Out Of Our Heads

PERCHED UNSTEADILY at the edge of the dancefloor amid the decaying grandeur of Glasgow’s Barrowlands ballroom, a young man is playing with a yo-yo. It whirrs down, it whizzes up again. As it does so its colour changes from luminous orange to a retina-re-adjusting green. Its owner nods his fringed head in approval. "Rockin’" he whispers.

Beyond him, the strobe lights glint on a minature Tequilla bottle filled with amyl nitrate as it is passed between three whey-faced, loose-shirted youths. Each inhales deeply from the pulse-quickening fluid, shudders, sniffs and returns, frozen-eyed, to the arms-aloft dancestep almost universally deployed by the two thousand revellers here tonight.

They stomp, they shake and they thrust their hands towards the stage where a wire-thin figure whips and spins above them. "Gonna get high til the day I die," moans the pipe-cleaner-proportioned object of their heightened affections.

‘Bobb-ee, Bobb-ee, Bobb-ee, Bobb-ee," chorus the unhygienically moist fans, terrace-style.

It’s 11.30 pm, Sunday night. Bobby Giilespie and Primal Scream are playing to their home town.

THE EIGHT-STRONG Scream team make an impressively eclectic sight. Singers Gillespie and Denise Johnson are the visual (and aural) antithesis of each other: one radiant, round, robust and with a pure black soul voice; the other a strung-out, twisted man-child with enormous, seemingly luminous white hands and a voice which mediates between bark, yelp and screech.

Guitarists Andrew lnnes (small, sporting black crushed velvet loon pants and "flared" hair) and Robert Young (affecting the rock’n" roll gypsy look in leather trolleys and flowing shirt) crash chords off one another as the stoic Henry Olsen thrumbs his founndation-shifting bass.

Drummer Toby Tomamov, keyboardist Martin Duffy and Hugo Nicholson, the computer operator, hover in the background. Together Primal Scream make a huge heart-shuddering noise that combines guitars of the early Stones, the rolling beat of The Happy Mondays with verging-on-the-Byrds melodies. But bolted on to this raw-edged indie sound are the hefty slabs of dub and abstract samples which make Primal Scream unique. And on tonight’s evidence, they don’t seem to be scared of the big, bad volume knob either.

Steam and smoke are rising in clouds from the audience of whistle-toters as the gospelised dance anthem Come Together is followed by the filling-loosening bass riff of Loaded, the group’s l990 chart break-through.

At this juncture, an enthusiastic frugger springs up from the audience to twirl her locks onstage. Bobby Gillespie smiles, she spirals. He swims over, she head-bangs even more violently. He hops and and weaves his hands like a faith-healer before suddenly completely out-manoeuvring her with a Wonder Woman speed-spin. The hair-tosser exits stage right.

BACKSTAGE, AFTER a powerful closing performance of the Scream’s crowd -pleaser Higher Than The Sun and Lennon’s Cold Turkey, a dapper, red-haired Glaswegian is nearly falling over with excitement.

"That was amazin’," he enthuses infectiously. "That was brilliant, one of the best gigs I ever saw. There’s only The Clash in ‘77 that I’ve seen better. In fact, I’d say it was the best ever, except I feel funny saving it. I mean. Bobby’s ma best mate, y’know?"

Meet Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records - home to The Jesus And Mary Chain, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub and, of course, Primal Scream -soft-spoken leader of the toppling, tippling crew of mad-eyed gangle-limbs now spilling into the fluorescently-lit dressing room. For though these may seem like your average loose-nostrilled hunters of rock’n’roll hilarity, they are not. These are McGee’s employees, Creation Records employees.

Robert Young, Romany curls a-flutter, comes striding in. "Ma mum’s put away ma JD," he announces. (Subtitle: My mother has just drunk my Jack Daniel’s ). "I gave it to her to look after, and she’s fucking drunk it!"

Upstairs, Andrew lnnes is strutting his dance-floor stuff with his own tiny mother. Gillespie is up there too, signing autographs for his skinny disciples. Nearly all of the Scream/Creation tribe end up punching the air beneath the mirror globes at some point during the next two hours of Andy Weatherall’s DJ-ing. But for the moment, all attention is keenly focussed on what’s happening downstairs. The entourage mill busily, rub their hands and grin gleefully. The reason? The drugs est arrive.

Tonight’s menu includes: "glug" (methadone, a soporific heroin substitute); Ecstasy (inhibition-dismissing, dance-floor friendly "love" drug); amphetamine sulphate; magic mushrooms; cocaine and - backstage staple - hash. The varied and various mood-alterants are liberally distributed amongst the tour regulars. "You know," muses Bobby, "it was a love of music that brought us all together and that’s what we really get excited about. But we also get excited when the drugs turn up... really excited."

THREE HOURS earlier, sprawled across the Laura Ashley hotel bedspread with eyes clamped shut and Glaswegian drawl barely distinguishable above the air-conditioning, Bobby Gillespie is far from excited. He couldn’t, in all honesty, even be described as attentive. If the truth be told, he’s barely awake.

"Aw, why can’t you just listen to the record and just write what you think?" he complains with an unnatural sleepiness of manner. "l’m so tired.

He attributes this profound drowsiness, a touch unconvincingly, to jet-lag from a recent trip to Japan.

"Best thing about Japan?," he mumbles unhelpfully. "The crystal methadrine (industrial-strength amphetamine) and, ah, the mescaline (potent hallucinogenic)..." His voice trails off and his eyes turn upwards in their grey-tinged sockets. Oh dear.

"Primal Scream’s first gig was at a club down the road from here," he offers after a five second interlude of apparent unconsciousness. "ln 1984," he continues "someone handed me a demo-tape. He hated it but he thought it was my kind of stuff, "The tape, it transpired, was an early recording by wall-of-scuzz merchants William and Jim Reid, The Jesus And Mary Chain. Gillespie was so inspired that he sent it down to his pal Alan McGee, who’d just started a record label in London. And so it came to pass that on October 12, 1984, The Jesus And Mary Chain, with Douglas Hart on bass, Gillespie on drums ("Nah, I couldnae play the drums, I was just on the same level as them, I could understand") played their first gig supported by Gillespie’s own group, Primal Scream.

Primal Scream had come out of the "pretty dissonant" combination of Gillespie’s punk wailing and Young’s Sex Pistols riffery. "We started off just making noise, a kind of release, it was very cathartic. I was rolling around on the fioor screaming, it was brilliant. Gradually we became more melodic. Before long, Andrew lnnes joined ("we just wanted someone who was a punk") and for the remainder of the decade Primal Scream made what would become prototype indie guitar rock. They were influential too. The Stone Roses’ Made Of Stone is uncannily similar to Primal Scream’s Velocity Girl.

But it wasn’t until 1990, when the then unknown DJ Andy Weatherall got hold of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have from their second LP, Primal Scream. A few inspired knob-twiddlings later, the original vocals entirely cut to make more space for the grindingly catchy bassline and curlicues of blues guitar, the song emerged, in virtually unrecognisable form as Loaded. It went: "We wanna be free to do what we wanna do/And we wanna get loaded." It went, "and we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do..." It went to Number 16. "We knew that Andy Weatherall) liked our group and that was at at a time when very, very few people liked what we did," says Gillespie. "And we dug what he played as a DJ and we knew that he was into really good music and that he was open-minded. Also the fact that he’d never been in a studio before was a plus. It was Pretty experimental in that sense. If I explain it, it’ll destroy the mystery and I don’t like explaining how tracks are made, it’s easy but it’s like...sort of... I don’t know..."

His eyes are either closed or rolling now. At one point it takes a sharp poke in the ribs to remind him that he was talking. In this instance about dancing.

" ... I think dancing ... I think it’s a great thing, a completely, completely liberating thing, I think it’s really cathartic at times. It’s like sometimes it’s kind groovy to just dance on your own or even dance with your own shadow, just kind of like... look at the shapes you make with your hands and just get in your own type of groove. And other times it’s good to dance with one person or a couple people you know. Or a large group of people, it can be a communal thing that’s good as well. I always liked dancing. I can dance to songs that don’t have any drums. You You can find the rhythm." Quite.

UNUSUALLY AMONGST rock’s many indulgent partakers of the spoils of success, 27-year-old Gillespie is very interested in talking about drug use. "I think if you’re allowed to speak about drugs and give your ideas clearly and independently and within context it’s fair enough."

AIthough he maintains that "certain people can use certain drugs as a tool" and admits that he may occasionally try to recreate on vinyl a sound he hears whilst under the influence, he believes that the decision to experiment - particularly with the currently vogue-ish Ecstasy - should be left entirely to the individual.

"I do believe that," he affirms. "But if you look at our band and you look at the drug usage involved it’s not just as simple as Ecstasy. It’s basically everything you can think of. How could I put it? A lot of what we do is quite hallucinatory. A lot of what we do is quite...quite...quite strung out and quite heroin-y. And the group does love amphetamines as well..."

Could you make the music you make without drugs?

"I think drugs can influence...how can I put it?" he says, groping for a precise explanation. "lt’s part of a life experience thing that the drugs are influential and that can go into your song-writing because...I don’t think excessive drug usage is going to lead anybody to a place of enlightenment. It might in the sense that they might meet situations they..." Suddenly he stops mid-flow, covers his mouth with his hands and stumbles out of the room. A few seconds later the sound of flushing is heard. Gillespie returns, picks up his water bottle, has a swift sluice-out, and continues - rather impressively - exactly where he left off.

"...they can learn something about themselves through a strange situation they find themselves in. But that can happen on alcohol. It can happen by kust meeting somebody and going home with them and three days later you’re involved in some mess or something. It can happen in a lot of ways. But I’m not one of those people that thinks if you take acid it’s going to make you more spiritual than somebody that doesn’t."

IT’S A very different Bobby Gillsepie that trots into the room the following morning. After a sleepless night (during which, he admits, people were "dropping like flies" through over-indulgence) that took him from Barrowlands to a nightclub to a friend’s party and back to the hotel, he’s still remarkably lively. So’s his left knee. His foot beats a constant rhythm, his head swings from side to side to a silent beat. From time to time, he throws his head back, neck arching up, mouth stretching In grotesque contortions. Last night, he confides, by way of explanation for his drugged state, he took six "E"s. He sits down and launches into a speed-head diatribe about the Screamadelica tour.

"lt’s a whole night, it’s not like the normal rock thing where they’ve got one or two support bands and then the main act comes on. With us everything’s as important as everything else. The Orb, he plays first and he gets the audience really kickin’, right, and then we come on stage and we give it to them, the rock’n’roll thing, right, and then we come off and Andy gives it to them with the records that he plays so that people all night are just on a constant high. It’s a totally different atmosphere, it’s wonderful. We give energy to the audience and they give it us back but more and the energy builds and . . . it’s like sex!"

And on he goes for over an hour. Talking and taping and grimacing his way around a number of topics dear to his (racing) heart: Music by Sun Ra, The Who, Mott The Hoople, Jane’s Addiction, Dionne ("Great music should always be an argument against committing suicide. It makes you realise that you’re alive"); a jazz book he’s reading at the moment by Leroy Jones ("about finding the note and going past it, trying to get complete expression, beyond and above form"); meeting people "who amaze me - by their audacity to stay alive".

It’s now almost 24 hours past his bedtime and the tour bus is reving up outside but Bobby Gitlespie has just one last thing to say.

"See the whole point of Primal Scream is that we want everybody in the audience to get their rocks off," he gabbles. "And for us to get our own rocks off in the process. So everybody gets their rocks off and feels high. That’s an important thing to say. That’s the whole point of it. To get your rocks off. You should print that. We wanna get our rocks off and we want the audience to get their rocks off."