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The Jung Doctors
Why don't we go to the park? I don't
think the barricades will burn today.
What do you like, apart from music?
Two boys grin.
"Don't know... films, some
times," murmurs Bobby.
"Like walking," adds Jim.
"Flowers, trees," says Bobby. "I think some trees remind me of people's haircuts. I really like trees."
Do you prefer the countryside?
"Well, I like living in town," admits Bobby. "But I like looking at
the countryside. We were in Devon yesterday. The countryside was
bril liant."
''I'd like to earn enough money to buy a castle," confides Jim. "I'd
like to live in a castle. Not for a pose... no, I really like
castles."
Primal Scream, then, make a kind of uncompromising pop. Pop that
sounds young and gleefully resigned to being young, happy or sad,
as moods go from time to time, open-ended, short songs that could be
love songs or visionary observations that glimpse the world much
wider than it might feel from a desk or breakfast table, or just
sha-la-la songs, to sing.
Primal Scream are dark horses beside Creation's split-open-colour-
sound area where we might under stand much more easily, say,
Slaughter or the J&MC (Bobby plays drums for them). Primal
Scream's lift is much more subtle: I was surprised when I fell in
love with it, slightly; I wasn't surprised when it happened in my bedroom.
Bobby Gillespie (singer) and Jim mie Beattie (guitarist) are not
wimps - nor, I suspect, are the other four members of
Primal Scream-but Primal Scream is only the right name because it's
not right at all. Though onstage, who knows? Wild, sometimes.
Shuffle through the years: Love and "some groups from the sixties",
the Subway Sect and "some groups from the seventies", up to June
1984.
''We used to make noises, then we learnt to play guitars, then we
learnt to write songs, and we quite liked it, and we thought, 'We'll
try and get a group, try and get records out and things like that.'
Oh, ah. Is that it?
"Aye! Honestly."
Meet me in a lavatory, meet me in some fresh-cut grass. Sometimes you
just feel different. Their 'All Fall Down' single is an infant Julian
Copeism: a tremorous ballad, a joy both naive and knowledgeable firmly
harnessed. `It Happens'is even bet- ter. They'll make a classic soon
(that's the point). Then again, one of their new song sounds like
Wire. Primal Scream are a very proud pop group, I think, but they're
saying nothing about it.
Most fans know that it gets to be worth shifting in the general
direction of almost everything, sooner or later. I'll give Primal Scream
a good few years more than most.
Copyright © Zig Zag. 1984
Lunatic Fringe - Bobby ; Sheepskin - Jim; Photo: Alastair Indge ; Text - Rex H. Garvin.
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