playing rock'n'roll, which was how we tried to make the second record, but we didn't quite know how to... We knew how to play rock'n'roll but we didn't know how to write rock'n'roll songs. Y'know what? You make mistakes and it's not a bad thing. When you're on an Enterprise Allowance scheme you want your record to do well, you don't wanna keep signing on. And if everybody at the record company's telling you it doesn't work and they're busy promoting House Of Love, and you're a forgotten band and you know you're great, you get like - Well, fuck 'em. Wasn't it a bit galling being ignored by Creation when it was your best friend's label? It was all right, because it was just timing. Whatever's successful people naturally gravitate tawards. I don't have any grudges with anybody. On the whole, our relationship with Alan [McGee] over the years has been amazing. There's only one time it wasnae so good and that's after he got ill. He felt that we weren't there for him. But we weren't there for him because we weren't there for ourselves, we were all having bad times. Everybody went a bit weird in the mid-'90s because of excessive drug use. Everybody was confused and isolated. I saw some strange things, things I would never have imagined would have happened. But it worked itself out. The support I've had from Alan, personally, has been incredible. I had a really bad time two years ago, I was a bit imbalanced, and Alan and Kate [Holmes, McGee's wife] took me in and looked after us, sent me to their house in Wales and got us better. I had to get out of London, because I had crazy things, some changes in my life that were too much for me to take. If you're going to do stuff, accept the consequences, deal with it and don't feel sorry for yourself and don't blame anybody else. How did you feel when you discovered the Labour Party were considering 'Movin' On Up' for their election theme last year? (Derisive snort) I remember a Labour guy saying we must eradicate the word 'socialism' from the dictionary. That could have been Josef Goebbels saying that. I never voted for the cunts. The funniest one was the New York Stock Exchange wanted to use 'Movin' On Up' to advertise the post-September 11 rebuilding programme. We just said, "Nah, we don't agree with your politics". They were gonna pay us a lot of money for it, but we just thought it's blood money. The money that's made there every day is through slavery and exploita- tion. I don't mind it being on a TV ad for Telewest, which it is. Cable TV's all right, not mass-murdering capitalists. Talking of which, what's happened to the song 'Bomb The Pentagon' that you played live last year? It was never recorded, we played it four times. I took the line "bomb the Pentagon" out of the song. It was too sensational, too much shock value, it just didn't make for good rock'n' roll. I wanted some- thing more ominous. It was a great song, a lot of different themes: the pornography of militarism, the alienation of work, drug culture as control... and if I'd kept that line in the song would have been tied to a specific time and place. We got a lot of attention for that, but it's not the kind of attention we wanted. We hate militarism and we were starting to be seen as some pro-militaristic thing. There were all these stories in the music press saying we'd recorded it, it was going to be a single, it was on our album, the American record company had dropped us... All fabrication. We haven't had an American record company for two years! Is it true to say the Scream haven't always been the easiest band to work with? No, I think we have. Alan McGee always said, "You were never a problem to work with, even when you were fucked up you were actu- ally all right." I think we always manage to get the best out of people, so I think that tells you a lot. We've played with a lot of different people, from the Memphis Horns to George Clinton, Robert Plant. Augustus Pablo and the Memphis Horns on the same record [Star]. That's pretty' good! That's no' bad! And then Adrian Sherwood did a dub of it. Things could be worse. What's fatherhood like? It's great. I've got a fucking amazing family. I love my girlfriend Kate and I love my son Wolf. The Wolf. He's a great kid. Mind you, he's only six months old! Hopefully it's gonna make us less selfish. I just wanna be as good a father as I can. Not be a fuck-up. I wanna be there for him, and love him, help him out. Make him laugh. Originally appeared in Mojo August, 2002. Copyright © Mojo Back 
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