Primal Scream . Webadelica

Soul on Ice

Primal Scream ride the title track for Trainspotting back home to successful pop experimentation. Tom Lanham finds Bobby Gillespie following his own advice giving out, but not giving up.

Ask Primal Scream mastermind Bobby Gillespie to log a place In pop history for his band's classic '91 album, Screamadelica-a post-house, pre-techno pastiche that blazed a found-art trail for many a modern mixer- and you'll get a short, to-the-point response: I don't think it has a place." Quiz the man about Screamadelica's surly, Memphis-tracked follow-up - the Stonesy Give Out But Don't Give Up from '94 - and you get an answer that's far more detailed. Detailed and so filled with shame, Gillespie might as well put himself on derisive display in the public pillory. Possibly flagellate himself senseless in the city streets. The guy has issues.

"Give Out was quite disgraceful, really," sighs Gillespie, so fresh from an afternoon nap he still has stripey pillow marks on his face and forearms. "I think we had a good idea. but I just don't think we nailed it properly. We were kind of off-focus, kind of displaced. It was a real downer record, real dark and ragged - there were only two songs that captured any kind of feeling, I think. The band had quite a lot of drug problems, so there was that as well; people's minds were going in and out of the record all the time." He stops to stir several sugars into his double cappuccino before continuing.

"Our record should have been raw and dark and strung out. And warm as well. It was our fault - I think was a lack confidence. If we'd recorded it in a basement in London, it would've been cool, but we didn't. We came to Memphis. I think it's missing some soul, really, and I didn't even sing on half the album. The song 'Free'? We weren't actually up to recording that as a band. When we recorded it, I pictured that song as 'If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Wanna Be Right): but it ended up being..just like...nothing. A failed experiment. I think we failed." Pause. Long, hard stare at the ground beneath his chukka-booted feet. Another protracted sigh. "Yeah. We failed."

Gillespie's stark adnissions come freely, with little provocation. How can he face his past so blithely? Probably has something to do with Vanhishing Point, Primal Scream's sparking new - and aesthetically pleasing - confluence of rock/reggae/techno/trip-hop/echoey-dub, which sounds like absolutely nothing else in the pop music spectrum. This time around Gillespie swears, his group actually succeedad. This time around, vision, exexution, and final realization were inextricably linked. No communication breakdowns along the way.

But there was a breakdown of quite a different kind. A stumbling block between Give Out and Vanishing Point that tripped up the 34-year-old Gillespie when be least expected it. In recent interviews, he likened the period to being "at war with myself." This afterroon, on the verdant patio lawn of LA's chi-chi Chateau Marmont, with birds twit tering and children playing all around, he elaborates further. It was depression, he says. A creeping sense that - after the failure of Give Out - he might never write again, his idea keg might've been tapped completely dry. Drugs were part of it, too, he adds. The end result? "I was sick in my head, sick in my soul." frowns Giliespie, who's trimmed his shoulder-length Give Out locks to a tousled Beatles shag, and switched sarforial gears from black leather jackets to bagg hip-hop wear.

"I was just completely destabilized and disengaged. Not from reality. because your reality is what's happening to you at that point." Regarding chemical substances, he continues, "You know the people who get smashed and then go home, that's it, it's cool? Well, I'm the one who'll keep doing it and doing it and doing. It's just greed, then - I get too greedy. And I'm not even the worst one in the group, that's the thing, although the group's not as bad as it was, in terms of indulgence. I think you've gotta know your limits, really. You've just gotta know your limits. And the culture we come from is so fuckin' druggie - ever since acid hoose, British youth culture has become a heavy drug culture. So I was feeling kind of worthless for quite a long time, because I wasn't actually able to do anything in my life that I was proud of. And it seemed pretty endless."

Gillespie was pushed from this mental morass by an unexpected force. Trainspotting author (and fellow Scotsnnan) Irvine Welsh had done a few magazine features on Primal Scream and hdd become pretty good pals with the band. Not only did he pen lyrics for the group's out-of-hibernation single "The Big Man & The Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown." he also invited Gilliespie to contribute to the soundtrack for Trainspotting's film version. (The sinister eight-minute mood piece, also titled "Trainspotting," is included on Vanishing Point) Another coup name last October - when Stone Roses bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield arnounced to the British press that he would be punching the clock for Primal Scream from then on; his muscular tones help make Vanishing Point the strong, beefy beast it is.

How did Gillespie feel after his Trainspotting assignment? He smiles. "It gave me a lot of faith - it made us all feel proud. When you suddenly end up creating some music that's exciting and new and quite experimental, you start feeling a sense of self-worth again. You think, 'This is great! I warm get involved in this again.' And it's something worth waking up for in the morning. Worth going out and getting involved in. I've got a real sense of wonder that's only satisified by playing msuic and being involved in music. It keeps you feeling 'whole - it's really clean and pure and a nice feeling.

"And Trainspotting was new music for us; it was dubbing. And I thought, 'This is why I got involved in music in the first place - to make music Ike this.' Because I fell me were becoming too one-dimensional as a band, even as people. We were just narrowing our limits. Then suddenly we did that hit of music, and it was live sunshine coming in again." It was also the first track Primal Scream had ever recorded in Gillespie's new Camden studio. "So it was a real good feeling that we could make these big-sounding records in this little rehearsal room, using a couple of ADATs."

Now officially out of his funk, Gillespie tore into the funky grooves at Vanishing Point like a man possessed. He plugged in his synthesizers, started scripting lyrics, sculpting arrangements, basically began trying to "make new sounds and just explore sound itself. And what we did was, we went back and listened to alot of stuff that we loved when we were younger, like Public Image Limited, the Byrds, the Velvets and really old reggae. Started really getting inspired to make music."

The album pivots on -- and nicks its title from - a sinewy, serpentine cut named "KowaIski," after the speed-demon protagonist in the '71 B-film, Vanishing Point. Noise-wise, the song features everything but the kitchen sink. Although that could be the kitchen sink clanking deep beneath the cavattade of bleeps, whirrings, squeals, and movie -soundtrack samples. Besides Mani's undulatiog bassline, the only other discernible sound is Gillespie's secretive, whispered mantra, "Soul on ice...soul on ice...Kowalski...vanishing point...Kowalski...vanishing point."

Why kanisiring Point?

Why not? chuckles Gillespie. "We loved the film, but we never liked its soundtrack. So we wrote same music for it, tried to capture that feeling of paranoia, driving and high speed. And Kowaiski's on anti-hero isn't he? He's like a modern outlaw. 'We love him."

That's where the disc stops making conventional sense. There are spooky spy-flink instrumentals ("Get Duffy," "It They Move, Kill 'Em") quasi-country ditties (the martyr-honoring "Star"), diary-personal, techno-enhanced pop-rockers ("Medication" and the plaintive stop-this-depression prayer "Out of the Void"), even an over-the-top, near industrial send-up of Motorhead's signature "Motorhead" ("We love Motorhead! "Gillespie seriously swoons). Then there are truly inexplicable anomalies, such as the trance-meets-Middle-Eastern opener "Burning Wheel," and a vocoder-buzzing, Moog-cheesy "Stuka," replete with what sounds like the Concorde taking off from channel to channel.

"We started off with a drum tick." explains Gillespie, "then Mani put tho bass on it. Then, with an old vocoder, I sang on top of the bass and drum lick. Then we added a lot of strange sounds, put some strange live synthesizer on it, just random notes, real screamin' stuff. And it was great, just like collage! Again, I was feeling, 'This is the kinda music I wanna make, and I'm glad I'm making this music, even if nobody else likes it.' For instanne, if you take Metal Box by PIL, it was disengaged from everything at the time it came out. It was a solitary piece of music in its own little world, a real strange creature. And that's the kind of record that I wanted us to make this time - something really strange and soulful and experimental."

So, while Screamadelica may have stood the dance-music world on its ear six long years ago. Gillespie still feels that, "We just made the best record me will ever make." Which, of course, was roughly what he was purring about Give Out when it was released. The upshot is that Gillespie has survived, emerging from his hard-partying past with a futuristic new sound aid a healthy degree of optimism. Does the man - who has basically the same physical dimensions as a really long eel - still feel primal? Still got to screaming now and then?

Gillespie points across the courtyard to a ground-floor window. "As soon as we got here to LA, we got smashed," he murmurs, maybe a little regretfully. "I ain't gonna wear it like a badge of merit, but there were people fallin' outta that window all fuckin' night. crawlin' in and crawlin' out. It wasn't really my party, you understand - it was somebody else's. Drugs all the time gets too boring, really." Gillespie concludes, his afternoon pillow marks finally starting to fade.

"But it's good to be social at the right times, I think...."

Originally appeared in Ray Gun, September 1997.
Copyright © Ray Gun.

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