Thursday, 14 March 2013

'We always saw music as a revolutionary force' - The Guardian

The other night Bobby Gillespie made a mistake – he turned on the TV and watched the Brits.

"Who was that guy who won the awards? Ben Howard?" he asks, shaking his head in disbelief. "He looks like David Cameron! He looks like he shares the same stylist! And, just like David Cameron, he's had a complete personality bypass. How can this guy be in rock'n'roll? How can this guy be in music?"

Gillespie may have turned 50 last year, but his spirit doesn't seem to have aged with him. Nor does his belief that rock'n'roll should be about something more than just smiling politely for the cameras. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, the Scream singer – backed by long-standing guitarist Andrew Innes – will cover everything from the time he quit the band to what the Tory government would be like on pills. The pair of them will despair at the de-politicisation of the arts, express horror at the concept of Boris Johnson and struggle to remember minor details such as how they wrote one of their biggest hits. But mostly it will all come back to the subject they like talking about the most: music.

Gillespie's enduring fanaticism is in full effect from the second the Guardian arrives at the band's recording studio in Primrose Hill, north London, and he embarks on a guided tour of their recording space: past the vintage synths that have been with the band since the beginning ("How did they survive? We never took them on the road!"), stopping at the iconic image of the Heartbreakers on the wall and then on to the cramped recording space that has recently hosted the likes of Robert Plant, Mark Stewart and the Sun Ra Arkestra, all of whom contributed towards Primal Scream's 10th album, More Light.

It's something of a miracle that Primal Scream have made it to album number 10 at all (breaking news: this band have done rather a lot of hard drugs in their time). They certainly don't sound much like a band winding down to retirement. Instead, More Light is a 70-minute-plus psychedelic trip that takes in a greatest hits of Scream touchstones: krautrock rhythms, soulful gospel rock, bursts of free-jazz, propulsive horns, a sense of revolutionary rage and, yes, all right, the odd cringe-inducing lyric too. Unlike 2006's back-to-basics Riot City Blues and its rather lightweight followup, Beautiful Future, More Light sees the band back at their most adventurous, a product – they say – of absorbing a "whole attic full of obscure stuff" at their producer David Holmes' house in Belfast.

As with all their best albums, from Screamadelica to Vanishing Point, More Light thrives on the fact they've worked with a stellar line-up of musicians. A lot of this was simply down to fate. We have the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010 to thank for the Sun Ra Arkestra's involvement – they were left stranded in London and so the band provided them with work while they waited for an exit route home. And if you think Robert Plant's vocals on Elimination Blues were the product of writing endless begging letters to the Led Zeppelin singer's management then think again – instead, Gillespie just happened to bump into him in a cafe one morning.

"He said he was [in London] for a few days and if I needed anything then get in touch," Gillespie recalls. "Me and Andrew just looked at each other and said: 'Get him on Elimination Blues!' Two days later he came in and nailed the vocal."

It all sounds rather fortuitous …

Gillespie shrugs: "You make your own luck …"

Innes: "Yeah, by setting off a volcano in Iceland!"

Gillespie: "Aye, that was down to occult magic. There's a guy sat at a top of a mountain in Wales arranging all this stuff for us!"

Plant's involvement was apt, as the band credit him with reinvigorating their belief during one of their darkest moments.

"It was 1994/95, before Vanishing Point," recalls Gillespie. "We were creatively blocked and pharmaceutically blocked. Everyone was pretty fucking depressed so we went down to the pub for a break. On the way we heard: "All right lads," and it was Robert, giving us a wave."

"He's a fanatic, knows all about music," continues Innes. "Not just blues stuff. He can talk about psychedelic music, techno, whatever."

Discovering Plant was a believer in the band helped them get over the heroin-plagued sessions for 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up, which both Gillespie and Innes credit as being the band's worst recording experience.

"Put it like this," says Gillespie, "a couple of people around when we were making that record are dead now …

"A couple?" says Innes, eyebrows raised. "Nah, three of them. Four of them …"

"A few of them, anyway," says Gillespie, before picking up the story. "Our manager and Creation [the band's label] had just signed to Sony who wanted another album from Primal Scream … but Primal Scream weren't in any state to make another album. After about two weeks we had nothing to show for it. Then we bumped into Flowered Up who said they couldn't get their record company to pay for them. We just said: 'Have our studio!' … a bunch of junkies giving another bunch of junkies their studio? As soon as [Creation founder] Dick Green found out he just shut it down. We were just pissing it up the wall."

Unsurprisingly, precise details of these session remain hazy. In fact, the band were so out of it at the time it might just have helped them to stay together.

"We went to Australia and I left the band for a night," says Gillespie. "It was the only time I've ever left Primal Scream. We had a summit crisis meeting, me, Andrew, Alex and Throb … they were screaming at me and I was so apalled that I quit."

Andrew looks up as if to say "You quit? Really?" and sighs: "My memories of those times are sketchy."

"I was back the next day," concedes Gillespie.

Basically, nobody realised you'd even quit?

Gillespie: "At the time I don't think they'd have known if a fucking nuclear bomb had landed on their heads."


Primal Scream - Rocks on MUZU.TV

Life during Primal Scream's druggiest period must have been a constant stream of surprises. When I tell them that it's hard to imagine a rock'n'roll band sitting down to write certain songs on More Light (the sprawling River of Pain's impromptu orchestral crescendo being a good example), they look unsure as to what I mean, so I illustrate the example by saying that it's easier, for example, to picture them writing a Stonesy guitar number like 1994's Rocks.

"Rocks?" splutters Innes. "I didn't even know we'd written it!"

At first I assume he's joking but it turns out he's deadly serious.

"[Alan] McGee phoned us up going: "You've got a great song," and I thought: what the fuck are you talking about?"

"I can definitely remember recording it," adds Gillespie, as if this deserves some kind of prize.

Given the memory issues, it's perhaps for the best that More Light comes after a degree of slate-cleaning and freshening up for the band. In 2011 the band toured Screamadelica, a rare bit of nostalgia chic from a band who prefer not to look over their shoulder too often. They also lost bassist Mani to his first love, the Stone Roses. ("It was what he'd always wanted so we were happy with that.") Perhaps most importantly was the news that one of the country's most debauched rock'n'roll frontmen was finally cleaning up his act and giving up drink and drugs.

"I was in a pretty bad place for quite a lot of years," admits Gillespie. "I'm happier now and you can hear that in the work."

Gillespie accepts that 2008's Beautiful Future might have been a bit off the pace due to his lack of sober focus: "I'd have written some of the lyrics better if I'd been a bit sharper. I know that for a fact; my thinking was a bit muddled in places." Do the band worry that Gillespie going clean will affect the legendary Scream rep?

Innes laughs, shaking his head: "We've got all the gold medals! We've broken all the world records! I think it was McGee who said – you've got to decide if you want to be a drug addict or a musician. Obviously we ignored him for about 10 years!"

It's hard to imagine sobriety will soften Gillespie. After all, neither ageing nor fatherhood seems to have played the traditional affect of mellowing the band.

"We're angrier than we've ever been about the way this country's going," says Gillespie, "Our kids are going to grow up into a really bad place."

The first single from More Light, 2013, sets out their discontent with modern culture ("Every generation buys the lie, just like the one before") in a style that doesn't so much get off the fence as take a chainsaw to it .

"We're living in extreme times and if you listened to modern rock music you wouldn't know that," says Gillespie. "I just think it's odd there's no protest, resistance or critique of what's going down. It's like people are tranquilised. All the rights people had fought for – people like trade unionists, anarchists, artists – are being clawed back by extremists. These people [in charge] aren't rational thinkers. Someone like Boris Johnson hides behind that bumbling public schoolboy image but he's a sinister rightwing cunt trying to bring in anti-strike legislation … we've got to fight these fucking people!"

Gillespie is aware that critics mock Primal Scream's brand of political rock but he's unrepentant. After all, would you sooner have that or suffer the kind of faceless bands turning up at the Brits?

"We always saw music as some kind of revolutionary force," he says. "People can laugh at that all they like but we saw it as fucking psychic resistance."

Two years ago, false information circulated that home secretary Theresa May had soundtracked her appearance at the Tory Party conference with Rocks, prompting a calm and measured response from the band: "Primal Scream are totally disgusted," it began, adding: "Didn't they research the political history of our band? Hasn't she listened to the words? Does she even know what getting your rocks off means? No. She is a Tory; how could she?"

For Gillespie, the rise of the Tories – or just power-seekers in general – represents the ultimate weakness of youth culture's abiliy to change the world.

"For me, punk meant more than just some 7in records and good memories of seeing the Clash at the Apollo," he says. "For us it was the start of a creative life. I thought people touched by punk would become enlightened, non-sexist, non-racist, rational people. But not everybody will go through those phases as young people and take the same things from it. Someone like David Cameron … he's 42, 43, he would have been ripe for acid house, but it just didn't affect him."

What would have happened if Cameron had taken pills?

"It wouldn't have made a difference. I'm sure these guys took drugs, had the odd line, you know, but that's a different thing. We were doing it to get a poetic, psychedelic experience … to get some spiritual insight. The revolutions that touched our lives could never touch someone like David Cameron."

Realising we're straying off topic, Gillespie retreats back to musical matters, ground he's always most comfortable on.

"What we do is more like production," he says of the band's unique, collaborative working methods. "You can't just have anybody playing the flute or the bass or the melodica. That's why in the past we've had, say, Augustus Pablo on melodica, or Jackie Liebowitz on drums, or the Memphis Horns on horns."

The band's impeccable taste has frequently led to them being described by critics as a band of the ultimate music fans, a product not so much of great minds as great record collections. It's something that winds Gillespie up.

"I think we transcend all that shit that we sound like our record collection," he says. "You could take apart any band from the past and say they just sound like their influences. The MC5 weren't heavy until they supported Blue Cheer, then they got Marshall stacks and got heavy. You could say the Stooges' first album sounds like the Troggs!" he takes a deep breath before unleashing his knock-out blow of a next sentence: "Look at side two of Sticky Fingers – track one [Bitch] is the fucking Temptations' Get Ready, track two, I Got The Blues, is I've Been Loving You Too Long by Otis Redding with different lyrics, but they've done the Ike and Tina Turner arrangement of that, who supported them on their 1969 tour, then track three, Sister Morphine, which is basically a Bob Dylan song, take it down to acoustic guitar and vocals and it sounds like Visions of Johanna, then track four is Dead Flowers, which is just the fucking Flying Burrito Brothers one, he even sings like Gram Parsons, track five, Moonlight Mile. is fucking Van Morrison …"

Hang on, this is you saying that you're not terrifyingly obsessive music fanatics?

He laughs: "I've been rehearsing that one for 20 years! But it's like I always say when people start talking about politics. We're not for one party or another party. At the end of the day, we vote for Miles Davis."

• More Light is out on 13 May (First International/Ignition Records). Primal Scream play the Royal Albert Hall, London, for Teenage Cancer Trust on 21 March

No comments:

Post a Comment