Primal Scream - A Screamadelic Saga

Emerging in the second half of the Eighties as one of the standard-bearers of British acid-rock, alongside landmark acts from across the Channel like Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, Bobbie Gillespie's Primal Scream later swerved towards a wholly personal hybrid of rock, techno and dance music, first riding the wave of darkwave, then the psychedelic shoegaze revival, before finally landing in the era of the "chemical generation".

Formed in Glasgow, Scotland, around 1985 by Jim Beattie and Bobbie Gillespie — the latter having already appeared, very young, as drummer on the Jesus and Mary Chain's landmark "Psychocandy" — Primal Scream debuted, like countless other British bands, with a string of singles that, much like the contemporary work of the early My Bloody Valentine, drew heavily on the Sixties: in particular on groups like Stooges and Rolling Stones on the rawer side, and on Byrds and, naturally, Beatles on the lighter, more melodic one.

On the debut album Sonic Flower Grove (1987), it's precisely this latter side of their personality that takes over, on tracks like "Gentle Tuesday", though there are also more warped and distorted moments, close cousins to what would become the sonic magma of shoegaze. Despite the good reception, Jim Beattie chose at this point to leave the band in favour of his other project, Spirea X, leaving Bobbie Gillespie as sole master of the Primal Scream universe. And Bobbie wasted no time seizing the opportunity to immediately mould the group in his own image. Having recruited the hugely talented guitarists Robert Young and Andrew Innes, Gillespie effectively brought a new band into being, to the point that the second album is simply titled Primal Scream (1989). Unfortunately, Gillespie's scattered, unfocused personality — which from here on would prove both the band's gift and its curse — kept the album from truly taking off. "Ivy Ivy Ivy" is the standout track on a record of decent psychedelic pop-rock, essentially still a transitional work, undecided about which path to take.

Precisely because it came from a band that was interesting but had, up to that point, never produced anything particularly significant, the leap in quality Gillespie achieves with Screamadelica (1991) borders on the miraculous: in the very same year that the kings of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine, were demolishing and rebuilding acid-rock with the chaotic, stunning, tumultuous arrangements of the legendary "Loveless", Gillespie and co. did something far less dazzling, but also more concrete and prescient, and in its own way equally brilliant. Primal Scream had a wonderfully simple, and therefore revolutionary, insight: take the sunniest strain of psychedelia and merge it with the contemporary acid-house scene, filling songs (still melodically indebted to the Beatles) with samples and catchy electronic rhythms. Having built a bridge between the past (the Sixties) and the future (the Nineties), Primal Scream, with crucial help from producer Andy Weatherall, threw down a "Damaged" and a "Movin' on Up", complete with gospel choir. The rest of the album also serves up the frivolous dance-music of "Don't Fight It, Feel It", but it's in its most experimental moments that Screamadelica takes on the shape of one of the most influential works of the years to come. The gorgeous "Higher Than the Sun", with its sinuous, hypnotic sway, paves the way for trip-hop; the masterpiece "Inner Flight" further widens the record's musical spectrum with a disorienting and thoroughly successful foray into soft, uneasy electronics; the sprawling, radiant jam "Come Together", amid exotic polyrhythms and kitsch little choruses, is another highlight of the album, and by this point has nothing left to do with a rock band. A stunning piece of sonic collage that sums up decades of popular music gone stale, and reinvents them for Generation X. The languid "Loaded" (an absurd, irresistible mix of Motown, James Brown, bursts of rock and dub moves) and the murkier "I'm Comin' Down" achieve just as much. At this point the reprise of "Higher Than the Sun" arrives to shed further light, stretching out for another seven minutes with an exceptional guest like Jah Wobble and his alien, insinuating dub basslines. The closing track instead falls to the dissonant music-box chimes of "Shine Like Stars".

The sonic and conceptual impact these songs, and this album, would have on countless bands, both electronic and indie, in the years to come is incalculable.

Gillespie and co., for their part, bask in the triumph, and perhaps let themselves be overtaken by the fear of moving beyond the brilliant insights of Screamadelica. A post-masterpiece panic attack is really the only explanation for their next album, Give Out But Don't Give Up (1994), a stunning step backwards into the most tired, flavourless rock/blues — not even today's Rolling Stones could sound this stale. An amused return to rock after the electronic, retro-futuristic binge of Screamadelica? A heartfelt tribute to their own roots? Not even close — this album is a terrifying, inexcusable flop. The ensuing disastrous American tour alongside Depeche Mode drives Primal Scream's stock even further down, and the long hiatus that follows this time brings not anticipation, but merely the hope of one day seeing again the brilliant band that seem to have suddenly vanished without a trace.

Hope is reignited when the explosive single "Kowalski" starts getting airplay, and the video featuring Kate Moss is a match for a song that returns to Screamadelica's territory, albeit now with a new tone — nasty, malicious, perverse. All of this, however, fails to find a satisfying outlet on the new album, Vanishing Point (1997). Compared to the wreckage of its rock-leaning predecessor, this album is manna from heaven, of course. But however pleasant and moderately creative, at least in its arrangements, the record gives the impression of being mostly an attempt to reconnect with the visionary modernism of Screamadelica without quite remembering how it's done. Good old Gillespie is clearly running on fumes creatively here, and it often falls to the supporting cast — chief among them the inspired keyboardist Martin Duffy — to save the day. The only tracks that truly stand out alongside the blazing "Kowalski" are "If They Move Kill 'Em" and the long, sprawling "Trainspotting", the soundtrack to the eponymous cult movie.

In order to survive, the band at this point has no choice but to reinvent itself, to try by any means to shed its skin once again: and after the ritual three years of silence, Gillespie pulls Exterminator (2000), or Xtrmntr, out of his hat — the album with which the Scottish musician ventures into the treacherous territory of the "riot album". The record is in fact nothing less than a concept piece that oozes, in every single moment, all the disgust and outrage towards UK domestic politics, capturing the reality of British youth, trapped between drugs, alcohol and repression (this was the period when Glasgow's local administration imposed a curfew, an event also targeted by other Scottish bands like Mogwai).

But Primal Scream aren't musicians of "rupture" or protest: they don't waste much breath on profanity (or at least use it very sparingly) and they don't launch into social diatribes: their way of expressing rage is entirely in the sound — the explosive, pounding sound of spectacular tracks like "Kill All Hippies", the title track, which Trent Reznor would surely love, and the frenzied rave anthem "Swastika Eyes". Alongside these, the album's pillars, come terrifying walls of sound like the extraordinary "Accelerator", filthy rock distorted beyond belief, and driving gallops like "Shoot Speed Kill Light", an adrenaline-fuelled tribute to New Order (unsurprisingly featuring guest Bernard Sumner).

But there are also digressions into the soft, melodic psychedelia of Screamadelica, like the sweet "Keep Your Dreams" and two long instrumental tracks: the exceptional "Blood Money", an exercise in unrestrained musical suspense, while "MBV Arkestra" is merely a new version of "If They Move Kill 'Em", elevated by the alien guitar of none other than his majesty Kevin Shields — Mr. My Bloody Valentine himself, a friend and frequent collaborator of the band. Crucial to the album's success is also the contribution of bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield, formerly of Stone Roses, as well as production handled by sacred monsters of English electronic music such as David Holmes, Jagz Kooner and the Chemical Brothers themselves (on "Swastika Eyes").

That same embittered mood, though in a far more measured dose, also lies at the heart of the follow-up Evil Heat (2002), a scattershot, programmatic album, convincing overall but lacking the cohesion that made its predecessor great. It's perhaps the most self-referential record of their career, one in which Primal Scream play across every front they've crossed over the course of the fifteen years gone by: there's hazy, hypnotic electronics (the gorgeous intro "Deep Hit of Morning Sun" and the reference-laden "Autobahn 66" and "A Scanner Darkly"), there's material for DJs and raves ("Miss Lucifer"), there's rock 'n' roll (the excellent "City" and "Skull X"), there's the soft, melodic psychedelia of "Space Blues" and, straight out of the terrifying charges of Xtrmntr, the heavy industrial rhythms of "Detroit" (sung by Jim Reid of Jesus and Mary Chain) and "Rise". But there's also a "mutant" track like "The Lord Is My Shotgun" (featuring Robert Plant!) that's something of a summation of all these styles, and could well point towards a future direction in which Gillespie and company might have a lot to say.

In the meantime, though, we have to reckon with another worrying silence, this time a full four years long, and with the rather sorry return of Riot City Blues (2006), yet another inexplicable slide backwards into a retro-rock totally devoid of ideas. The cast once again boasts hair-tearingly good guests such as Will Sergeant (Echo & The Bunnymen) and Warren Ellis (Bad Seeds and Dirty Three). All of them wasted here on songs that are certainly well played, but as pathetic as a Woodstock veterans' reunion. The songs on this album have no bite and no reason to exist, at best pleasant if always banal ("Country Girl" and "Suicide Sally").

In the worst cases, instead, we run into unbearable "tunes" like "Dolls", which genuinely make you want to throw a punch, and don't even get me started on when the Eastern-tinged perfumes of "Little Death" arrive — a track that reminds us of the band's ability to blend rock and electronics with real originality: it reminds us of it, and that's about all it does, though, and it's hard to make sense of this track within the context of an album like this, especially when it's sandwiched between the insipid "The 99th Floor" and the bland "When the Drop Bombs".

The further it goes, the worse it gets: the final four tracks are a concentrated dose of every cheap trick you'd expect when the Stonesy nostalgia that plagued the songs on “Give Out…” is laid on with a trowel. The unlistenable “Boogie Disease”, the already-mentioned “Dolls”, and then “Hell’s Comin’ Down” and the final coup de grâce with the mawkish “Sometimes I Feel So Lonely”.

Primal Scream are giving further proof of their eclectic talent, the kinder critics or the fans might say. But there's a world of difference between being eclectic and simply being scattered and muddled.

Yet just two years later, with Beautiful Future (2008), the Scots once again manage to change skin and surprise us.

The album distances itself from the stale retro-rock of the previous LP, reshuffling the cards played in the past and relaunching their electronic-soaked rock: a sort of summary of twenty years of constant shape-shifting. There's pop, there's their hard-hitting electronics, there's gospel, there's punk: nothing seems to be missing, and the single “Can’t Go Back” is a great statement of health, a snapshot of an aggressive band doing everything it can to bare its teeth.

The album kicks off in fifth gear with the boogie of the title track, arranged with piano, saturated guitars and bells, yet never betraying its Rolling Stones-style gait; the album's hallmark is offering well-polished, carefully arranged pop songs without ever neglecting a certain rock urgency: “Uptown” indeed boasts an exquisite melody, with its dub bass and a melodic chorus carpeted in strings, yet it's not ashamed to show off its guitars, while “Suicide Bomb” is the most powerful track, thanks to a martial stride and titanic riffs. Other gems include “I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt)”, which dusts off their insidious, sensual electronics, with Lovefoxxx – singer of Cansei de Ser Sexy – on counter-vocals, and the ballad “Beautiful Summer”, which showcases Gillespie's near-limitless skills as an arranger.

A couple of stylistic missteps, however, mar an otherwise flawless album: first “Zombie Man”, whose irresistible rhythm is undercut by questionable arrangements (an overblown gospel choir), then the psychedelic ballad “Over And Over”, which overdoes it a bit on the sugar.

On the whole, though, the album works, sounding powerful and solid, and showing off the great resources of a band that, twenty years on, takes stock of its situation, summing up an enviable career and reaffirming that it has no intention of growing old and dying.

After a full five years of absence, on 13 May 2013 More Light was released. The saxophone carrying the main riff through the nine insane minutes of the opening “2013”, a gigantic track with an irresistible groove, acts as a sort of call to arms for all the band's longtime fans. What we find here is a lineup in fine form, able to completely change register in the following “River Of Pain”, an enchanting, absorbing psychedelic narcosis. These two extended tracks, totalling sixteen minutes and placed at the start of the tracklist, set the mood for the whole work, steering it onto thoroughly virtuous tracks. Everything that follows only adds further strength to one of the Scottish outfit's best albums. “Culturecide” brings funk-oriented flavours into play, pairing them with the barricade-storming, anti-establishment lyrics that often crop up in these grooves; the following “Hit Void” is just as aggressive, shifting the focus towards more decidedly alt-rock spirals and foreshadowing the psych density of “Tenement Kid” and the lush 80s feel of “Invisible City”. There's also the odd filler track (which basically keeps the album from establishing itself as a true classic of our times), but the level stays consistently intense, from the boozy bossa nova of “Goodbye Johhny” to the suburban blues of “Elimination Blues” (featuring Robert Plant), all the way to the closing anthem “It’s Alright, It’s OK”, which couldn't be more Gillespie if it tried. Plenty on the plate: the deluxe edition includes a bonus disc with six further tracks, among them a remix version of “2013”, and there's also a further release adding the excellent covers of “I Want You” (Troggs) and “City Slang” (Sonic’s Rendezvous Band), their exclusives made for Record Store Day.

March 2016 brings Chaosmosis, one of Primal Scream's most forgettable works, perhaps the lowest point of their artistic journey, one that not even the most loyal, die-hard fans will manage to rank among the albums for which the Scottish outfit deserves to be remembered in the rock encyclopedias. And certainly not because of the tracks' overly synth-pop leanings, but because the record proves (even after repeated listens) to be lacking in genuinely meaningful ideas, the real cardinal sin for a band that has always played metamorphosis as its trump card. Chaosmosis is a concise record, its ten tracks settling somewhere between the anaemic lushness of “Trippin’ On Your Love” and “Autumn In Paradise”, with its most embarrassing moments found in the Game Boy-like textures of “(Feeling Like A) Demon Again” and “Carnival Of Fools”. But, as with any Primal Scream work, even the least successful one, there's always something that gets under your skin: a riff, a chorus, a melodic turn that you can't help carrying around with you for days.

The irresistible duet with Sky Ferreira (“Where The Light Gets In”) shows just how well Bobby Gillespie can still write a perfect pop song, and just how much he loved 80s italo-disco (makes you wonder if, without Valerie Dore, rave parties would ever have existed), but that's not the only thing worth remembering. Also worthy of a spot in the playlist are the dynamite-charged opener “When The Blackout Meets The Fallout” (under two minutes that blow hard on the sacred flame of rock'n'roll), the acoustic folk ballad “Private Wars” (yes, the middle stretch is the best part of this record), and, right at the last minute, the Stonesy swagger of “Golden Rope”. The rest is just filler, and we'll soon forget the elegant cadences of “I Can Change” and the harmless little rock number dusted off in “100% Or Nothing”, for an album that fails to pick itself back up even with the help of a few strategic guest spots (besides the lovely Sky, there's also Rachel Zeffira of Cat's Eyes and the Haim sisters, Haim). I don't know whether Uncle Bobby's inspiration has run dry for good; I think the (partial?) failure of Chaosmosis is more the result of a half-achieved project: the attempt to produce a pleasant (synth) pop album with the quality of an (indie) rock approach. At the end of the day, the good and the bad roughly cancel each other out, but the album doesn't escape its own collapse, and will be remembered as one of the weakest chapters in Primal Scream's otherwise honourable career.

In 2021 came the moment for Bobby Gillespie's first solo chapter, Utopian Ashes, shared with ex-Savages member Jehnny Beth. Alongside the two leads of the project, we find the familiar presence of Johnny Hostile, Beth's longtime musical partner, and the full Primal Scream lineup, in a sort of “extended family”.

To mark the thirtieth anniversary of “Screamadelica” in grand style, in 2021 Primal Scream released a limited-edition picture disc and a box set containing 12” vinyl reproductions of all the singles taken from the album, plus the “Dixie Narco” EP and a previously unreleased remix of “Shine Like Stars” by Andrew Weatherall, for which illustrator and designer Paul Verhoeven produced a video. But the release that will surely intrigue fans the most is Demodelica, a collection of demos and early mixes of almost all the songs featured on “Screamadelica”. The tracks and sketches included reveal unseen aspects of the album's composition and production process, including provisional versions, second thoughts and discarded directions, offering a glimpse of the work in progress that led to the final result. Songs often initially conceived in a rather bare folk-rock-blues format, with just an acoustic guitar or a piano, and only in a later stage subjected to the well-known manipulation and “hyper-production” treatments, with the recording studio becoming a fundamental additional instrument for locating, developing and grafting a sound. A method that would set a trend, a guiding element for many musicians who followed.

In these intermediate takes there's no better or worse, simply something different, evolving over the span of a few weeks as it hurtles towards immortality. Recordings still free of the dub intrusions that would add further shading to “Come Together”, here still a mid-tempo number heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground. “Damaged” is just a demo for voice and guitar, while on the Stonesy “Movin’ On Up” Bobby Gillespie is clearly still searching for the words. “Higher Than The Sun” is still in its primordial state, “I’m Coming Down” appears in both an acoustic and a synthetic guise, three takes apiece for “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” and “Inner Flight” capture different stages in the process of transmutation. Closing things out is a non-definitive version of “Screamadelica”, the title track that would only be unveiled the following year on the “Dixie Narco” EP. The use of samplers and the clear shift towards a dance-oriented direction marked a radical turn away from everything Primal Scream had been up to that point. In this context, Demodelica is a sort of logbook narrating the voyage of those days, during which the support of drugs played anything but a minor role.

To round off the celebrations, for summer 2022 Primal Scream have planned a short celebratory tour (their first live dates since December 2019, following the pandemic-enforced halt), during which they will play the songs from “Screamadelica”, alongside a selection of tracks drawn from the stylistically related albums “XTRMNTR” and “Give Out But Don’t Give Up”.

Without ever having come close to the phenomenal success of Oasis and Blur, without ever having dared compete with the authority of Radiohead, without ever having been as groundbreaking as My Bloody Valentine or Jesus & Mary Chain (in whose ranks Gillespie himself once served), Primal Scream have nonetheless managed over time to play a fundamental role in the development of music (both electronic and rock) in recent decades. And while some recent efforts hinted at a slight loss of edge, Bobby Gillespie's band confirms itself as a lucid, accomplished project, among the sacred monsters of the contemporary European music scene, free of wistful nostalgia and with its gaze always fixed on the present

After the poorly focused, if not downright messy, Chaosmosis in 2016, hopes that Bobby and his band of scoundrels could decisively right the ship and reinvigorate a career that had been running hot and cold for at least fifteen years were slim. But like all self-respecting Scots, Primal Scream have thick skin and hard heads, and with them a vigorous comeback - the kind that can change the course of a match - is always just around the corner. Even when it might seem too late.

That something excellent was brewing was clear from the moment the big single "Love Insurrection" dropped, probably the best thing the band has recorded since the blistering XTRMNTR. A syncopated guitar line, bass oozing groove, acid-tinged flourishes here and there, a hooky, sensual chorus, horns stirring everything up - and the party's on. But that's not all: towards the end, our own Anna Caragnano delivers a touching political monologue that closes with a resounding "viva l'amore, no pasaran".

This blazing closing statement, together with the gospel-tinged opening of the first track "Ready To Go Home", announces that Come Ahead is an album born in the furrow ploughed by the acid, political dance music of Screamadelica. A world plagued by populism, a dearth of reading and a corrupting capitalism is the backdrop against which bloom protest songs that are tough yet brimming with hope, like "Heal Yourself", "False Flags" with its ultra-soft guitars, and the wonderful "Deep Dark Waters" - another memorable chorus sung by a Gillespie on top form, over a taut arrangement dominated by an acoustic arpeggio that digs deep into the soul.

Disco strings, festive horns and funk rhythms ready to take hold of even the most reluctant hips feed a swaggering "Innocent Money" destined to wreak havoc live. Meanwhile "Melancholy Man" and "Settlers Blues", which closes the record with a carpet of strings and guitars rippling outward like rings on water in a marsh, round out the ballad side of things.

Primal Scream's twelfth album doesn't have the solidity of the masterpieces mentioned throughout this piece, nor the vision of a classic like "Vanishing Point". It is, however, finally exactly the record you'd expect from a band as canonised and as fully mature as Primal Scream: strong, engaged, fresh, and often incredible.

Contributions by Alessandro Nalon (“Beautiful Future”), Claudio Lancia (“More Light”, “Chaosmosis”, “Utopian Ashes”, “Demodelica”) and Michele Corrado (“Come Ahead”)

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