Primal Scream . Webadelica

Give Out Press Release

There is a new Primal Scream album - GIVE OUT BUT DON'T GIVE UP. Now we need it more than ever:

In 1994 rock music is supposed to mean either wide-eyed and winsome impressions of what bad power-pop sounded like in the toilet-bowl of The Vortex over 15 years ago or raunchily-reheated baked beans turned up in the scabrous posing pouches of salivating musos. Original tightrope-walking nightstalkers like the Stones and Clinton may get a nod of the head but theSpirit which made them has been through so many intestines that the latest vapid pretenders now seems to end in the lunch-box of the school prefect. Unless that spirit, which once meant adventure, vision and danger can live on without trying to earn a Blue Peter badge, Primal Scream know this.

Like a beautiful monster devouring what lies in its ravenous path, The Scream gorges on inspirational diamonds from the past, letting them mate with its own unique soul as another stimulus to be pursued, hued and spewed back into the maelstrom. Primal Scream not only walk it like they talk it but enter the pole-vault and limbo championships to boot.

In '91 SCREAMADELICA consolidated the post acid-house euphoria which had given birth to "Loaded", "Come Together", "Higher Than The Sun" and "Don't Fight It Feel It". The effects were seismic and there hasn't been an album to touch it since (until now). If that was their exploratory mission inot the unknown then the new album returns to the mothership with a vengeance, burning a swathe through the garden of earthly delights which has yielded some of the greatest music ever made - Memphis soul, 70's Stones, the P-Funk - and drop-kicking it into Primal orbit. As ultimate fans The Scream have finally had the means and opportunity to revel in a lifetime of passion.

When 'Screamadelica' reared its red and yellow head things were different. Post-acid dance music had divided itself into factions like hardcore and garage while techno was well underground. Rock had long since buried its true soul under a welter of watery retreading and clean living. The vapour trail of the indie dance movement which some credited The Scream's "Loaded" as galvanising still blew vague smoke rings around existent gonads. They'd missed the point. And the bus.

Primal Scream had gestated and emerged in mid-80's as Bobby Gillespie stood behind the drumkit in the Jesus and Mary Chain, who had just signed to his best friend Alan McGeee's record label Creation. With Robert Young and Andrew Innes on guitars they spent the rest of the decade exploring every style of guitar rock from Byrds-style jangle to the Stooges.

1990 and "Loaded" - Andrew Weatherall's stripped - down/pumped-up reconstruction of '89's "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have" using funk, dub and "Easy Rider" - crystalised the band's discovery of dance music's open fields and limitless possibilities while keeping intact their original vision of what was classic and killer in rock... and beyond. "Come Together" was the 1990 summer anthem, though never as obvious as it seemed being more of a plea for something that could never be. "Higher Than The Sun" melted the hallucinogenic space blues with The Orb and later turned into a Jah Wobble-underpinned Dub Symphony. "Don't Fight It Feel It" remains the ulitmate hedonists' anthem with the MC5's starship well and truly in orbit.

This remarkable quartet of singles stroked the lost umbilical chord between heaven and hell and tied off a pressure pocket which ejaculated volcanically in mid-'91 when 'Screamadelica' strafed a path to pole position in the national album chart.

'Screamadelica'- one of the first albums to be released in double DJ-friendly format - stunned the status quo and rocked the boat. The rock enclosure wasn't used to music running so wild and free with total disregard for what was deemed normal behaviour and categories. No-one had revelled in the simple joys of paramelonary excess and twillight zone skateboarding since the Stones but now the stars were the limit. The charred soul of rock 'n' roll had been struggling for years with grey mundanity but now it was fitting and flirting again like a beautiful ghost with strides round its ankles, circling the old dead zones, turning its nose up at the buzzards of conformity and embarking on a voyage.

'Screamadelica' revelled in its its sense of discovery and charting unknown territories which would think nothing of planting Sun Ra's Arkestra in Brian Wilson's sandbox with a James Carr ballad.

Dance music had opened up The Scream's horizons to include the new technology as an extra instrument. It had also introduced them to Andrew Weatherall and The Orb. Now songs began life as mutant tadpoles which could then pass through a multitude of mixes and incarnations before feeling fully initiated. The group had always worn its influences on its sleeve. Sometimes on its head. These reference points are all-important but constantly misunderstood. The Scream passed the point of mere plagiarism around the time of their first rehearsal. When influences are consumed with such voracity and passion the end result isn't going to be some half-assed diluted trickle of tribute but FULL-ON PROJECTILE VOMIT FIREHOSE-IN-YOUR-FACE CELEBRATION. Like 'Screamadelica', which roped together the four singles, added sound pictures like Brian Wilsonesque "Inner Flight" and spiritually-napalming "Shine Like Stars" plus pointing to a mature realisation of the Stones fixation via soaring "Movin' On Up" and beautiful "Damaged". These last two were produced by Jimmy Miller, who'd clawed the mixing desk through albums like 'Let It Bleed' and 'Sticky Fingers'.

Meanwhile The Scream live had developed into a full-blown Experience which would start with Dr. Alex Paterson easing into proceedings before The Scream and then Andrew Weatherall taking it out. The album won that year's Mercury prize for best album, the group slaughtered the 1992 Glastonbury and a trip to a spiritual home of Memphis came up with "Stone My Soul" and "Carry Me Home" for the 'Dixie-Narco' EP, which lead with "Movin' On Up" and also included the 10 minute "disco-mantra" of 'Screamadelica'.

The end of 1992 saw Primal Scream starting songs for the next album. By now dance music had risen from the underground to become a massive, ever-growing force. Albums like 'Screamadelica' and 'U.F. Orb' had paved the way for a thousand imitators while rock itself continued to draw inspiration from the wrong things. Like poxy "new wave", which was crap back in 1978. In the hands of the newcomers it was all too clean and Cliff Richard. Rock couldn't even wish it had died for somebody's sins - it simply got smothered in innocence, foppery, misdirection and that strain of wholesomeness which first separated Little Richard from Pat Boone.

The Scream had started back in the mid-80's fired up by the likes of the Stones, Stooges, MC5 and Johnny Thunders. As blandness prevailed their home listening renewed the fanatical interest in such classic danger merchants plus the ever-present thirst for new discoveries contantly unveiled fresh delights in the garden, like P-Funk, classic Memphis soul, Gram Parsons.

With dance music bursting its banks with new blood maybe rock could do with some skaking up again. The new album has been forged over the past 18 months in hotel rooms and studios from Chalk Farm through Memphis to Los Angeles. Ideas tried and tested, old giving way to new and pupae exploding into opiated butterflies on the final stretch.

Again the cast has changed. Many of the tracks were laid down at the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis under the direction of Tom Dowd, the man who hued Aretha and countless other gems from the deep soul mine of the 60's and 70's. Stones collaborator Jim Dickinson was there along with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and Memphis Horns. George Drakoulias of Black Crowes fame mixed "Rocks", "Jailbird" and "Cry Myself Blind" and supervised the LA re-recording of "Call On Me". George Clinton was taken by the balladic "Free", anthemic "Funky Jam" and "Give Out" and was smitten enough by THE SPIRIT coursing within that he couldn't resist adding his own vocals.

The first single is called "Rocks". A call to "get yer rocks off" over a razor-stomp explosion of wired urban energy. In moving on Primal Scream have looked back, captured the essence of something that was nearly lost forever and propelled it into the 90's. The Spirit and The Scream. A marriage made in Heaven, Hell and The Soul.