Primal Scream . Webadelica

Not everything in black and white

Not everything in black and white (and pychedelic colours) makes sense..And definately not a PRIMAL SCREAM tour. Well, not when they're drinking Guiness for breakfast and dalying with the odd drug or three. But at last they're making sense of 'Vanishing Point' live. Acid test: Roger Morton (Words) Steve Double (photos)

"Nico used to say to me, 'Zhlmmy, oh Zhimmy, you must be totally poisoned to do what you do. You are only mostly poisoned, you must be totally poisoned'. She meant I had too much humanity." Iggy Pop, Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Giman McCain

Wednesday, February 4, 1998, Dublin. Strap on your goggles, straddle that Greyhound, hold on to your Guinness and wave goodbye to geography. We've only been at the Regency Hotel In Dublin for two hours the Invading army arrives and all matters of wherever the hell we are and whatever vanishing point we're heading tor get stomped on.

Here they come, not the first, not the fifth, but the last chemical column, the dub dragoons, the tripped-out troops of free-jazzed, Detroit-meets-Glasgow punk rock terra-della. Ein-drei-zuber! Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the only truly great, full-on speed-brawl faith-keepin' f-up rock'n'roll band left in the West.

"We are forming our own Luftwaffe!" Andrew Innes, reclusive Scream guitarist and studio-meister marches into the Regency bar. He is wearing a Speedking T-shirt, Eskimo coat and his eyes glitter with chocs-away amusement. Behind him bounds bass monster Gary 'Mani' Mounfield sporting newly cropped hair and jibbering in machine-gun Mike Baldwin tones about how he's going to take flying lessons.

It is day one of the Primals tour after a protracted post-Christmas lay-off, and the airborne wing of the band are clearly battle ready. Tour manager Trigger dumps the itinerary down on the table. Dublin, Galway and Derry, it says on the inside. On the outside there's a shot of a Worid War Two Stuka dive bomber rendered in Jamie Reid punk-rock pink'n'canary yellow. "Stretch Stukas! We want stretch Stukas! Get 'em in!" shouts Mani heedless of the frowns from the cardigan'd drinkers at the bar. No sign of Gillespie yet, but already the effects of the Primals' medicine show are starting to be felt. We are moving out of Ireland and into Screamland. Seat belts on, here's Duffy. Honky-tonk parallel universe keyboardist Martin Duffy (aka 'Nanook') was last seen trying to climb out the windows of an LA-bound jet to make friends with the aliens. Tonight he contents himself with an exposition on the history of Anarctica and Reg Presley's theories on UFO propulsion. "It's all magnets!"

The 'snug' crew are in middle of digesting this heavy info when the hearty figure of modulated rock god guitarist Throbert arrives and decides to get his tackle out. Mid-snug, he pulls out an expandable green rod, unfolding it until he's fly fishing in Guinness froth. "Whaddya think?" he asks proudly. "I gae it fro' the shoppin' channel..."

If James Brown's been busted again, Joey Ramone's out of hospital and there's still miners' pits getting blown up on TV, this must be the week Primal Scream head out to reclaim their status as Kings of Mindblowing Millitant Rock'n'Souledelica after last years shaky gigs. it should be a straightforward A to C journey where the sceery's eithe rhtat of a going-through-the-motions live band, drifting off into self-indulgent irrelevence or of a bunch of connected, vital avant-rok pioneers reinventing themselves as the collest sonic-contact soundclash out there.

Ten minutes with Gillespie on the Bus down to Dublin Olympia and it';s apparent that there are two journey's going on here. The horizontal march witht he babbling band. And Gillepie's interior trip. The Primals singer is focused and neat Chairman Mao-cut blue denim jacket, but there's a pensiveness about him, a kind of introspective tension that seperates him off. Gig time comes, and the band tumble intl the dressing rooms at the Olympia, slap James Brown on the ghettoblaster and flip velocity vitamins around the room liberally. Everyone's up on their toes. The crowd's wild for it and the show is high-powered and sharptoothed, winding up from the shadowwrapped start of 'Out Of The Void' into the terror-rock concrete blaster zone of a climactic 'Kowalski'. New recruits Jim Hunt on sax, Duncan Mackay on trumpet and drummer Darren Mooney gear up the sound into a driven, baroque-noir mesh of trad and future sonics and, whaddyaknow, it all clicks into place.

If the band's post 'Give Out...' diversion from the mainstream into the psych-jazz and Krautrock-ing of 'Vanishing Point' made them look an unreliable live bet, the Dublin show makes it clear they've found a way of pulling the schizo strands of 'Rocks' 'Stuka' and even 'Come Together' into a great show. Unparalleled, in fact.

Gillespie cuts Lydon-esque shapes against the backdrop films of riots'n'rebels, sings like a teen Dylan angel and gives the 'power' salute to a delirious crowd. The old lost-it Gillespie droopiness is nowhere to be seen. Instead he is King Insect Man, perched over the kids, sucking up energy and giving strobe-lit lessons in edge rock history from dub to Miles Davis.

It's a paced blitzkrieg but there's a background mood touched on in 'Insect Royalty', a new song destined for the movie of Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. Bleak and twisted hip-hop, it has a lyric about being colonised by a parasitic disease. Amidst the wilful stoopidity of the on-the-road Primals there's clearly some dark psychology spinning around.

Back at the hotel, the Scream split into clubbers, drinkers and talkers, and Gillespie sits down with local legend BP Fallon. Small, bald and mad-eyebrowed, BP ('the Beep') survived the '60s, hung out at Apple and worked with Bolan and Zeppelin. For a while Bobby laps up the rock stories, relishing the one about Robert Plant tuming up at a blues club and being ignored by Memphis soul singer Bobby 'Blue' Bland who simply whacked his night's fee on the table, placed a revolver next to it and preceeded to count his dollars.

Naturally, attitude, of the 'kiss my mad motherf-r ass' variety gets big respect in the Primals camp. The conversation swings round to old-time rock'n'rollers and Gillespie starts to tell Fallon about Harmony Korine's meeting with a certain ageing rock'n'roller. Korine, who wrote the movie Kids and auteured the notorious Gummo, found himself driving at high speed while the old timer spiked himself up through his jeans with speedballs. Gillespie lights up as he tells the story. He'd met Korine a while back and is a major fan.

"Werner Herrog wrote to the censors when Gummo was banned and said they had to let it be shown," he informs the bar. "Herzog told him, 'You're the last footsoldier'. He said to him, 'You know what we have in common you and I? We both aestheticise mental illness'. That guy, Korine is giving kids Super 8 cameras, using surveillance footage. That's rock'n'roII, what he's doing, not all these f-ing pricks in bands!"

The info-swapping between Bobby and Fallen goes on way into the eariy hours with the subject matter getting gradually darker and as Innes sits down they start to sift bad memories - the morphine tablets nightmare, the smack problems too close to home. The '98 version of the Scream is probably healthier than ever, but the chemical culture is still in their faces, not least because, as Bobby points out, "it's on the cover in every newsagents, the whole thing is endemic now. I really figure like we're going through some dark times."

Deeper into the journey it seems relevant to enquire whether Gillespie thinks there's a bit of that 'aestheticising mental illness' going on in the current Primals?

"Yeah, I think so," he says. "Slightly. Because songs like 'Burning Wheel', if you read the lyrics, that's very internal. It's about having your mind fractured. It's about psychosis. It's hallucinations you can get. It's that state. And it's drug induced but you can go beyond that. So, yeah, I think so. But I'm not glorifying it, I'm just trying to explain it, or make sense of what's going on inside my head. That's why you write a song like 'Burning Wheel' or 'Stuka', you're trying to articulate... confusion. But it's purifying, it's angry. It's like confronting yourself and trying to work out what's going on in your head and what's gone wrong.

"I'm not saying I'm mentally ill or anything, don't get me wrong. I'm saying like a depression or whatever. But rather than writing songs like 'Movin' On Up' or 'Come Together' which are affirmations of communality, it's like trying to take away anger, the self-hate that you've got inside you and get it out whichever way possible, by screaming or writing a song.

"So we won't do 'Movin' On Up' now, because Innes, he says, 'I'm not moving on up now. That was eight, nine years ago when I was doing Es'. And now you're Iooking inward, looking inside your head. Even 'Kowalski', it's a speed song basically, it's a paranoid song. It's jokey as well but even that's got psychosis to it. But it's got catharsis as well."

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, DUBLIN to Galway. The Primals surface mid-morning to the the bizarre sight of rugby fans in kilts flying a red dragon flag in the bar, which the band take as a signal to order a breakfast round of Guinness. Fortification is particularly in order since Mani's woken to news that a friend who was coming to see him on tour has died of an overdose. The casualty list gets longer but in the haze of burning wheels and goofed hedonism that constitutes a Scream tour there is no possibility of navel gazing.

The Republic Of Ireland? This could be the Sultanate Of Oman for all the inhabitants of the Scream's Gilded Autobus Of Sin know. You can't see out the bus windows, the stereo's blaring Johnnie Allan's 'Promised Land' and most people round here seem to have radically misinterpreted the meaning of the term 'line-dancing'. All of which puts the permanently up-for-it Throb ina good mood. He's moving house. he's getting divorced, But wha the hell, he's on tour with the Scream again, readinga book on UFOs and laughing at the Primals' legendary security man, the grievous bodily tatoo know as Fatty or Molloy or, on this tour particular tour, Val Hooligan.

At 4am, Duffy was in a hotel room with Molloy, drunkenly asking him why he had a nasty great dinosaur tattooed on his back instead of "something nice... like an allotment". It is a strange environment, the Primals touring bubble. It's gonzo shouty, but with an underiying politeness and an extra deranged twist in the tale. On a memorable West Coast USA journey they once spent three days in Dolly Parton's tourbus (don't ask why) lying in the pink double bed, buzzing rigid on crystal meth, watching The World At War videos. "Innes' idea of a good time," someone remarks.

Not any more though. Today's madness goes no further than a surreal sing-song to the Bavarian military band marching themes that Innes picked up in Munich and a lot of running around tryin' to see if the horn section know any avant-garde tuba players. Pompa-pompbom-porn-diddley-born-born-bom (altogether now), "EIN-DREI-ZUBER!'. Nobody knows what 'zuber' means but it doesn't stop Molloy mrching about doing his mad lager dog act and bawling his belly off.

"You'll regret this you know," counsels a vaguely sober voice as the NME photographer zoorns in. But Fatty won't regret it any more than he regrets asking a squaddie who stuck a gun in his faca on a previous Norbern Ireland tour of duty, "Who the tack do you fink you are, son?", or laments getting nutted by a lesbian fliend of Debbie 'Echobelly' when he addressed her as "schweeeetheart". Because this is a Primal Scream tour, goddarnit. The rules just don't apply here. After 15 years of extreme attitude and swinging round the signposts to oblivion, they have their own codes and a sense of black humour that reached meltdown way back in the trip.

Outside, Ireland rolls back until we're in Galway. Just feet away, through the tinted glass, there are shops, and banks, and mothers and children. But they might as well be 3,000 light years away. As we steam into town, Bavaria is on one jukebox, Innes is merrily discussing Hitler's use of cocaine eyedrops and Elvis' last prescription ("six different types of speed!") and Throb's upstairs miming shotgun suicide to a soundtrack of Nirvana.

"Anyone join me to fight against America?" shouts Gillespie backstage atthe Galway Leisurelands. He's emerged from his bunk, run down to the sea to clear his head, and joined the band perusing the Iraq headlines in the papers. "it's global racism," reckons Mani. "It's Paki-bashing on a mass scale."

Perhaps inspired by the newspapers, they play The Stooges' 'Search and Destroy' in the soundcbeck ("Lookout momma they're using technology..."). After further jams of 'Rebel Rebel' and 'Paranoid', Gillespie's enjoying himself so much he tries to get out of the moving coach on the way back to the hotel.

"If I want to fall out of the coach, why shouldn't I? It'd probably do me good. Might knock some sense into me...

An hour later he's back at the venue winding up a sweet and innocent teenage local girl who's hanging out backstage. "Pssst. D'ya wanna come in here," he says, beckoning into a dark side room. "We're making a snuff movie. We're gonna kill that guy over there and film it. We're gonna stuff him full of cheese 'til he's had it."

"D'you know what? You're a brat," she eventually tells him.

"I'm a brat? Good. I like that," says Gillespie.

It's a valedictory show that night in Galway. More extrovert than the previous one, culminating in wild encores of The Stooges' 'Loose' and The MC5's 'Kick Out The Jams', and Bobby asking the danced-out crowd if they're "up for taking us out later?"

But that's not quite how it happens. We ride back into town with Mani giving his verdict on the Ian Brown album. "I think three of four songs are good and have potential but a lot of it's f-ing wank," he says. Er, did you fall out, then?

"It's a mad one. It's a nutty one actually. Something and nothing, but it's gone way out of control, up to the point of a couple of lads wanting to go and shoot him at one point."

While the band repair to the bar to forget their quarrels and indulge in a demented all-night ballad-singing competition with a quintet of middleaged Galway men, Bobby slumps out on his bed upstairs. There's a lot of explaining to be done. A handful of offform gigs last year and the band's detractors were quick to mouth off. While 'Vanishing Point' was widely hailed as a retum to 'Screamadelica' levels of innovation and pertinence, few made allowances for the fact that at Glastonbury and London's Victoria Park they were doing complex, untested material with a partly new band.

Up off his bed and sipping tea, Bobby admits that "we f-d up" but pleads that the only way to know how ready they were was to test the songs live. The layered sonics of the album were, he points out, completely different from taking a conventional rock band out.

"That's why if you hear the original of 'If They Move Kill 'Em' and then you hear Kevin Shields' mix, it sounds like pure John Coltrane, a really heavy free-jazz kind of thing," he says.

The Primals' sidestep left towards the '60s improv musics and obscure German synth sculptors is another muchmisunderstocd area. Anyone expecting the Primals to still be the band to drop an E to was clearly going to be wrongfooted by 'Vanishing Point'. But they've by no means turned their back on rock'n'roll kinetics.

"It's a high-energy rock'n'roll show but there's other weird shit there, mad metallic hip-hop, free-jazz stuff, dub reggae. We mix it all up and that's what's interesting about our band," he declaims.

The fact that the Primals are still absorbing the Pistols or Steppenwolf into rocker tunes like 'Medication' as much as they're feeding off Coltrane or Neu! hasn't stopped people suggesting they've gone all muso self-indulgent. Just the other week in these very pages, someone accused them of being part of a 'back-to-'74' prog-rock movement. Gillespie's not having it.

"He's an arsehole for saying that, because the whole thing about free jazz is it was a political thing. I ain't saying we're a free jazz band by any means right, but if you hear the Shields mix it is a free-jazz record. But that whole music came about 'cos jazz was about harmony and beeuty and then Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, people like Sun Ra started playing free jazz and screeming. If you hear those records, its the sound of people screaming, the sound of people in pain, anger. It is punk music. It's like primal scream (sic) music because black people were being f-ing slaughtered, and they still are. It was protest music in its very purest form. It was like screams."

So you'd be able to survive Lester Bangs' Custard Pie In The Face test for bands who've gone pompous?

"You've seen us tonight. Every time something goes wrong onstage we're all laughing. So we ain't pompous, serious musicians, we're punk rockers. I mean if somebody put a custard pie in my face I'd probably f-ing have to bottle 'em. Fair enough. But at the same time, we don't take ourselves seriously like that.

"We want our music to move people and tonight you saw it, we want people to come to the gig and f-ing get out of their skins and have a good time, but in a good way. That wasnae a druggy audience tonight, that was just pure joy. And that's why we do the music. I want people to get off on our music, I want it to be affirmative and even the more abstract, fractured stuff, I think people can relate to because they feel like that.

"Sometimes you feel abstract, fragmented, dislocated, and alienated and if you can make the music sound like it as well then I think it's a great thing, because if you can capture that mood it's a soulful thing too and it makes contact. I think it's important to have that contact because them's a breakdown in a lot of communities, there's nae contact between people, there's nae discourse, there seems to be a coldness, a numbness and a fear amongst people, which I think's sad.

"I think Britain at the moment feels claustrophobic, pregnant with violence, run-down, edgy, paranoid and no sense of communality. I want to question that. We want to question that. I want the music we're doing now to sound like Britain feels, which is hard, grey, industrial. Just to capture the atmosphere of this country right now, because I think it's a dark time."

So how do you equate your positive social attitudes with the band's love of Rommel, Stukas and German military marching tunes?

"I don't know if you can explain that. Except that we just think it's funnnny! It's because we grew up on World War Two movies, that's all. We're the most antifascist people you could meet. I used to put up Anti-Nazi League posters when I was 16 and go on anti-National Front marches, and my old man's been in the anti-fascist movement for years. Don't try and hang us with that! It's Spike Milligan! Keith Moon. Basically it's so camp!"

By 2am we've marched through a wide stretch of Gillespie's current mental space. We've talked about his hatred of Tony Blair ("We said to Alan McGee, 'You're dealing with scum, man"') his recent trip to Cuba, and on into striking dockers, Diana, Detroit car workers and the Black Panthers. With his voice cracking up as he lays into another corporate/state crime, it's not hard to see what he got from his trades unionist father. But there's another side to Gillespie that's about to kick in.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, GALWAY TO Derry. Morning stabs the collective forehead of the Primals and they gather in the hotel lobby. Some have been to bed, some have not; Gillespie has vanished. "Where's Bobby?" the cry goes up. "Did you try looking up in the sky?" suggests one of the party. When he eventually emerges, looking drawn but sounding weirdly rational, them's a story to tell. Some time after 2am Gillespie had wandered into the wrong hotel room and been given LSD. The entire night has been spent playing mental chess with his pro-mind game opponents and trying to come down oft the acid, which he insists he's not into.

"I don't like it, I kept telling the guy that. It's like my head's in Las Vegas. It's soulless and I don't want to be there."

The bus ride up to Derry is hypersense tinted for Bobby. The miles go by and the band keep the raucous, surreal gabble going, but Gillespie's off somewhere else entirely. We stop in tbe middle of nowhere at the Woodsjde Inn and all but the singer pile in for mixed grill and Guinness, scaring the landlady haIr to death. Innes, Throb, Mani and Duffy sling a few answers into a tape recorder but even the none-acid-wrecked Primals are too tripped out on road fever and black Genius to take it seriously.

Durrr... What do they like about Ireland? "The whiff of Semtex on the breeze," says Mani. "The jazz potatoes," offers Duff. Great. So are they pissed off that the Super Furry Animals were voted above them as the ninth best band in NME polls? "No, 'cos we are the tenth best band in the world ever," says Mani. "The next album's called 'Now That's What I Call The Tenth Best Band In The World Ever: Volume 6'."

So what's the next album gonna sound like? "We're just going to be ripping off the Super Furry Animals," sniggers Duffy.

Somehow, Bobby drags himself off the coach to take part in a photo shoot, outside the pub, with the wind blowing and chemicals still hopping up and down on his synapses. Innes, however, lurks inside the pub muttering darkly about how he despises the salesmanship side of band life. "I cannae be bothered with all that shite," he gripes. "Videos and photo shoots and waiting around three hours in a TV studio so you can mime three minutes. I don't wanna know."

For the remaining two hours of the journey to Derry, the band occupy themselves with Blaxploitation parody videos, 'When We Wene Kings' and falling into a coma.

"I f-in' love being on tour," declares Mani, waving his wine glass wrecklessly. "You f-in' skive all your life, and you f-in' wag school, and take no shit jobs just to end up here!

You could say that the Scream road trip round Ireland really ended up in Derry with a final detonation of 'Kick Out The Jams', a back projection of Che Guevara and a dressing-room full of local kids getting a lesson in Gram Parsons and Neil Young courtesy of the Scream ghettoblaster. And maybe for the players it did, and no doubt for Innes who'd particularly wanted to play Derry to prove you could have a happy time amidst the political strife, that was the culmination.

But for Gillespie, out there on a road trip round his own psyche, trying to pull together his shadowy social intuitions and his psychological dismemberment, I'd swear that he'd docked way back down the road. Hanging on by a spool, he'd scrabbled around in the plastic bag of tapes that sustain him while on tour, pulled out the obscure 1969 'Oar' album by Skip Spence and cranked up the volume. A kind of sick acid country rock, it sounds like California hippydom falling into the abyss. It's beautiful, mad, powerful and socially precognitive, and as the bus coasts on, jolting red wine down Bobby's wrists, he slips mentally inside the arc of a guitar solo.

"Shut the f-up will ya," he yells at the rest of the bus. "I'm having Holy Communion here!"

You either understand those moments and know that the belligerent, militant messy, and murderously kicking Primal Scream are capable of spitting out such life-support epiphanies, or you don't. May the road keep rising with 'em.

Originally appeared in NME, 21 Feb 1998.
Copyright © IPC Magazine Ltd.

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