PRIMAL SCREAM COME CLEAN

Part I - Visions Of Swastikas In Bobby Gillespie's Head

IF YOU'VE been monitoring recent emissions from the Primal Scream camp, you'll know that Bobby Gillespie's got swastika eyes on the brain and an almighty millennial bug up his ass. You'll have read him and bassist Gary 'Mani' Mounfield ranting and railing about Amerikan cultural/corporate/military imperialism, the annihilation of the trade unions and the disempowerment of the working classes, the imprisonment of their friend Satpal Ram and the corruption at the heart of the British judicial shit-stem.

Reading these dispatches, you've probably pictured the Primals stumbling through this urban dystopia like malcontented conspiracy theorists straight out of Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn's worst rock nightmares. You'd be wary of all the polemic, recoiling as if from a soapbox juror on Grafton Street.

Except, in the current lukewarm rock 'n' roll climate, it's important that someone like Gillespie shoots his mouth off, even - especially - if his manifestos are stitched with inconsistencies (like how his band remain infatuated with American dreamers yet fundamentally opposed to the dream itself, or how they can condemn the societal effects of smack, crack and charlie, yet remain ambiguous when it comes to the promulgation of drug culture in rock 'n' roll).

What matters is not that Primal Scream's policies are watertight, but that they have any in the first place. Bob might come on like a crank, but I'll gladly reproduce his diatribes here because I'm a sucker for manic street preachers proclaiming, "The Russians are coming!" at every turn. Except in this case, it's the Yanks. But more about that later.

For now, let's focus on the forthcoming Exterminator, Primal Scream's seventh long player (and it's worth bearing in mind that until as recently as 1996 the band had but one good album to their name, although within the last four years they've upped that to four, an exponential rate of development which bears inverse relation to recent sales figures). If the times demand extremes, then this is a custom built soundtrack to the Seattle riots ("No civil disobedience" berates the title track). Soundwise, it's the result of 20 years spent absorbing the vintage radicalism of the MC5, the eruptive heat of Sun Ra and Miles, the kaleidoscopic buzz of acid house and the majestic gloom of acts like Joy Division.

New tunes such as 'Blood Money' (Bitches Brew meets In Sides), 'Accelerator' (Royal Trux duking it out with The Stooges) and 'Swastika Eyes' are low on melody, high on cutting edges. Indeed, much of Exterminator (this writer's advance copy was labeled Xtrmtr - apt, given that the music is all consonant, little vowel) suggests White Light/White Heat remixed by Georgio Moroder. Even the blissed out 'Keep Your Dreams' (not the Suicide song of the same name, though it might as well be) evokes the ecstatic exhaustion of a Spacemen 3 rather than The Stones.

"Some people were saying that the album is really angry," Bobby Gillespie admits, "and I'm saying it's positive anger, it's not inward, it's externalised and it's aimed at targets. I think it's an uplifting record."

The music undoubtedly benefits from a flesh and blood rhythm section (Mani defected from the crumbling Stone Roses late into 1997's Vanishing Point, while drummer Darrin Mooney joined halfway through the subsequent tour) not to mention London horn players Duncan Mackay and Jim Hunt. Gillespie can now boast an ensemble possessing both the power and the funk required to join the dots between Coltrane and The Clash.

"With Mani and Mooney holdin' the rhythm together, the guitar and the horn players and me could just fly, and I could just dig my vocals right into the fuckin' groove," he enthuses. "We got this fuckin' hard new concrete sound through playin' the Vanishing Point songs live. The gigs were gettin' more extreme in terms of intensity and energy and I guess we went straight into the studio in between doing the festivals and stuff and we just kept recording."

Those extra sessions produced some pretty far-out variations. My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields applied some industrial splatterjazz to a remake of 'If They Move, Kill 'Em' from the last album, they nailed the original version of 'Insect Royalty' (later bound for the Acid House soundtrack) and also managed a digital breakdown of the Third Bardo's garage punk nugget 'I'm Five Years Ahead Of My Time' featuring Can guitarist Michael Karoli and drummer Jaki Liebezeit.

By early 1998, Primal Scream, who'd been facing creative bankruptcy only a couple of years earlier, had hit a purple patch. Vanishing Point may have salvaged the band's credibility after the widely lambasted "brown period" of Give Out But Don't Give Up, but the new material would prove even more coherent, more extreme and more focused.

"Y'know, suddenly I think we had this fuckin' shit-hot band, and it really gave us the confidence to do anything," Gillespie reckons. "I was watching a Clash documentary last night, and on London Calling, with Topper Headon, suddenly they could play reggae, funk, soul, rock 'n' roll, hip-hop, and when you get that freedom, you're fearless, and I guess maybe the same kind of thing happened to us."

However, despite an enduring love of the revolutionary funk of Sly Stone and James Brown - exhibited by tracks like 'Kill All Hippies', 'Pills' and the title tune -Exterminator is also informed by the kind of paranoid death disco experimentalism you'd associate with Throbbing Gristle or PiL. Gillespie's invocation of London Calling recalls the militancy and extremism sensed throughout the late '70s, an era of assassinations, riots, postal and miners' strikes, plus a plague of petrol queues as Arab nationalism asserted itself against Britain and the US in the form of the oil crisis.

"I've been listening to Joy Division and PiL again for ages," Mani admits. "I think that's no coincidence. And also Death In Vegas and The Beta Band and Mogwai and Tricky - I've been turning a lot darker in me musical preferences. You just can't help but it permeates through. We just wanted to make a record that sounded like it was made in a city, this year."

Certainly, Primal Scream are far more at home with the claustrophobia and congestion of the cities - the white noise of Detroit, the stench of Cologne, the polycultural swelter of London, the sweatshop soul of New Orleans and Memphis or the hard-bop/electro-funk traditions of New York - than the home counties or the Christian mid-west. Exterminator could be the true sound of Blade Runner's blue-lit rotten-apolis, a futuristic eclecticism that links post-rock (1999) to post-punk (1979).

Perhaps it's no accident that the Scream's bar mitzvah years coincided with the point where New Wave became No Wave, absorbing concepts such as soundtrack music, avant-funk and free jazz: Suicide had Thelonius Monk, Voidoid Bob Quine was a Miles disciple, Sonic Youth were learning John and Alice Coltrane. On this side of the pond Jah Wobble and Peter Hook, consciously or not, encoded allusions to Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo into records like Metal Box and Closer. You could hear all these elements in the Primals' quaking 1997 single 'Kowalski'.

"That's the music that we grew up on, that had the most powerful effect on us in '79 and the '80s when Thatcher came in," Gillespie confirms. "Even as a 16, 17 year old, I wasn't involved in any political party, but you could feel a climate, you could feel something changing in the country.

People were so militant then. I don't think the conservative government ever forgave the miners for that, and they had that all-out war to destroy the mining union and indeed the trade union and working class movement in this country. Y'know, eventually they forced 'em into that strike, beat them and closed all the fuckin' pits down. And it was a long term plan, I mean, they had all the scab fuckin' lorries ready, they were bussing policemen in from different parts of Britain and they were getting triple pay scale to do picket duty. I really believe that it was war on the working class. So that music captured the atmosphere of Britain then. Even as a kid, I knew there was something bad in the air, I knew something scary was comin'. You could just see it and feel it. That music spoke to me more than anything."

Does he have that feeling now?

"I guess the job's been done. I think they've successfully destroyed any left wing opposition in this country. It's a right wing Christian democrat fuckin' Labour party. It's a one party state, they're just carrying on the policies that Thatcher started. And when I say Thatcher, I know there's people above her like American and British multinationals, and indeed the American government itself. Britain's a client state for the US. We provide a mercenary army for them, we're like an aircraft carrier for the jet fighters to take off from here and bomb fuckin' Libya or Serbia.

"They used the excuse of helping out those people in Kosova to just destroy the industrial infrastructure of Serbia, that's what it was all about. The IMF and the World Bank will loan them the money at a high interest rate to rebuild the country, and the Serbians will be forever in debt to the Germans, the Americans, the French and the British companies and multinationals. They'll open up Coca Cola factories and Mercedes Benz factories there and the people will be workin' cheap labour and America will have a military base in the Balkans. They've occupied the country, it was an invasion.

"That's what the song 'Swastika Eyes' is about," he continues, "the new smiling face of fascism, which is America and NATO, under the guise of peace-keeping forces and that fuckin' bullshit they use, those terms like, if they bomb a council estate in Belgrade, it's 'collateral damage', they've got these new polite terms for mass murder. I think we're living in amazing times.

"I'm no conspiracy theorist, but when you saw politicians like Blair and Robin Cook on TV here during the bombardment, and the language they were usin': those guys were high on the war, it was bloodlust, they were so full of hatred. They're intelligent guys, and I really believe they're evil because they know exactly what they're doin', placing medical and food embargos on a country that they've just fuckin' destroyed. America ran out of cruise missiles from bombing Serbia, I mean, for fuck's sake, y'know what it's like. War's good for the American economy, Lockheed Tristar, those big multinationals . . . I mean, I'm sorry man, if I'm ramblin', alright? I'm sorry, but it's not as simple as we've got to stop some death squads, that's just CNN propaganda and people are swallowing it. It really is a depoliticised, consumerist spectator culture that we live in."

Them's fightin' words. But do not adjust your spectacles brothers and sisters - Bob's only getting warmed up.

"Do you remember when Channel 4 started?" he demands. "Do you remember they used to show Fassbinder films, Herzog films, and it was an art channel and it really turned you onto a lot of great things as a youth? And now it's just all full of soaps. There's not one fuckin' TV station that shows anything interesting, informative, controversial, educational or exciting. Even with the BBC, there's no funding for documentary programmes, it's just cheap moronic fucking gameshows. And the Sky TV thing with Murdoch - we know how right wing that guy is. Mani's got a good name for it: electronic smack."

Which brings us onto the subject of drugs.

Part II - Opiates Of The Masses

Anyone in need of a crude guide to Primal Scream's back catalogue could do worse than gauge each album in terms of whatever narcotic was going around at the time. For example: Sonic Flower Groove - acid; Primal Scream - amphetamines; Screamadelica - Ecstasy; Give Out But Don't Give Up - heroin; Vanishing Point/Echo Dek - skunkweed.

We can only speculate as to what they were on during the conception of the new opus. Bug powder, maybe. Or PCP. Maybe even tap water and fresh air, if you can buy that. Either ways, the tone is about as far from the beatific, bleary, Balearic beats of 'Come Together' or 'Higher Than The Sun' as you can get without entering Black Flag territory. As you may have gathered from Gillespie's gospel in the preceding paragraphs, Exterminator is their Malcolm X record: loose but lucid, politicised and pissed off. Not that Bobbie has any intention of renouncing his Hacienda daze.

"The thing about Ecstasy was it brought people together, so it was a political drug in that sense," he muses. "Y'know, you'd have guys who were in the Chelsea Headhunters or Millwall or the Cockney Reds or fuckin' Hibernian casuals or Aberdeen casuals or whatever mixing with gay people, all sorts of strata of society goin' to these warehouse clubs, takin' Es and dancin' together. I mean, I'm not trying to paint a pretty picture, but I was at a lot of those (clubs) and you'd be stood there beside some mad-eyed guy who'd normally want to fuckin' Stanley knife ye, and he's fuckin' huggin' ye.

"I think that was a time when Thatcher was saying, 'There's no such thing as society,' and acid house actually created an alternative society for a lot of people, because it got them being creative, being a DJ, promoting a little club, even designing the fliers, making up slides for lightshows, there was a sense of involvement and community, and I think that's why it was political.

"But I really do believe there's a degree of population control that (also) goes with the drug culture," he expands. "After Ecstasy, about the start of '92, suddenly the atmosphere in the clubs changed from this friendly communality to a moody, distanced, undercurrent-of-violence kinda feeling, and suddenly there was a lot of cocaine about. And then also, suddenly there was a lot of heroin. All the working class towns were awash with it. The first time I became aware of this was at the start of the '80s when you had the riots in Toxteth, suddenly Liverpool was awash with heroin, and there was nae more civil disobedience there.

"I remember when we were takin' it, it was harder to get, it may have been a hundred quid for a gram or somethin', but now it's like twenty quid a gram. Are you from Dublin? Well, you know all about it then. And I really, really believe that it's tolerated by the authorities to anaesthetise the population. I don't think they're supplying it, but I think there is a certain level of tolerance allowed because it placates people and it neutralises them, and it's the same with the cocaine. I've never seen as much cocaine - it's so available and it's so cheap - it's out of control, y'know? You buy it in pubs, everywhere you go."

Having witnessed The Stone Roses being atrophied by a variety of substances, Mani, as you can imagine, also has words to add on the subject.

"Recording The Second Coming album in South Wales, I must've come away to put at least 14 friends in the ground," he relates, "and after about the third or fourth you just can't cry anymore, and it just makes you so fuckin' angry, the amount of talent that's getting wasted. Some of the best guitarists and drummers I've ever known are now just worm food and it's really, really sad."

What makes musicians so susceptible to heroin?

"I don't know really," he shrugs. "Maybe it's an escapist thing. Me hand on me heart, I don't go for that kinda stuff, I'm happy with a few fucking jars and a couple of spliffs or a nibble of an E every now and again. When it comes down to smack, it's just people with too much time on their hands I think, and they're looking for something to fill the hole."

Which is precisely what happened to Primal Scream in 1992/93, smacked out in London's Roundhouse Studios (nicknamed The Brownhouse) trying to follow the twin masterpieces of Screamadelica and the Dixie Narco EP. Give Out But Don't Give Up, eventually recorded in Memphis with a host of southern soul legends and veteran session men, was a collection of mostly beautiful songs paralysed by excess. It should've been a comedown record on a par with third album Velvets or first album Johnny Thunders or Spiritualized or Big Star. It ended up sounding like one of Rod Stewart's mid-'70s LA efforts (no surprise that the man they used to call The Mod covered 'Rocks' on his When We Were The New Boys album).

"They're lucky that a few of 'em didn't die y'know," Mani avers. "They went through a really shitty patch with it. Absolutely, they'd be the first to admit that they totally underachieved with that one. The potential for that to be such an enormously beautiful LP . . . I think they just sucked their own lifeblood out of the songs, y'know?"

So, throughout the mid '90s, together with labelmates Oasis, Irvine Welsh and the whole Loaded lot, the Primals inherited the worst traditions of capitalist rock 'n' roll wastage. Even more lamely, they fell for that ol' Johnny Thunders heroin chic shtick.

"Well I've got to say, we never ever advertised the fact that there was heroin use in our band," Gillespie responds. "If anything the media were trying their best to get people that knew us to talk about us, or to try to get us to talk about it, but we never once spoke about it, because people in our band got involved in it, through, I guess, a sense of rock 'n' roll romanticism, okay? Lovin' Johnny Thunders and Keith Richards and Hank Williams and Gram Parsons. We bought into that whole thing, and it was to the detriment of our music and our personalities and our souls, and we kept it to ourselves because it was destroying the band. Not because we were ashamed about it but because we didn't want to make it seem glamourous.

"We did certainly proselytise for Ecstasy, but I wouldn't have spoken about the heroin because I didnae want to influence anybody to take that drug, because I'd seen what it was doing to us. It's only now that I'll talk about it, a long time after the fact."

How did they go about sorting it out?

"We never went to no clinics or nothing like that," he explains. "We did it privately, and for some of us it was harder than others. Y'know, our drummer went missing, we couldn't find him for five years, he ended up living in the streets and stuff like that. There was overdoses and all sorts of shit. And that's not glamourous, man. Our music suffered. We got caught up in it and we got ourselves out of it. And it upsets me. When Kurt Cobain died it upset me because I thought he was a young man with a lot to say, he seemed like a good fella and he definitely had his heart in the right place. We need people like him."

Yet, for all the horror stories, it's not as if we'll be seeing Bobby Gillespie down The Priory anytime soon.

"I'm not against people takin' drugs," he maintains. "As far as I'm concerned people are free to do what they like, but it's no good to become a slave to anything or anybody. I've been addicted to drugs, I still take drugs, y'know, I admit that. I'm a drug addict. But it's pharmaceuticals, I get them from my doctor, but it's under control. So I'm not lecturing anybody, I'm not a pompous arsehole like Pete Townsend. Nothin' against Pete, I love his music, but I'm not one of these guys that says, 'Hey kids, don't do it - I did it'. It's up to people to find out for themselves."

So this is where we leave Primal Scream in January 2000. Poised to release the last ever Creation album before the label folds, they are no longer mainstream contenders. Rather, the band have gone underground where they can continue to evolve and mutate, harnessing old-skool rock 'n' roll activism, dub mysticism, punk-funk politics, freejazz experimentalism and acid utopianism into one volatile, uncontrollable mass.

"There isn't enough danger in music at the moment," Mani proclaims, "no rebels, no renegades. There's too many people out there aged 22, 23, starting bands and wanting to sound like Bryan Adams. Not mentioning any names, but we all know who they are, so-called Welsh fascists and that. They're not apathetic or apolitical, they're just . . . unintelligent. If they could think a lot more about the tool and the medium they've got their hands on, it can be a powerful thing, and instead of being careerist they could use it to try and change opinions or attitudes. All we've got to do is just eradicate these careerist conservative fuckers who are in the charts right now. They might as well get jobs in offices because that's how they approach music: just go to the office on Monday, keep your 'ead down and don't annoy anybody and get your paycheck at the end of the week.

"We're livin' in a depoliticised era," he concludes, "and we want people to get more politically aware. I'm still a massive Clash fan. That (documentary) was the best bit of television I've seen in ages, that wasn't electronic smack, that was proper information, y'know? A lot of people say we're on the soapbox and all that shit, but we've seen the death of socialism, that's been killed by its own bloody hand now, by Tony Blair and all that, we don't trust him. He's gonna get a punch in the chops if I ever see him. Tony Blair thinks he's a hip premier - he's got fuckin' nothing on Vaclev Havel man! We've just got to try and kill this vibe of apathy and get people woke up again, get 'em angry, get 'em on the streets. I still dream about a revolution here - we've got to burn it down and start again, because it's not going to get any better."