Primal Scream . Webadelica

Hell's Angels - Q & A with Bob

As long as the guitar plays it'll steal your heart away

Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream in conversation with Tim Tooher.

A guy like George Clinton: he's 54 and for over 30 years he's been making music. He's made so many people happy.
I think he has. There's so much shit people have got to contend with every day of their lives. Why add to the misery? Someone like Clinton, he's saved my life, man. Rock'n'roII's saved my life. Jazz has saved my life. Music has saved my life. What would I be if I didn't have music? I've met all my best friends through music, a lot of beautiful cats. It's a great form of communication. It's a great way of getting in touch with other people. It's great to go on stage and see the joy on people's faces and watch them dancing and getting down. Just getting off on it and losing themselves in the whale fucking experience. It's a beautifult hing. I love it, man. It'ssexy. Rock'n'roll and sex.

There have been times when it's seemed like it might stop. The times when it's not worked is when there's nat been an audience.
We need people to play music to. It's like if you're laying in bed, you need a lady, or you might need a man. To make love you need someone to make love to. And it's the same with music. It's great to play music for people. The energy thing is reciprocal. You need the energy from the audience to give the energy out. Music's one of the last things that can make you feel. If you sit and watch TV all day, all it does is nullify you, numb you out. I don't think you get emotional watching TV. But at a gig you're surrounded by people, and there's this energyfrom everybody in the room. There's electric energy coming from the stage, coming from the amplifiers. It's a real sexy thing at its best. It's like total communication. Sometimes if I'm alone I can put on a record like Wait And See by Lee Haziewood, or Please Forgive Me by O.V. Wright and it makes me feel less alone. In fact it makes me feel, which is important. The way the world is you can get numbed up and you can be cynical and you can be inward to the point of killing yourself, but music makes you feel. It can make you cry or dance. It can let loose emotions which sometimes you forget you've got, and that's the power of rock'n'roII or soul or funk.

Loads of times we've gone out to clubs, got back at four in the morning, either to your flat or mine, and there's 10 people that are all off their nuts. Most people don't know the records we know but in those situations people are open and you play records that mean so much to you but they might not know.

That's a total gas. It's beautiful when that happens. When kids say to you, 'What the fuck was that?' and you go, that's African Dub Chapter 3 by Joe Gibbs and The Professionals. Classic '70s dub record, and they're just like 'Man, that just blew my mind.' Or you might play the second side of Oah La La and it gets to the point when you're coming back every Saturday night and people are saying, 'Could you put that Faces album on?' Club kids getting into all the ballads on Side 2 of Ooh La La and everybody's just sat around feeling perfect.

Does it amaze you that your music is doing that for somebody else?
Aye, it does, aye. If we can touch somebody's heart with Damaged or Sad And Blue from the new album in the same way that We Had It All or Rainbow Road or Kind Woman does for me or you, then it's a victory. It's a beautiful thing. It's lovely, lovely. Because it's emotional, and it makes you feel emotional and it's good to feel like that. It's good to feel that you're alive and that you're a human being because you can get so numb from living in this fucking world. It can be such a hard place.

Do you not think sometimes, when you see people listening to records like that, you can almost see that they're not used to showing that level of feeling? So, in a way, the music helps people to get In touch with things inside themselves?
Yes, it puts you back in touch with emotions you forgot you had. Sometimes I get so introverted I think I'm never coming bock, and that I'm going to be depressed for the rest of my life. When I feel like that I could go to sleep and never wake up, but you can play these beautiful records and they can speakto you. This may be a sad thing to say but sometimes I feel like music can speakto me more than most people can. I don't know if that says a bad thing about me or if that says a bad thing about other people. Maybe it says that I'm fucked up and I can't communicate properly with people. Maybe I can't open myself up. Perhaps the records help me open up to myself, to have a conversation with myself. But records are always made by people. The people that make the records are going to have just as many problems as anyone else. Yes, it's like Dylan. People look to Dylan far answers but he's as confused as the rest of us.

When I first became a fan of your music, I always felt that the feelings I got off other records were all in there but that the records weren't as good as you knew they could be.
It takes you ages. It takes a longtime to grow. Clinton was making records in the 'SOs. The Stones and The Beatles relied on covers for their first few albums. It was only in 1965 that the Stones really started to write their own songs. These days people expect a band to be shit hot from their first single, but it doesn't work like that.

You don't just listen to one sort of music. There isn't just one way a record can sound for it to give you that special feeling. There are myriad forms of music out there... That's right. And we mix them up. If you listen to Struttin' on the new album it's got a New Orleans beat, a funk groove, dub effects, space-age sounds, rock'n'rolI, Sun Ra and the Memphis Horns. Allan the one record. And together they make a new sound. It's beautiful.

And the essence of the song is still the same as one of the ballads or Rocks.
Of course. It's got soul, it's got the feeling. It'll touch people's hearts and make them move at the same time. As long as the guitar plays, it'll steal your heart away. As long as Mr. Young and Mr. Innes and Mr. Richards and Mr. Berry and Mr. Fuckin' Elmore James and Mr. Slim Harpo keep on playing

Originally Appeared in Mojo April 1994. Written by Tim Tooher.

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