GROW UP BUT DON'T GIVE UP

Why be embarrassed by your dream? " Bobby Gillespie pauses and shakes his head: "I hate those interviews when people go, 'Oh, we had such a hard time making this record.' People have a hard enough time in their own lives without some cunt maoning away, some multi-millionaire talking about how hard their life is. That's what I love about our band, it's fucking ecstatic! We've still got two songs left to mix on the new album and I'm already thinking about the next one. I don't have any fears about what we can do next, 'cos it's always exciting..."

Historically speaking, there are two different. Bobby Gillespies you might encounter in an interview. There is "Bad Bobby", prone to surliness and sarcasm, dismissing certain subjects with a flash of something feral in the eyes. And then there's "Good Bobby". Which is the Bobby Gillespie we get today; warm, engaging company, happy to chat passionately and intelligently for close to two hours.

Arguably, Gillespie is, these days, a mellower figure than you might have met in the past. He has two young sons - Wolf, six, and Lux, four - and he clearly seems to have taken the responsibilities of fatherhood seriously, particularly in terms of limiting his taste for rock'n'roll excess. One national newspaper even claimed Gillespie wrote a letter last summer to his local council, protesting atthe noise from his local pub, and it's not unusual to see him walking his kids round the parks of north-east London at Ham on a Saturday morning. In 2008, Bobby Gillespie, it appears, is more Sesame Street than "Desolation Row". But he's still fanatical about the mythology of rock'n'roll, and in particular the dream he's lived out now since 1981: Primal Scream.

Certainly, there's some dignity to be found in rock'n'roll, as people settle down and grow old in a profession notoriously high on casualties. The Stones and Nick Cave, for instance, have proved it's possible to move into middle age and beyond with a certain grace and a curbing of their recreational proclivities. Gillespie, now 46, appears to be following suit.

Meeting him today, for the fifth time in 10 years, he's still thin as a whipping post; as he goes to shake my hand in a photo studio in Chalk Farm, I suddenly worry I'm about to get paper cuts from him. The disarmingly large, wolfish smile that frequently cracks across his face shows up an elaborate network of spidery laughter lines, and there might even be the a strand of grey in the mop of black hair that hangs down to his shoulders. But his skin, once the yellowish hue of a fly-blown lung, is conspicuously pinker, the sclera of his dark brown eyes clear and bright. Although he might not be about to run a marathon any time soon, he looks remarkably healthy. He's dressed well, too, in a brown, knee-length Italian coat borrowed from a friend for the Uncutphotoshoot, a black polka-dot shirt like the ones worn by Dylan in the '60s (and favoured by Gillespie himselfin the early days of the Scream),jeans and tapered alligator skin shoes.

Later, sitting in an airy office space in Primrose Hill, picking sporadically at a tuna salad, Gillespie ponders the duality oflife as a card-carrying rock'n'roll star on stage and a devoted father off.

"You've got to do everything you do to the best of your abilities. Be a man, really," he laughs. "You've got to be great in a rock'n'roll band and be a great dad. You've got to pull your weight and contribute."

Does it mean changing you lifestyle?

"Yeah, well, that's pretty fucking obvious, isn't it? You've gotto be there for your children, and if you're fucked up on drugs and alcohol, you're not present. You may be sitting there, but you're somewhere else, a million miles away, so."

His peers agree. "I suppose Bob has changed since having kids," says Paul Weller. "We all do, don't we? You want to see them grow up, so you have to calm down a bit. You can't be a hellraiser all your life, I think Bob realises that."

If Gillespie is doing his level best to be a good father to his sons, then it's a model he inherited from his own dad, Robert Sr, a SOGAT official, who he describes as "a very moral guy, very fair. Hewas also quite non-judgmental. Other kids I went to school with, their parents were religious bigots and racists and violent, and my dad was a good guy."

Gillespie was born in Springburn, to the north of Glasgow, on June 22,1962, around the time the suburb was selected as part ofthe Comprehensive Development Area programme. On paper this was a forward-thinking scheme designed to demolish the city's dilapidated four-storey Victorian tenements and replace them with modern tower blocks, and Gillespie recalls being aged eight or nine and having "four or five streets full of empty houses to play in. We'd get up into the attics and we'd go from one end of the street, just walking through the attics. We'd smash the doors down. You know, like there'd been a war and people had to escape an invading army? That's what it was like."

In the mid-70s, though, the CDA programme had reshaped Springburn as a warren of high-rise housing estates, with a reputation as one of Glasgow's most notorious districts. By the time he was 17, Gillespie had "a lot offucking hatred because of where you were... if you went to the school that I went to, we were factory fodder, dole , fodder, the scrap heap."

Gillespie's solution was, while not exactly revolutionary, certainly a tried and tested means of escaping the grim actualities of dole life. He formed a rock'n'roll band, Primal Scream. And,just for good measure, hejoined another one in 1984, The Jesus And Mary Chain, led by schoolfriendsJim and William Reid, with whom he played drums.

The original motivation behind the Scream was, according to Gillespie about "trying to write something that reflected how it felt to be alive at that time. The music you might hear in the charts was a lie... how could people be that happy? Everywhere I looked, everybody's fucking miserable, fucked up on booze or glue."

At its most potent, the Scream's music is about messing with the tenets of rock'n'roll classicism, through vivid experiments in dub, Krautrock, House and avant rock through to the more unorthodox end of their recorded output that Gillespie describes simply as "weirdo music".

"His enthusiasm for the beautiful treasures of American obscura is our common ground," says Robert Plant, one of the band's many high-profile collaborators [see panel], who played harmonica on their 2002 EvilHeat album. "From Hasil Adkins through to Townes Van Zandt they dig deep, mixing everything with their own spook and rhythm... a real beacon from Mars. An eccentric British masterpiece."

What I've heard so far of Beautiful Future - their ninth studio album and their first for B- Unique seems to find the Scream moving forward once again. You can perhaps attribute this to the fairly withering reviews dished out to their last album, RiotCity Blues, a perfect example of the Scream in default mode and at their least engaging, retreading familiar rock'n'roll riffs - Faces,Exile... era Stones, 13th Floor Elevators - with, yes, a lot of energy, but little ofthe imagination that underscores their most exciting work.

This time, though, there's the sinister electronic grooves of "I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt)" - a duet with CCS' Lovefoxxx - and a striking, string-laden Philly soul number called "Uptown". There's also a song based around a cut-up of a guitar riff from Josh Homme, the process behind which sounds so mind-bogglingly complicated that Gillespie has to describe it to me twice.

But if Gillespie and the Scream have made a career out of shifting through musical genres, it's safe to say that even a casual follower of the band's story will be aware of their reputation for excess.

"All of my family in Scotland worked on the shipyards," says Linda Thompson, who duets with Gillespie on a cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Over And Over" on BeautifulFuture. "That kind of Glaswegian working-class person has a tremendous , soul and sense of humour, and Bobby's got all that, and also that kind of madness a lot of us have; 'Shall I have one drink or SOO? I'11just go with the 500.' A slight tendency to over-indulge. I like that in a man!"

The trick, surely, is to find the right balance between work and play. Gillespie and the Scream currently have a formidable attitude to work. As Gillespie explains, "We do I2 to 5 or 6,five days a week", in the Primrose Hill studio they've owned since 1996, with the line-up now settled on bassist Mani, guitarists Andrew Innes and Barrie Coddigan, keyboard player Martin Duffy and drummer Darrin Mooney. The Scream's work ethic, as Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh observes, is like "being on an oil rig. You work hard when you're on the rig, then you get two weeks off. Coming from that background where you know you're not going to get something for nothing, you have to graft to get anything back."

The drive to achieve and put in the hours is conspicuously strong in Gillespie. While the gangly frame and occasionally comedic moments onstage may not necessarily have marked him out as a star in the band's earliest days, it's a role he has, over time, perfected admirably, fuelled by a desire to immerse himselfin the mythology of rock'n'roll.

He speaks at length about bands he admires, from the Pistols to early Banshees and Nick Cave, with whom he sees an affinity "I look at Nick and he's as excited by the new Bad Seeds record as he probably was when he started The Birthday Party. That's inspiring and beautiful. If you can maintain that sense of wonder... If you're still excited by what you do, you're inspired to keep making new music."

This feeling, perhaps, is key to Gillespie. When he says, "We love this new record, wejust work. We want to keep doing it! .. with such force, I halfexpect him to jump up and start pumping the air, like a cheerleader in alligator lace-ups.

So where does this passion come from? And does he see it reflected in a younger generation of bands?

"When we were growing up, it was punk. And you had the threat of war. The British were at war with the IRA. all across Europe the same thing was happening, and in the Middle East. I grew up at a time when people were questioning the spectacle, fighting against it and trying to rip it apart. And now maybe people don't question that, they've accepted it or are dazzled by the whole celebrity culture. I don't really know what bands are informed by, because they're 20 and I'm in my 40s.]ustin the same way that if you'd grown up in the '30s or '40s, you might have been more literate than if you grew up in the '70s, as there was no TV, and you got information from books."

It's all the fault of Big Brother, then?

"In the '60s, Marshall McLuhan said that in the future, all wars would be fought in the media. And it's true, because people are blinded by garbage. You hear people talking about, 'Did you see Big Brother last night?' The curse of the modern age is a complete lack of culture. I don't watch TV, I hardly ever buy newspapers. But I've got to live in the world, so you're in a room and someone's watching TV or you walk into a newsagent and it's there in front of you."

So you don't read the celebrity mags, then?

"No, but our album EvilHeat did get one of the best reviews in Heat magazine. A lot of people never gave it a good review, so I have a special place in my heart for Heat..."

It's true that all Gillespie wants to do is be part of a band he loves, playing what he describes as "high energy rock'n'roll". But, almost by default, he has himselfbecome something of a celebrity lately, partly due to his lengthy friendship with Kate Moss, who also works occasionally with Gillespie's wife, fashion stylist Katy England.

I don't think of myself as a celebrity," he frowns. "I think I'm a rock'n'roll star."

But all the tabloids ran pictures of your wedding...

"That's because Kate Moss would have been at my wedding." He shifts in his seat "You'd only be in those papers 'cos they thought that if Kate Moss is going to be there, then there's going to be A.B,C,D and E there.

"They're not that interested in me."

The national press, though, were certainly interested when they ran stories about your apparent objection to your local pub's application for a late license. "Do you know what? I never did [write to the council]. My wife was pregnant with our second son and wrote a letter saying, 'I don't mind it at the weekends, but I don't want it every day of the week.' And I think she signed my name on it, and sent it to the council. Then TheIndependentgot hold ofit. Whoever they had D]ing in there, that was fucking shite music... Ifthey were playing rockabilly it would be fine with me, but.....

And what about the Uniqlo modelling assignment last November, where you and Katy appeared in an ad for the] apanese clothing label?

"I get asked to do things like that all the time. And I always said no. Then that came in, through my wife, and we did it 'cos they paid for it. Simple. It was ajob. But I don't think I'll be doing it again."

How much was it, Bobby?

"I'm not telling you! I don't think I'm cut out to be a model. I'm not going to try and justify it, Ijust did it for the money. It's that simple. It's a job."

So, I ask Bobby Gillespie, after 27 years of Primal Scream, what is there left to do?

"I want to write a great love song." the 46year-old fatheroftwo smiles warmly. "You know when you hear Gram and Emmylou singing 'Love Hurts'? The feeling defeated and broken. I want to marry that with an ecstatic feeling, and if you get that sadness and ecstasy together in the same song, people are crying but they're also wanting to put their hands in the air. One of these days..."