Primal Scream . Webadelica

Chicks with Everything

Primal Scream Come Good In bed with Bobby Gillespie

Bacchanalia in the USA! Well, Kentish Town actually, but then the true spirit of rock 'n' roll has always been in the mind, reckons PRIMAL SCREAM's BOBBY GILLESPIE - the boy in a Bowie 'n' Bolan-fixated bubble liberated by the mind- expanding possibilities of dance music on a slew of classic singles. Accordingly, the PrimaIs' third LP, 'Screamadelica', is their finest yet, a seamless evocation of rock's rich pickings and rave culture's most incandescent burblings. JAMES BROWN fights his way though the bevy of chicks and dog-eared record covers to ask Bobby 'do you believe in magic?' Flesh photography: KEVIN CUMMINS

We are The Primal Scream Appreciation on Society... Imagine an LP that can hold its own alongside 'Let It Bleed', that burns at its own boundaries. Imagine Bobby Gillespie coming out of a pizza restaurant in Kentish Town and saying, "Melody, sex and violence. That's what I'm interested in, bands being totally into what they do, being on the verge of exploding. These are the things I'm into". Then retching on the slimy mozzarella.

On a bed a minute's walk from Pizza The Action, Bobby Gillespie sits playing with one of those tin guns that unfurls a flag saying BANG! when you pull the trigger, It's the only shooting up being done. Here's the news.

I don't want to sound like Boris Yeltsin or Brian Clough, but Primal Scream have come up with something a little impressive, and it couldn't have happened at a more opportune moment, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, squealed Gillespie's country- women in Macbeth. Had Shakespeare's harridans wanted to see what tomorrow held in store for rock 'n' roll they could simply have checked what was in the charts ten, 15 years ago today- The arrival of Primal Scream's 'Screamadelica' LP is vital, you now have this choice: Do You Want Tomorrow Today Or Yesterday Forever? Who draws the line between nostalgia and neuralgia? And are you prepared for an All Night Party Potitical Broadcast from me and Bobby Gillespie? Primal Scream have shown that if you give it all, you come close to getting it all. This is going to take some explaining.

"We've got this theory," explained Bobby G in Brighton last week. "It's not even a theory. I think music is magic... magical, in the true sense of the word. Certain pieces of music make me feel strong, protected. It raises... it raises my soul. No, forget that, it protects me from bad feelings. Music protects us in such a powerful way, it makes you aware of possibilities. To alot of people I think music's a commodity, not spiritual. it's something you put on the mantlepiece and it's there, like a set of golfclubs or an ironing board, whereas to us it's a holy thing, and none of us are even religious."

Or you can look at it this way. There is a line of thought in rock 'n' roll that bastardizes the need to go backwards in time for influence and instead goes back in time for good. In recent years Marvin Gaye, The Clash and Bolan (all Levi's), Bobby Vinton (Domestos), and Cream (Vauxhall) have all found themselves back at the top because of the power of advertising. Others, like Nat King Cole, have re-appeared because modern acts have released artistically inferior but commercially successful cover versions.

More immediately, singles from film soundtracks (Cher and Bryan Adams) have become the biggest selling records. The pop charts have become a marketing man's dream and a futurist's nightmare. We're so busy using music to flog films, cars, leans and beer we've become accustomed to creative necrophilia. The message is this: Stop re-releasing or the pop kid gets it.

Such wholesale commercial exploitation is typical of the fear of progression and development that rests like a still born child in the hands of record industry executives. It's this that Primal Scream are an exhilarating rally against. Gillespie calls it "an aesthetic battle". A&R departments are under such pressure to produce successful artists fast, the emphasis placed so firmly on profit, that creative development has been left on the shelf. There are many exceptions. I know, but look at the charts. Listen to the radio. What's important is that YOU, the fan, has more idea of what's going on than the people paid a king's ransom to run record companies.

The shoe-gazers are forced to look down to avoid the glare beaming from the high gloss rubbish that pumps like effluent through the media. But shy dullards are inexcusable. Shoe-gazers are an eyesore and an earsore; being charisma-free doesn't pass for rebellion, it's simply sad.

At the Grown-Up Shoe-gazing Convention that passed for a Pixies gig at Crystal Palace this year. I watched the singer from Cud in a gold waistcoat and black leather drainpipes languish onstage, totally free ofstyle, sex or passion. He looked like a psychedelic Mick Hucknall having an asthma attack. His music, devoid of great pop, fine art, or beauty,led him through a Hall Of No Hope. After them the Multown Brothers followed suit, bright eyed but blind to the possibilities of the artform.

Throughout this I saw a timid boy, untouched by acne, crouched in his Robert Smith hi-tops and V-neck school jumper. On his Army & Navy canvas bag the likes of Moose took pride of place alongside Joy Division. I stared at this boy and he flinched, my friend pulled me on. I felt like an old man watching a conscript march into Flanders Field. I didn't feel superior, just knew there were better things than watching Black Francis growl.

And then 'Screamadelica' came out.

"GOSPEL REGGAE. free-form jazz, Country blues, old disco, rockabilly, punk rock, soul, House," Bobby Gillespie, the last living stick insect to leave the Ramones concert, pauses for breath. He is busy recounting the many varied forms of music his band listen to, the sort of music you will hear on 'Screamadelica'. He is not bullshitting; ahead of everything Bobby Gillespie is a music fan. In two days of interviewing he plays Charlie Feathers, Deep Purple, John Lemon, Syl Johnson, James Brown, T-Rex, Lee Perry, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Dion with Spector and more. Though he sees Bowie and Bolan as role models, Gillespie is proud of the variety of influences Primal Scream enjoy- Bobby is The Eclectic Warrior.

'Screamadelica' is testament to this love. It is a breathtaking album; midway through 'Come Together' you can hear the music fermenting. As for the altars on 'Moving Cn Up' bend over Keith and let Andrew Innes show you the news. They don't sound derivitive like The Black Crowes but they'vve captured a spirit and used it to their own sound a bloody good ramming. 'Inne Flight', the bubbling dive through the cosmos, should really be called 'Onner Trip'. Bobby loves his Intergatactic metaphors, it's as if, no abuse the old Alien line, In Space Everyone Hears The Scream.

"Great records are immortal things," he says, ominously. "I think there's a lot of soul to what we do, there's a lot of blues inflections in there as well, I think we've got a feel that other people never have. When I say blues I mean Our kind of blue, I don t mean Johnb Lee Hooker...love him though we do.

For Gillespie good music articulates something for the Iistener he can remember quite clearly the first time he encountered 'Electric Warrior'. he describes vividly the effect 'Starman' had on him. To Bobby. music is linear and has to be purposeful, a taste for one thing preparing you for the next.

"If you'd been into Mott The Hoople then The Clash came you might have got into them, liked both bands because one's prepared you for the other. The people I was at school with who liked Emerson, Lake & Palmer hated The Clash for the same reasons they hated Mott The Hoople. If you heard The Velvets play live and they got into free-form and you liked it, then you get a bit older and someone plays you some jazz, you hear Ornette Coleman letting loose- Listening to the Velvets you'd never have known they might have been influenced by jazz, but listening to them gets you ready for it.

"I learned to play bass copying Jah Wobble bass lines from PiL, and he was reggae influenced. When you hear reggae after, you can relate to it. The same with The Doors and Willie Dixon or the Stones and Bo Diddley... I could sit all night and trace lineage like that. The sax on 'Coming Down' (from 'Screamadelica) is free-form and it's going to be the first time a lot of kids have heard that. There's Country blues on 'Damaged' and old disco on 'Don't Fight It, Feel It'."

"It's hard to believe that Smash Hits haven't picked up on the Primals."
NME; May '86

"Backstage some girls got their tits out for Bobby to sign."
Manchester Boardwalk, '86

"Yikes! Primal Scream have been in prison!"
Smash Hits, summer '90

BOBBY GILLESPIE, I've been told, owns The Golden Handbook. A pop star in ascendance, a meteorite waiting to land in your lap. Let's face it. Jim Morrison was a joock with a jawline. If he hadn't been pounding the Greek classics he'd have been kicking ass on the football pitch. Gillespie, like Bowie and Lydon before, has none of that specially re-assuring physical strength. The Original Twiggy Pop.. Bobby fathfully sticks to a Generation X T-shirt like a six- year-old on summer holiday.

Bobby Gillespie's idea of clothes shopping involves whipping out an old LP sleeve, photocopying a Marc Bolan slogan from it, and having it laser-copied onto a cheap T-shirt. Axl Rose may well have gain a lot, of mileage from being a social inadequate, but I can assure you there's no need for an bicycle at Club Gillespie. Anorexic In The UK, Bobby is too busy enjoying life to let that twenty something flab Carter pinpoint on the startoftheir album creep upon him.

Like his physique, the music on Planet Gillespie shows no gristle. The Pixies' latest album may sound like a roll in the hay with a lawnmower, but the Primal Scream LP is a league apart. It has a sense of purpose that mirrors the semi- legendary state of this cult indie band. It's sexy, dangerous and definitive. And it sounds best played from start to end. I dare any Radio 1 DJ to play all 63 minutes 15 seconds of it, start to finish. Now that would be provocative.

'Screamadelica' has come about because Gillespie, Andrew Innes, 'Throbert' Young and co have created their own space. In 1986, Gillespie demanded of the world (in an NMEinterview that prompted an American rock- loving writer to have kittens in a special editorial reply) the time, money and space to record an album that would show the plaid shirted pretenders where to get off.

"I also told McGee I wanted Prince or Jimmy Page to produce us, and he laughed at me, It took us Six weeks to record 'Screamadelica', we can't write songs to order. I wish we were a lot more prolific than we are but we never have been. I think we're a bit lazy.

"It's cool if you make some money. it's bad if you lose money, but really it's not an object to what we do. The main thing is making a great record and having a good time doing it. lf that wasn't the case there'd have been quick follow-ups to both 'Loaded' and 'Come Together' when they were in the charts. I love it when a band can produce four good singles in as many months - The Faces singles were always better than their albums--but we can't do that, we work in our own time scale."

'Working in ourown time scale' has, on occasion, meant checking into an expensive recording studio and then over-indulging on prescribed medication that's left the band comatose, the engineer frantic, and the record company bewildered. Such are the things gossip columns have been filled with. And although there's always an inevitable journalistic embellishment, most of the Primal Scream stories are true, there's very little PR-instigated hype involved.

I saw Bobby Gillespie fall five feet off the front ofthe stage at Wembley, waving a wine bottle in the air whilst supporting New Order. When the young Primals turned up in Leeds or Manchester in the mid-'8Os there really was a sense of occasion. Just as there still is today when they invite you to get your rocks off all over the country on one of their live jaunts.

Bobby, of course, concurs: "I think there's a lot of mythology these days as far as the music scene goes. I like wild stories, I'd rather read the interview with a band who're full of crazy stories than an interview with a band explaining a guitar sound. What about Chapterhouse getting fined on tour by their tour manager for getting up late! Hah! This is about destroying rules to create the perfect environment - not about going back to school."

Gillespie does have the benefit of some history. Although keen not to dwell on his past, Bobby does - enthuse of earlier times with as much relish as when he describes breaking into Robert's house at five in the morning to tell him there's a soundcheck in ten minutes.

"I met Andrew Innes through McGee in Glasgow. When he was 13 he played guitar in a punk band called The Drains. They got the Glitter best number and rang up and asked Malcolm McLaren to manage them, I love that.

"The way I met Alan was he'd be the only other guy in the area on the way back from Clash gigs on the train. The way I met Douglas, Jim and William (of the Mary Chain) in 1984 was this guy, Nick Lowe, ran a club and told me about these people who'd given him a tape with a Syd Barrett song on. I listened to the tape and thought it was beautiful. 'Upside Down', 'Inside Me' and 'In A Hole' were the Mary Chain songs on it.

"I phoned the number on the tape and spent two hours talking to Dougie, total strangers talking about the books, films, and records we loved. It was great because me and my mates had felt isolated, we thought we were the only guys around who liked what we liked. We met the Mary Chain and it was f--ing great. We put concerts on together. My first gig with The Chain was my first gig with The Scream, simultaneously. The poster was a picture from If?, Malcolm MacDowell holding a hand grenade, and it said 'Whose Side Are You On'.' That's how it started in 1984, everything we'd done before, making PiL inspired noises in a scout hut was leading up to that.

"The bands then, Southern Death Cult and Three johns, got a lot better, but I wasn't really into it. Everything seemed a bit grey and cheap, nothing was glamorous. beautiful, exciting or melodic, I guess we started because no one was playing the music we wanted to hear. And the same with the club, Splash One. We wanted an underground network of clubs throughout the country that could be into what you did, even if it was just one night a week. We started Splash and suddenly there were people there, it only lasted a short while but Norman (Teenage Fanclub), Eugene (Vaselines, Nirvana). and Stephen Pastel were all arriving. There was energy there.

"It's like later, Innes reckons it wasn't luck that we met Andy Weatherall (zzzzzz - Ed) we were drawn to the same scene. The amount of records I was hearing in the clubs and at home, a new club classic every week. It was through doing what we enjoyed that we met Andy."

Considering Primal Scream have bad more starting line-ups than Andy Roxburgh, it's probably in their interest that they now carry an entourage rather than a standard four or five-piece combo. Robert and Andrew have been Bobby's compadres for sometime. In addition, Martin Duffy has tinkled the keyboards and held Bobby's hand in magazine photographs of late, Denise Johnson has taken on a Nico-style role, and then there's special booking agent Alex Nightingale, who's like a snap-together Neal Cassady with a briefcase, and the good Dr Weatherall. Intent on loving the life they live, the Scream crew present a flashing alternative to the drab pronnotional routine many bands now call tours.

"As long as someone's got a contribution to make," says Bobby, "then I'm quite happy to let them get involved."

"In fact, I get excited when they do. I never really enjoyed being in this group until we toured two years ago. That's when I started to have a great time. Just going away and getting... playing our music. I knew we had good songs but had always had difficulty recording them.

"Me, Robert and Andrew had a good thing going, I used to make Robert punk T-shirts and tapes when he was ten, that's why we've stuck together. People have said Acid House was like punk but it wasn't. Acid House was optimistic, punk was nihilistic. Acid House penetrated the psyche of British youth much quicker, our band was revolutionised by it."

Revolution. Now that I have a taste for. Do we know enough about Primal Scream to let their album drag you through such an astounding musical experience? Bobby, like many singers, has no interest in divulging his personal past. He talks to his father on the phone but hasn't seen him for a year, and anyway, he points out, his parents are nothing to do with the band. Apart from listening to their Ray Charles and Rolling Stones records as an infant Bobby G, and the fact that it was their hand on the radio dial that found T- Rex and the 0-Jays.

"I am selective about what people know about me, I think everyone is. I don't think you should give too much away about yourself, even if it's with a lover there should be a bit of mystery. If I wanted to shit in a cop's mouth I wouldn't tell you about it. Not that I do, but I might"

I'VE BEEN told Elton John has someone buy every record that's released for him. A record collection is not a record collection unless the sleeves have been thumbed a thousand times. When Bobby Gillespie says "Once I started buying records I never really stopped", you know he's got better taste than BPI Hero Elton. You can hear it in his music.

The bedroom in Kentish Town is a swirl of strangled bedsheets and old clothes; a well-thumbed record collection and a half-cocked chest of drawers share the floor. From the walls Alan Vega, The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Nancy Sinatra, Marc Bolan and The Small Faces look down like frozen gods.

It's in this room, this tribute to domestic disarray, that Gillespie finished the interview, a two day conversation that started with the importance of Time, Timing, Fortune, Charisma, Soul, Arrogance, Beauty and Self - Preservation, and ends with a tale about how he tried to lure Pete Wylie to a club by offering him a shirt Pattie Smith wore when she recorded 'Horses'.

"Self-preservation? Self- destruction more like," he says, suggesting Primal Scream didn't get where they are today without spending half a decade becoming legends in their own run-off grooves. The story of Primal Scream is one of hits and myths, how they took their exceptional taste and wrote their own songs around it, coming up with 'Screamadelica', an album of beauty. It's hard not to be absorbed by the full stretch of different musical styles on the LP, the way they smooth over into each other. Such isthe talent of the ultimate pop fan. Which is what Gillespie is.

Through Prlmal Scream, Gillespie retains a spiritual and creative independence that's vital to the progression of music. "People like Bolan and Bowie made albums that sounded different, that change is important to music," he says. Next month Primal Scream find themselves on a stadium tour of America with Electronic, both personnel enjoying a new lease of life. This may well be the tour to elevate the Scream from their cult status.

For the moment, though, Bobby needs someone to cook for him and someone to talk with about those escapist car racing riots that are going on. He's been watching Teenage Fanclub live and raving about 'Been Caught Stealing' by the over-rated Jane's Addiction.

"It took the Velvets 20 years before anyone gave them a gold disc, but look how much influence they had," he says by way of explanation, by way of everything. As I get up to leave The Boy With The Golden Handbook leaps up and flings down the magazine with pictures of him vomiting in it.

"Wait, I forgot to tell you. We nearly did a record with Phil Spector! He wanted to make a big comeback and someone Andrew knows who used to work at Rolling Stone got in touch with him. We sent him a Beatles song called 'Christmas Is Here Again', it was a - fan club-only ... he liked the idea but didn't want to do it because it was only a chorus. So we dug out a Bolan flexi that hasn't even got a name and sent that... his people told our man -check that- 'his people', you don't even get to talk to Phil, just 'his people' - He'd been into it but the time had passed, He was busy again. I suppose Christmas singles have to be recorded in August That would have been it though. We wanted the guns pulled on us, that sound, the lot... that would have been it"

And with that he pulls the trigger on the tin gun and a flag unfurls and says BANG! Primal Scream, sex, melody and violence. Tin guns in Kentish Town. This man is living for you.

Originally appeared in NME, 28 September 1991
Copyright © IPC Magazine Ltd.

Back