Primal Scream . Webadelica

Primal Scream

An unrepentant Bobby Gillespie speaks out on the furore over priml scream's 'Bobm the Pentagon', his remarks about September 11 and why Britain is becoming a police state.

Text: Roger Morton, photography: Hamish Brown

It's not exactly midnight and Chanring Cross Road is not quite a crossroads, but there's something spooky about the way Bobby Gillespie emerges Out of the evening drizzle at the end of the nearapocalyptic year of 2001. It's between Christmas and New Year, there's a lull in the shopping binge, but while the nation's grazing on satellite-lite, Bobby's out on the streets, scouring bookshops for insider knowledge on the dirty ways of global misgovernment and waiting for a big event.

Looking like a devil's advocate in a guerrilla jacket, Bobby bounds across the road with a wild smile on his face. In ten years of NME bumping into him at parties, gigs, and spacecake baking competitions, Bobby's manifested a spectrum of moods ranging from total zombie to seething proselytiser. But tonight, on a wet Soho street, as he enthuses about the progress of the seventh Primal Scream album and the Alexander Cockburn tract 'Whiteout The CIA, Drugs & The Press', he seems in the grip of an unprecedented lust for life. Well, wouldn't you be in a good mood if your band was notching up its third straight incandescent album, your girlfriend was about to give birth to a son, and you were clearheaded enough to name him Wolf rather than Lysergic Rabies Gillespie, a name you touted back in madder times? Please allow us to reintroduce Mr Gillespie - singer. songwriter, mouthy Scot, infosponge and Castro of Britrock.

There are two versions of recent Scream history. One maintains Bobby lost the plot after Primal Scream's last album, 'Exterminator'. Last November, Justine Frischmann - with whom Bobby briefly lived after splttting up with his long-term girlfriend claimed in NME: He couldn't really cope as a human being. He couldn't feed himself, he was too paranoid to answer the door and too jumpy to have normal relationships with people in the street.

Her words (which Bobby regards as so treacherous that he turns off the tape recorder when her name is mentioned. saying he doesn't want to give her the publicity) nevertheless tallied with rumours that had been circulating the music business for months. Bobby, it was whispered, was in such a bad state he'd been discovered shouting at the tannoy at Chalk Farm tube. Alan McGee had taken him in, but neither he nor McGee's heavily pregnant wife could cope with Bobby's behaviour - playing one continuous guitar chord all day long was just the mildest manifestation - so they packed him off to their house in Wates, where he embarked on a lengthy rehabilitation process.

Allegedly, Bobby had only just recovered when September 11 occurred, further destabilising the singer and surrounding him in controversy thanks to the Scream's untimely live testing of a song, provisionally titled 'Bomb The Pentagon'.

The other version is that he was busy recording the best Scream record in years, and the personal and political issues were a storm in a paper teacup.

In the summer of 2002, sitting at 11am in the most brightlylit, glasswalled cafe in north London, Bobby's smile is still sunrise-wide, but whether it's due to his augmented personal life or an inner resolve to laugh at the world's absurdity is yet to be deduced. This time we're on official business. A new Primal Scream onslaught is underway. Opening salvo, the poppy robopunker single 'Miss Lucifer', has arrived. An album titled 'Evil Heat' is to follow, featuring the full Scream team of Bobby, Andrew Innes, Mani, Martin Duffy and Robert 'Throb' Young. plus input from Andrew Weatherall, Kevin Shields, Robert Plant, The Jesus And Mary Chain's Jim Reid and a certain Kate Moss. With huge reluctance, Bobby turns his attention from enthusing about the week's work in progress - his duet with Kate, 'Some Velvet Morning' - to his state of mind two years back.

"I was a bit crazed, but it was mostly about things in my personal life. Whatever. It was two years ago and I don't really want to talk about it because everything's different now. I'm really happy. I've got a great family. I'm fine now."

Is fatherhood going to change any of your opinions?

"Nah, because I want the best for my kid and everybody else's kids. If anything maybe it'll make me a less selfish person and that's a good thing."

Have you been watching The Osbournes?

"I watched it the other night, it was really good."

Do you ever worry that The Osbournes might be a nightmare version of the future for you?

"Nah, I It can get quite crazy sometimes because my girlfriend's got a dog. I like Jackass, that's pretty good. Jackass is insane. It's more exciting than fuckin' pop videos, come on!"

Bobby sits back in his chair and takes his jacket off. We're warming up. There's a whole new Scream album to be looked at and he knows there's enough in 'Evil Heat' to keep us here all day. The title comes from a line in 'Miss Lucifer' (Evil Heat.. all night long") and the predominant themes are "sex and death." But first, we must talk politics. Through Thatcherism, the Royal Family, and the miners' strike and on to Serbia and Satpal Ram, Bobby has been willing to speak out (when asked) on social issues. Later-period Scream has seen more songs touching on global military industrial oppression, notably 'Swastika Eyes' on 'Exterminator'.

Rock bands are inevitably damned if they do and damned if they don't when it comes to politics, but as the son of a Scottish Trades Union leader and Anti Nazi League veteran, Bobby's opinions are certainly not grafted on. September 11, however, cast a whole new light, not just on 'Bomb The Pentagon' - which now appears on 'Evil Heat' retitled 'Rise' - but also on other Scream-espoused causes like Palestine, and Islamic resistance movement the Hizbollah.

"That song is a lot of ideas and images and it sounds stupid and pretentious if you try and explain those things, says Bobby, irritation levels rising. It's a rock'n'roll song, but it's just maybe a bit different from other rock'n'roll songs. I could sit here and say it's about the pornography of militarism and the alienation of work, and drug culture as control, but it's going to sound pretentous."

It might also sound truthful.

"Well, put it down then, that's what the song's about. End of story, I'm not going to say any more.

Why did you change the title from 'Bomb The Pentagon'?

"Because I didn't think it was that good a line. It was too sensational, it had shock value and I think that doesn't always make for great rock'n'roll. I wanted it to be more ominous. It was too obvious, it would have meant the song would have been tied to a specific time and place, and that's not good. And it's too much a dumb slogan. So that's why I changed it. I just thought, 'You know what? It's not that great.'

Some people, including voices at NME, have suggested changing the title constitutes bottling it.

"Well, have those people ever put themselves on the firing line for anything? They've never done it as far as I can see. I've done it loads of times, I've put my name to loads of issues, I've stood up, let my face be seen."

"I ain't a bottler, but I'm a songwriter, right? I ain't scared of anything, I've got nothing to hide, I'll stand up for what I believe in. Whether it be Satpal Ram, or the Liverpool dockers, or the Palestinians, I'll fuckin' say what I believe. Bet I'm a fuckin' songwriter and I can change any line that I want. And if anybody's got a problem with that they can come and ask me to my face."

"The song was not all about dropping bombs on the Pentagon. That was one line in the song. If you listen to the rest of the lyrics you can work out what the song's about We only ever played it in that incarnation about four times live. It was never, ever recorded. It was tried out live, as were other songs. I'm really, really bored with it by now. That's the thing. I'm bored with the issue. It's like, big fuckin' deal."

"The British government is just bringing in laws where the cops and the security services can spy on everybody's emails, see who they've written emails to, what sites they've visited, tap your telephone, they've got complete powers of surveillance. And has NME written about that? Britain is heading towards a police state. Does NME write about that? No. They're just pissed off that they couldn't go and hang out with The Strokes for three weeks after September 11. Wise up, guys. Get real. There's a lot of crazy shit happening in the world. Get off my back."

The other issue at question is your saying in one interview that September 11 was "spectacular".

"Well, it was like watching a science fiction movie. When they had 2~hour re- runs of the aeroplanes hitting the twin towers, I thought it was pornographic. It reminded me of 'The Atrocity Exhibition' by JG Ballard. I was just watching it, I wasn't in New York. It was like, 'I'm just a spectator like everyone else', and that sums up my feelings about being a spectator."

You've said you don't want to talk about issues like Palestine and the Hizbollah because they're too sensitive and complex within a music paper, but isn't it good to explain further when you've touched on those matters in the past?

"I don't want to do it because I don't see the point. I could sit here and talk about that shit all day but it's not going to change US and Israeli policy. I just think it would be beautiful to see the Palestinian people attain equal rights and independence, get a Palestinian state. I think that would be a beautiful thing."

"You can try and take the culture on, but then the last people to try that were people like John Lydon or Throbbing Gristle. And it's a hard thing to do, and I think to do that you've got to be really brave and extreme and live it 24 hours a day and ultimatby be willing to put your life on the line. You've got to be like a fuckin' commando, man, and it's a heavy trip. I don't think I can do it."

"The way I look at it is we do what we do, and if people are attracted to it, or inspired by it, then that's pockets of resistance. That's my way of resisting the power structure. I just wanna make people feel great, the way other people's music makes me feel great. And that's a powerful thing, because there's not many things in the culture that do that. A lot of it is really snide and brings people down. It's not really making people feel inspired. It's negative shit I just want to inspire people."

Most good rock'n'rollers have made their contribution by the time they're in their 3Os, but Primal Scream's trajectory is uniquely weird. Their first album, '87's 'Sonic Flower Groove' was regarded as a nice try. 'Screamadelica' saw them brilliantly ramraid the zeitgeist. In the aftermath of 'Give Out But Don't Give Up' in '94, they were written off as a force, and only rescued when they ditched heroin, built their own studio and resurfaced as an ongoing, highenergy experiment.

The uniqueness of Bobby's postion is made more complex because he's spent 15 years feeding the band scene as much as reacting to it. Garage punk with a Stooges/MC5 thrust? The Scream's encores in '97 were the Stooges' 'Loose' and the MC5's 'Kick Out The Jams'. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club? Their clear template is The Jesus And Mary Chain, the band for whom Bobby played drums in 1984.

When your forward motion is at least partly propelled by a need to keep ahead of your own rock offspring, there are consequences. 'Evil Heat' is a consistently inspiring, multi-level headkick record, spanning assault electronics, nu-psychedelic soul and incendiary rock. It has an amazing cast, it has moments of 'Screamadelica'-style accessibility, but how will it fare against The Hives and The Strokes?

"We make what we think is commercial music," says Bobby. "'Screamadelica' sold a million copies. Everything else sold half a million upwards. It'd be nice to have a Number One record, but if you look at things in terms of commercialism it's really dumb. On those terms Julio Iglesias or Ricky Martin is the greatest rock'n'roll star in the world. I don't care about the music scene. It doesn't interest me."

He may not give a damn about the current 'scene', but Bobby's fascination for the deeper, wider bandwidth is as strong as ever. His favourite records of the last year include Destiny's Child, The Von Bondies, Sugababes and Miss Kittin. A passionate, selective fan, Bobby's often thought to be more arch than he is. A case in point is the duet with Kate Moss, covering the 1967 Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra song 'Some Velvet Morning'. Bobby first met Kate in 1990 at Kinky Disco in Shaftabury Avenue. Their paths crossed frequently and Kate appeared in the band's 'Kowalski' video (smashing a bottle on Duffy's head). He also recorded blues song 'Diamond Blue' with her for fashion/art website showsfudio.com. The decision to record 'Some Velvet Morning' came after both Andrew Innes and Bobby had the same idea separately. Yet already scepticism has been voiced about the collaboration, including a letter in NME accusing Bobby of "shameless Met Bar starfucking."

"I don't understand that," responds Bobby. "It's pop music, I think it's a great idea. Imagine me and Kate Moss on Top Of The Pops, it'd be amazing. It's total punk rock as well, it's like fuckin' Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, that's the idea. People said the same sort of thing when we got Denise Johnson to sing 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' instead of me, and said we were jumping on some fuckin' house bandwagon. But you know what? I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks. It's going to be a great record. It makes pop music exciting 'cos it's so fucking dull just now. There's no personalities. Kate Moss is more of a rock'n'roll star than anybody in a band just now. She lives more of a rock'n'roll lifestyle. She looks more like a rock'n'roll star. She's got more attitude. Most of them should be fuckin' bank managers. She's just got it. Most people don't have it. So it's a great idea."

And despite his political caution - understandable in a climate where Cherie Blair is forced to apologise for even suggesting that suicide bombers might just be motivated by despair - Bobby's undoubtedly still got it too. At a time when Mick Jagger gets nominated for a knighthood, we should be thankful that at least someone out there is still prepared to question mainstream propaganda.

Maybe one day you'll get your knighthood, like Mick?

"Nah," snorts Bobby. "Well, Keith wouldn't get one, would he? It's fucked up, isn't it? It's like Shane MacGowan once said to me: 'The whole fuckin' world is one big Marx Brothers movie.' And you know what, that's what I think, man. The world's absurd, man... the world's absurd."

As we're preparing to leave the cafe, Bobby spots a guy marching up the far side of the street. He's bearded, wearing army fatigues and a peaked cap, and there's a big, knowing, supersane grin on Bobby's face as he clocks the lookalike. "Check that dude out, man! See him? It's Fidel Castro! I tell ya ... Fidel fuckin' Castro!"

Maybe it was a sign.

Originally appeared in NME 17 July 2002.
Copyright © NME.

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