Primal Scream . Webadelica

Sunshine Superman

WORDS: Andy Cowan
PHOTOS: Neil Cooper

Shrugging off the burden of having invented indie/dance music, Bobby Gillespie has stepped out of his space capsule in time to pen the single of the Summer 1991.

WHEN PUSHED TO DESCRIBE HIMSELF, Bobby Gillespie reckons he's a degenerate. It's a label that's stuck since he was 15. "This guy said 'My mother thinks you're a degenerate'. I said 'Why?' and he said 'because you like punk music'. I knew the word but I never actually knew what it meant, so I looked it up and thought 'Yeah, that's pretty cool'."

Whether or not Primal Scream's voluble, if softly spoken frontman has, as the Rage dictionary would have it, "declined to a lower mental, moral or physical level" is neither here nor there since his band have just released the most startling record of 1991. 'Higher Than The Sun' is a celestial space odyssey, seemingly without precedent. Light years adrift from any of their previous creations, it finds them shedding more skin than a gigantic rhinoceros on a vicious regime of laxatives.

"I think it's the best record we've ever made," Bobby says, all fired-up despite a sleepless night imbibing protein pills at his Brighton lunarbase. "It's as good as anything I've ever heard; as good as T-Rex, The Temptations or The Rolling Stones. We've actually made a classic record. It's a record that people will be' able to listen to in 40 years time and it's still gonna be as relevant then as it now. It's got more in common with free jazz, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman than anything that's gone down in contemporary rock music in 1991. I'm happy about that. It's like a massive jump onto another planet. The 'American Spring Mix' (by old spar Andy Weatherall) sounds like mermaids on Mars, it sounds like music of the future."

Such a quantum leap in sound comes as a welcome watershed after five years on the indie margins. Unfairly burdened with a revivalist tag ever since their inception, last year's chartbusting 'Loaded' and 'Come Together' singles attracted flak of another kind, that of jumping the so-called "indie/dance bandwagon". Bobby is, rightly, despairing of such criticism, turning instead on those bands still content to revive the '60s wholesale.

"It's just strange that rock bands back in the '60s were influenced by soul music and jazz music rather than just The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Everything was influencing each other and I think that was really healthy for music. These days it seems that everything's too generic and rock bands are only influenced by other rock bands. In the past people would take chances and do different things but these days it seems to be that if a group finds a sound that's commercial they stick to that sound. Maybe it's just the fact that they want to keep selling records because people are familiar with that sound or maybe, as I think in most cases, they're unimaginative and unable to change.

"People seem to think that if a band's a guitar band it makes it more righteous than a guy in a studio in Italy making an Italian house record. They think that it's in some way more viable that some kid is sat in his bedroom writing a song. I don't think it is. I don't think it's any less or any more. All these groups have got to say for themselves is that they want to be superstars and sell loads of records. You never hear them saying what effect they want their records to have on people emotionally. There's this brilliant Lou Reed quote. He said 'It's important that the listener should never feel alone' and that's my view.

"I never like to know what people's songs are about, it's much better using your imagination. Imagine asking Marc Bolan what 'Metal Guru' was about? You know what it's about but you can never explain it, and the best pop music is like that."

The same criteria is easily be applied to 'Higher Than The Sun'. Over two hours we manage to compare it with "mermaids on Mars","sea horses on Saturn", "a kangaroo on angel dust". Finally we conclude with "it sounds like 'Eraserhead' looks." Whatever, the lyrics reflect Bobby's homespun philosophy from the line "Hallucinogens can open me or untie me..." onwards. So what of drugs? True or untrue, Primal Scream's debauched reputation precedes them. Bobby?

"We're a pretty sleazy group," he concedes. "I think with the drug thing people think a lot of it's hype but it's not, it's just the way it is. We don't glorify drugs and I don't think it's anything to be proud of either. But I'm not gonna judge anybody by what they do to themselves.

"People are a bit naive about how far-reaching drugs are these days," he continues. "There's a moral uperiority thing, y'know, because people live their life na certain way they think everybody else should. It's sort of fascistic. There's worse things going on: health service cuts and education cuts...

"If you look at drug casualties, there's not many smack addicts in the stockbroker belts outside London simply because those kids are too well off. But there's smack rehabilitation centres near council estates in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, London, Cardiff and Belfast. Why's that? It's because people are victims of their own circumstances."

Talk inevitably turns to politics, a subject close to Bobby's heart (his dad used to be a Trade Union leader) if not always central in the Primals' music. "I'm not a Christian, right," he spits vehemently when asked about the last 12 years of Tory rule, "but if there is a heaven and hell then those bastards are going to rot in hell. They're sheer evil!

"If you look at the history of the left wing movement they're always fighting each other. There's this theory that the Labour Party are allowed to win a general election every 15 to 20 years, so people think it's a democracy. The health service has been damaged to the extent that it can't be repaired in the five years a Labour government has got and the Tories and big businesses will do everything within their powers to really fuck the government up and fuck the working class up. The working class get duped by it and they all vote Tory 'cause they think it's gonna be better. It's frightening because it means that nothing changes," he sighs, firmly into his stride.

"At one point I read that if you're gonna go to University to study electronics you'd almost certainly get a grant but if it's for philosophy you wouldn't because the Tories thought that philosophy was a worthless vocation. That tells you something about them. They think that the. power of thought is worthless."

But can making pop records do anything to challenge the status quo? Not directly, says Bobby, but they can open other possibilities. "When people listen to records they use their imagination and fill in the blank spaces. That's a healthy thing. I think television is fucking evil, it's a soul killer. Most of it's just dull, uninteresting and stupid. It's a shame 'cause it's a good medium but I don't think it's been exploited in the way it could be. People read less books these days than they ever have and that's a telling sign of this society.

"Anything that provokes thought is a good thing. Anything that encourages conversation as well. Debate has been extinguished in this country. Even with Thatcher in the House Of Commons, she's always silencing people, so it's all one way. There's no room for any real debate.

"I think music can provide an antidote to that. If you can put a record on at the start of the day and it makes you glad to be alive then that's it. And that's what other people's music does to me. I think music can genuinely affect people and make them feel. That's what we want our records to do: make people laugh, make people cry, whatever.

"'Higher than The Sun' is a political record in that sense," he finishes, our conversation turning full circle. "It's making a statement. I'm singing about me and my character and my beliefs. I don't know if it's going to change anything, but it's good to make a statement. It's a punk record in that sense: 'This is me, this is what I'm all about'." Spray it loud, spray it proud .

Sounds of Summer

The top ten records on Bob Gillespie's Walkman this summer.

'HIGHER THAN THE SUN'
PRIMAL SCREAM
"Most groups release records in the winter or the autumn but i find those seasons far too cold whereas summer is, sticky and sexy and you feel like taking all your clothes off. That's why we release records in the summer."

'PERSONALITY CRISIS'
THE NEW YORK DOLLS
"I bought that in the summer of 1997 and I had to wear a dress after i heard the record, it had such aprofound effect on me. My mother caught me raiding her make up cabinet - I was putting on lipstick like Johnny Thunders. She freaked out. But that was the kind of effect The New York Dolls were supposed to have on you."

'I WALK ON GILED SPLINTERS'
DR. JOHN
"Walk through the fire/Fly through the smoke/See my enemies at the end of their rop/Walk on pins and needles/ See what they can do/Walk on gilded splinters/With the king of the Zulus."

'GOD SAVE THE QUEEN'
SEX PISTOLS
"I remember the summer of 1977, me and my friends had some spray paint and there was this bowling alley with a huge white wall where we lived and we spray painted 'God save the queen/The fascist regime/She made you a moron/A potential H-bomb'. Just as we were finishing the cops came 'round the corner, chased us and we ran like fuck. We back the next night and wrote 'Sex Pistols' to commemorate Jubilee year. We had red and blue spraypaint, but we were using so much, it was so hot and we were standing so close to the wall, we got areal buzz from it."

'PRIMITIVE'
THE CRAMPS
"I halluncinated myself into this song on the hottest day of the year, sometime in July 1984. I can still taste that day everytime I hear this record."

'NO FUN'
THE STOOGES
"It's a great summer record because everyone's felt like that. It's the school holidyas and you're bored so you end up sniffing glue or playing chicken on the railway line to get some kicks into your life. When you're an adolescent you can really relate to those lyrics. A record like that is more important than anything U2 have done. It's an anthem teen-agers can relate to universally if not intergallactically!"

'HOT PANTS'
JAMES BROWN
"There's a real sense of tension in that records, it's almost like sexual frustration. he's walking down the street and there's all these absolutely beautiful girls dressed in hot pants. It sounds lie he's really horney, he's dying for a fuck! It's heaven but it's hell at the same time. The lyrics are really good: 'Hot pants/Make a differene/Hot pants/Smokin'."

'THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN'
THIN LIZZY
"It's arecord I always associate with the summer because I once saw Phil Lynott running down the street in Glasgow, dressed from head to toe in leather, being chased by 500 girls. What made it better was he was laughing and I thought 'That's what I want. I wanna be a rock 'n' roll star'."

'FRANKIE TEARDROP'
SUICIDE
"When I hear that record I feel like I'm living in a really bad area of New York. There's a sense of foreboding: it's far too hot, people are uptight and somethings gonna crack. Whenever I hear it I feel like I'm in that environment."

'DRIVE IN SATURDAY'
DAVID BOWIE
"Bowie rules okay!"