Primal Scream . Webadelica

High Generation

"If you've got a brain then you 're OK with drugs, really. it's like a motor car, you can kill yourself with a car if you drive wrongly. Give people the choice, that's what I say."

"I'd quite like to see what America does to some of the people in our band. I'd like to see how people cope with it, and I include myself in that... It appeals to my sense of humour. Basically, someone's not going to come back from America..." "If you've got a brain then you 're OK with drugs, really. it's like a motor car, you can kill yourself with a car if you drive wrongly. Give people the choice, that's what I say."

"I'd quite like to see what America does to some of the people in our band. I'd like to see how people cope with it, and I include myself in that... It appeals to my sense of humour. Basically, someone's not going to come back from America..." PRIMAL SCREAM are continuing their trip into the world of dance and, following the success of 'Loaded', new single 'Come Together' is even further away from their jangling rock roots. ROGER MORTON chilledout in the park qith Primals' prime mover Bobby Gillespie. Scream Idols: HARRY BORDEN.

THE WORLD turns. The sun rolls up high over London. It's a new day, a beautiful day. In the city centre the sun- doped populace starts to loosen up. Cabbies roll down their windows, coppers roll up their sleeves and pub life spills on to the pavements. Strangers start to talk to each other. In a burger joint-style record store in Victoria Station a T-shirted youth with a fresh-looking mod haircut stands flicking through the lyrics to a new album by one of rock's ancient punk wild-men. Perhaps the old bastard rocker will have moved on to something new. Bobby Gillespie, a young rocker who knows a thing or two about moving on, scans the words impassively, slots the tape case back into the rack, turns on his heel and walks out into the sunshine.

We're pushing on up through the traffic and tourists, heading for St James' Park and Bobby, who lives in Brighton because London's too frantic, is chatting. That's one of the things about him, he's no mean talker. The scared and scary walls of Buckingham Palace slip by on one side and Bobby speculates on the kind of parties that used to go on inside. "I bet they had executions in there just for the fun of it," he says and we both laugh.

On into the park, Bobby rapping in his murky Scottish drawl about snuff movies, haircuts, androgyny, Brighton clubs and eventually conversation gets round, as it does, to the funny things that people say in NME. "I did you see the band Five Thirty complaining about Happy Mondays promoting drug taking?" asks Bobby. "As if kids don't get into it anyway. It really made me laugh. In Brighton there's these 1 1 and 12-year-old skateboarders on acid. Two of them came past me the other day, and one's saying, 'It's much better on acid isn't it?' Imagine that, at 12 years old when you've got no f-in' hang-ups and your mind's still fairly pure... You'd feel like you were the Silver Surfer... F--in' brilliant"

THERE'S A good feeling about today, a real good feeling. And it isn't just because of the sun and a fresh breeze and a couple of beers in the park It's because the new Primal Scream single 'Come Together' is a brilliant inspirational piece of work, which will certainly be one of the singles of the summer, and probably one of the singles of the year. The follow up to 'Loaded' which, with its Andy Weatherall remix, catapulted Primal Scream out of their heavenly grunge-rock rut and on to club DJ turntables and TOTP, is a double A-sided trip to the outer limits of groovy rapture.

On one side of 'Come Together', Terry Farley slides a prime loose and funky rhythm under a joyous gospel choir chant tumbling piano, suspiciously 'Suspicious Minds' guitars and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra strings, while Bobby entreats Miss X(TC) to lift him 'right out of this world". On the other, Weatherall stretches the sound into a celestial acid-dub coral-mantra epic, intercut with the burning vision-gushing of Jesse jackson calling out for musical unity and human togetherness - "This is a beautiful day, it is a new day..."

Funnily enough, neither side sounds a lot like Primal Scream's 1986 debut 'All Fall Down'. Even funnier, 'Come Together' grabs the last shreds of the argument that rock groups can't/shouldn't make dance records, shoves it in the stocks and blasts enough rotten fruit at it to bury Big Ben.

So Gillespie folds himself on to the grass of St James' Park, exactly half way between the Queen's gaff and Thatcher's. On this July day, when the park is full of stretched-out mums with prams and frazzling bums with cans, and daily papers are interviewing Keith Richards about his septic finger and Liam from Flowered Up about his training shoes, it seems reasonable to ask Bobby Gillespie, one-time fey boy pop purist and heavy-rock hedonist, whether he's really a changed man and, if so, was it the drugs that changed him?

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!" Bobby curls up laughing. "I was a changed man after I'd done a lot of speed. I Changed for the worse. Really, really cynical. But nah, I think if you allow drugs to completely change your personality then you've got something wrong with you, definitely. I mean, drugs can enhance your environment, they can enhance a good night out.

"When I first took acid it reinforced a lot of things that I already believed, and y'know, drugs are a good thing. I think. I would definitely proselytise for drugs any time, because people who use drugs wrongly, y'know, that's their problem.

"If you've got a brain then you're OK with drugs, really. It's like a motor car, you can kill yourself with a car if you drive wrongly. Give people the choice, that's what I say. Don't infringe on anybody's personal liberties.

"For me, the best thing in the last two years is just that there was a lot of contemporary music that I could actually go into the shops and buy, and listen to and talk about and get excited by. And for a long time before that, there was nothing. 'You don't need to be an intellectual to see how much of a profound effect the house thing's had on British youth culture, and I think we live in better times as a result of it Musically, people are opening up a lot more."

BEFORE 'LOADED' Primal Scream were the rock band that every discerning rock fan wanted to 'get their rocks off' to, but could never be sure that they'd be able to get it up when they'd got the record home. You wanted to love them. Bobby was so passionate, fired up initially by staying up all night listening to the Mary Chain's demo tapes in his Glasgow bedroom. Their influences, spewing out of every interview - Stones, Stooges, Byrds, MC5, Love, Sly Stone, Prince, Funkadelic and so on - were so thoroughly 'cool'. Their clothes were so authentically leather'n'velvet psychedelic rock right There was never a fat bastard member of Primal Scream, or if there was they had the sense to cut him off the photos. But the records - '87s fussy, over intricate 'Sonic Flower Groove' LP on Warners which they tried to get scrapped, and '89s half-marvellous, half- messed up 'Primal Scream' LP, with its heavy rock burn outs and tender-pain ballads - were only occasionally the beautiful head-kicks they should have been.

Then came 'Loaded'. Born out of Bobby and guitarists Andrew and Robert's increasing involvement in the rav-ins of '88 and '89, and a chance friendship with Boys Own man, DJ and ubiquitous dance remixer Andy Weatherall, it thrust Primal Scream, into the hothouse centre of '90s pop. It was dance-rock crossover taken to a higher plane. But it was not as Bobby emphasises, a conversion to dance-your-brain-loose ways, just a logical extension of what he says was always an open arms, erm, catholic Primals approach.

"From the very start we used to say that we liked Chic, we liked the Sex Pistols, we liked Sly Stone. We've always been into that kind of stuff. Andrew, for instance, used to go to northern soul nights, take tons of speed and stay out all night dancing. I don't need to prove what I'm into to anybody.

"When people used to categorize us with other 'indie' bands and really, I'm being honest here, it used to hurt us, 'cos our aesthetic values are completely different to those of, say, The Wedding Present At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think Primal Scream always tried to make something beautiful, whereas people like The Wedding Present wouldn't know beauty if you f--in' shot them. "But doing 'Loaded' was good in a lot of ways, because I really believe that a lot of people in the music press were trying to set up barriers between rock music and dance music, and it's a really bad thing. I don't think you should set up barriers between anybody or anything. It just breeds ignorance and stupidity and bigotry. I think it's sick"

AT THE beginning of July, Primal Scream did a tour of Japan, playing a set which worked in their newer spacious, samplered-up grooves with the older riff heavy wall of sound stuff. No-one seemed to feel particularly 'betrayed' by the change. No-one ran out screaming, although one fan ran out and immediately got his hair cropped to match Bobby's.

On last year's British tour, when the band would let out that they planned a dance remix as the next single, the younger fans were all completely into the idea. Few people under the age of 20, and few japanese appear to h have a problem with the idea of a rock group shifting into a funkier gear. Yet despite almost the entire history of pop, from Elvis through Hendrix to Pop Will Eat Itself, having been one of cultural thievery, style-mashing and weird changes of direction, the daffy old argument that the Primals are somehow 'cheating' or 'trespassing' still gets loudly and repeatedly voiced.

Dance purists seem to think you're bandwagon jumping, Bobby.

"In that case, if someone's so hurt about the fact that our group made 'Loaded' or 'Come Together', because they feel they've got a deeper knowledge about soul or house music or whatever, instead of moaning about us they should go and make their own records and prove they can make something better".

The 'front man' from 808 State claims that you're betraying your 'indie past'.

"I know, but that guy's just off his head... Plus he speaks as though he's the guy who invented house music and black soul music and hates the idea of any white groups being influenced by it except 808 State, and that's really, really stupid."

How do you feel about suggestions that 'Come Together' is far more Andy Weatherall/Terry Farley's record than it is yours? How do you feel about suggestions that 'Come Together' is far more Andy Weatherall/Terry Farley's record than it is yours?

"But it is our record. It's me that's singing on it. It's us playing guitars and bass. It's us that arranged it, arranged the gospel singers. OK, we hand the tapes over to Andy and he comes up with something completely different, but that's the whole point of it We don't want it to be a slightly different version, we want him to take it somewhere else, completely out of this world.

"I think the Weatherall side is really inflammatory. It's beautiful, but at the same time it's really militant and tough. Both sides of that record are brilliant People are going to have to try hard to beat that I hope someone does. In a way, we've thrown the gauntlet down. We've done 'Come Together', and if I was in another band I'd think, 'They're f--in' brilliant records, I'm going to go beyond that'."

THE WORLD turns slowly on its axis, the shadows in the park lengthen and Bobby Gillespie's thoughts drift through the confused currents of '90s life and pop like the silver airship that loafs across St James' Park (honest). That afternoon, while just down the road in the big boys' talk shop, Home Secretary David Waddington was welcoming" the new powers for police to deal with "acid house parties - havens for drug dealers", Bobby talked about samplers and hedonism and melodies and intellectualism and why he likes Madonna.

"People are always putting up barriers, saying, 'Oh, you like dance music, it's mindless, because you take drugs, dance all night and don't think about anything.' That kind of argument generally comes from people who like rock groups.

"So you try and tell me that your average Pixies fan gives a shit about Amazonian rain forests or the NHS cuts. I doubt it There's no reason why they should think about those things before someone who listens to dance music.

"I'm not here to speak for dance music, I'm here to speak for Primal Scream, but y'know, a lot of people buy rock music on the premise that it's more intelligent than any other music around - 'I'm into the Pixies or the Throwing Muses, you've got to get the lyrics, it's kind of hard to understand and that 15-year-old Kylie Minogue fan, she wouldn't get it.' But I'm on the side of the Kylie Minogue fans and the Madonna fans. Those artists make better music than the Pixies as far as I'm concerned, I think that 'Into The Groove' is much more profound than any rock record that's been released in the last 20 years. 'Only when I'm dancing can I feel this free' - that's a brilliant lyric.

"Music can calm you, it can make you feel happy, sad, excited, but ultimately, you don't even need drugs for this, certain records just send you out, send you somewhere you've not been. You get blissed out, and that's a brilliant feeling. What's wrong with that? It's f--ng amazing I want that feeling. I don't want some conservative, Victorian, prudish person telling me that I can't enjoy what I enjoy because it's not 'intellectual' or whatever."

SATURDAY NIGHT at the Zap Club in Brighton and the door is clogged with snuffling would- be dancers trying to get out of the sea breeze and into the club. Inside, on the main dance floor, it's a white-out of snowy emulsion, dry ice and sweat as a heterogeneous crowd of twitchers and hoppers try to disperse their (un)natural energy with the aid of the mutated house sounds. Upstairs in the side bar, Bobby Gillespie has been attending to one of his irregular nights of DJ-ing, mixing old funk and new dance rock with anything that takes his fancy.

The sight of Bobby Gillespie strolling about amidst the tanned and muscled dance cognoscenti, the New Age aerobic girls and the matey beer-boy groovers still takes a little getting used to.

A year ago Primal Scream admirers (if they didn't live in Brighton) would probably have been thoroughly flummoxed to find the man chatting in a dance club (spilling stories about the fanzine writer who made a 'joke' about E- machines, and brought the cops down to the Zap trying to find where they were), and threatening to play a 14- minute long Yoko Ono track called 'Mind Train'. Primal Scream were, after all, chiefly making a name for themselves last year as 'crazy leather rockers' who could 'kick ass' and even occasionally get their 'dicks sucked' while out 'on the road'. There is a sign of hope that Bobby might remember how that sort of a reputation got about. Scan down past his white 'Hypnotic' sweat shirt and his white jeans, and there on his feet are to be found a pair of black leather winkle-pickers.

Completely 'rock'. Not at all a '90s item. "You'll get bunions," points out a friend. "I just can't see myself in pair of Kickers," says Bobby.

The past, then. Did you ever live out the myth, Bobby? Were you ever a rock'n'roIl shithead?

"Nah. We just got on with living the same lifestyle even if we hadn't been in a band. I would, Robert would and Andrew would still have taken as many drugs and done the things we did.

"You should always be able to indulge yourself, you should always be free to do exactly what you want. It's just f-- ng England, it's really puritan, it's too uptight It's not loose enough. It's much better to be loose. You can be loose but at the same time be moral. But British people are definitely too reserved. I think we're different from most British people."

There were a lot of Primal Scream stories a while back, though. Mostly about debauchery on the road.

"Part of that is, let's face it, I like girls, right? And sometimes, if you want to go and get a lot of girls, then you should go and get a lot of girls. If girls like you and you like girls, then there's no reason you shouldn't have sex with them. I don't think it's a big deal. It just happens to be that because you're in a rock'n'roll band, people say, 'oh, the Rock Myth'. Ha ha ha! "you can look at it from the Guns N' Roses side of things, where they're sexist, and to a certain extent racist, but our band's not like that I don't think we've ever written a sexist song in our lives. It's like I keep saying, if you've got a brain... It just so happens that most people in bands don't have brains. You know, if you're Wolfsbane and it's 'I've f--ed 15 women in the last week!', that's pathetic. I've never gone about saying that I kind of keep myself to myself. It's generally Alan McGee who goes about telling these stories to people."

LIKE ANY good libertine with morals or hedonist with brains, Bobby has a bit of a love/snigger relationship with the excessive side of rock'n'roll. You might sometimes wonder if he isn't a bit of a voyeur on his own myth. As soon as they get the chance, Primal Scream want to go and tour America. They've signed to Sire over there, and the reactions to 'Loaded' and 'Come Together are "knickerwetting". Why do you want so much to go there, Bobby?

"I think our music will go down really well in America, for a start. You see, a lot of really bad British bands have kind of half-made it in America and you just think, 'Well, what are they going to do when they hear us?' 'cos we're so good.

"Also, I'd quite like to see what America does to some of the people in our band. I'd like to see how people cope with it, and I include myself in that... It appeals to my sense of humour. Basically, someone's not going to come back from America... There'll be some good stories to tell."

The stories! The stories! For all their encroachment into the BPM bracket, Primal Scream are still suckers for a weird rock tale. Like the one Bobby tells me, with some relish, about old journo Nick Kent and The Rolling Stones and the burning lesbian double act in the German castle (another time, maybe). Best of all, however, are their own stories.

The one deemed fit for public consumption at the moment is about the sample of Peter Fonda taken from Roger Corman's The Wild Angels which they used in 'Loaded'. With 'Loaded' set to come out in the US, the Scream's record company started to worry that Fonda will sue them over the sample. Problem is, Fonda lives in seclusion and no-one can get to him. It turns out, however, that someone 'high up' in the band's label knows Jane Fonda, the only person who knows where Pete lives. So they pack Jane off down to Pete's place with a copy of 'Loaded' so that the old guy can review it in splendid isolation, and say yes or no.

"Pete's given it the thumbs up," grins Bobby. "It's cool, it's OK. Roger Corman we have to pay a penny a copy, but it's the Peter Fonda story that's brilliant He used to hang out with The Byrds, didn't he? And 'She Said' by The Beatles was written about Pete Fonda. He was tripping with Lennon, and he said, 'I know what it's like to be dead' and Lennon wrote a song about it So it's good. It's good." Bobby Gillespie is neither some nostalgia freak rock'n'roll dreamer, nor a blissed out E-head love-mug. It's simply that through Primal Scream's fascination with the past and their willingness to experiment with the present, they have arrived at the forefront of '90s pop. House and rock, body beats and head trips. Bobby Gillespie's time has come.

AT THE end of the evening at the Zap Club he sits in front of the turntables grinning from ear to E-ternity, while his DJ-ing partner spins the euphoric chant of 'Come Together' and a cluster of Brit youth dance their way towards the rave new world.

"'Come Together' is really a personal kind of love song, but if people want to interpret it on a larger scale they can, said Bobby the day before. "If you look at the state of the country politically it would be good if people did come together. I mean, it's so f--in' obvious.

"I'm not purporting to speak for dance music but if you think about it, the last time pop music really did anything inflammatory was when the Sex Pistols got to Number One with 'God Save The Queen' during Jubilee week and the BBC lied and said it was Number Two. That was it until last year when the government hated the idea of large groups of kids, black youth, white youth, whatever, getting together in fields and having a good time and dancing.

"That took the position that rock used to occupy in youth culture where there was some kind of a threat to society, not in a large way, but in people recognizing that other people felt the same way, getting on well and not being isolated. And the government actually did see a danger in that, like they did in the punk thing and the hippy thing.

"It's like when there's a threat, like with the Toxteth riots in Liverpool in the early '80s and two years later it's the biggest smack place in Britain. Why was that? Same as the CIA letting heroin into the black ghettos in America in the '60s to placate the black youth.

"I've got all these theories but I'm not articulating them very well. It's just that the house thing was definitely close to the original spirit of rock'n'roll and the rebel side of rock'n'roll far more than so-called rebel rock bands like Guns N'Roses or any other rock band on the planet.

"Our group gained inspiration from what's happened and it's helping us make good music and that's a good thing. You can take inspiration from the good things that happened yesterday and turn them into something for today... It's like, I really believe in transience, I think if you accept transience you're never going to get stuck in the past...

"It's getting f--ng mad now, isn't it?... Ha ha ha... But it all ties in with being in a group and changing. In 1985 you made a certain kind of record. In 1990 it's different It's different It's five f--ng years. The world has turned so many times since then."

Kiss them where the sun don't shine, the past is everybody's. The future is Primal Scream's.

Originally appeared in NME, circa 1990. Copyright © IPC Magazine Ltd.

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