Primal Scream . Webadelica

No More Yesterday

Primal Scream look back to look forward. Simon Reynolds retracts a few statements but still argues the toss. Pix: Tom Sheehan

PRIMAL SCREAM are pop fanatics. As they endure the ordeal of having their pictures taken, they're constantly whistling tunes - The Standells' "Dirty Water". The Stones' Gimme Shelter" and "Sympathy for the devil" - or bangnging out a backbeat on their knees, or acting out riffs. The only time I see them get animated is on the subject of Nick Kent and his legendary interviews with wasted- but-literate rockers like Iggy Pop and The New York Dolls. This is the lineage to which they aspire.

Primal Scream certainly look the part-pale, thin, dressed almost entirely in black Bobby Gillespie, their singer/leader, is a beardless, anaemic youth, softspoken, rather grave; his pipecleaner legs tightly encased by black jeans. Tambourine player John Martin is tousled, quizzical, a Rod Hull to Gillespie's Emu. Only bassist Robert Young seems at all corporeal being reasonably robust almost ruddy.

Gillespie looks as though he spends the whole of his life indoors, listening to records in perpetual twilight Primal Scream are one of the new breed of rock groups who never went out, who spent their youth cooped up in dark bedrooms, drowning in vinyl, steeped in the music press.. .in the process amassing enormous knowledge about rock, and fierce convictions about "what went wrong". Groups like The Smiths and The Jesus & Mary Chain - classroom dreamers, playground misfits.

Once upon a time pop used to be a commentary on adolescent experience. Now, pop is that experience; figures like Gillespie and the Reid brothers weave their desire from the vast accumulation of models and imagery in pop history. The dominant mood in Brit-pop is a nostalgia for something you never had, a vague, undefined pining for an era never actually experienced.

Brit-pop is epigonic - sadly sure that the (pop) era we're living through is less distinguished than previous ones.

In the Gillespie vision of What's Missing, 1967 is a pivotal year. I just think that time was probably the best time for pop music. An enormous number of great records were released. There always have been great records but for my taste, more so at that time.

"But me and the rest of the group don't only like music from '67. I love The Stooges, New York Dolls, Alex Chilton, Neil Young, The Pistols, the early Clash, Bo Diddley, Slade, Gene Vincent . (pause for deep breath).. .13th Floor Elevators, The Knack, The Stones, The Byrds, Gong, Love, The Lurkers, Tim Hardin, The Birthday Party and Nick Cove's solo .... thousands of groups, I could go on for hours!"

Do you feel there's a quality common to these artists that's absent from pop today?

"I think there is. Character, for a start. Today's groups don't have anything about them that's even slightly out of the ordinary. And then, how many records nowadays are really good songs?"

"There's always gonna be people making good music, but around '67 there were more. Maybe the climate people were living in encouraged them."

"Perhaps it was because it was the first time; a lot of people were making a blind leap into the beyond, blazing trails. Whereas now we have all these precedents; worse, something to live up to. And maybe a lot of the scope to do new things was used up then.

"There was an innocence then, but not a wimpishness. People did things for the sake of doing them, without ulterior motives. Then people got more cynical. I think people now are too paranoid about making music, scared they're gonna upset other people; they worry too much about what somebody's gonna think about it I think it was Sonic Youth who said that in America, bands are given time to grow, whereas over here, critics turn on bands really quickly. I think that sometimes you've gotto have a kind of tunnel-vision, a certain closemindedness, in order to achieve anything. Like the first PiL record, 'Public Image' - that's arecord that came out of nowhere. It had no discernible influences at all. That first single is what I'd call a psychedelic record."

Gillespie speaks in an agonised whisper, each comment is deliversd with a pained pensiveness, extracted like a tooth. It's clear he finds being interviewed extremely uncomfortable. He's polite to the point of being almost withdrawn. I am a little surprised; I'd expected truculence, having heard a while back that the two live reviews I'd one had riled the band. On each occasion, bored boneless by their near-catatonic stage prescence and wistful listlessness, I ran the gamut of anti-wimp derision - "namby-pamby; "cissies; "milksops", "pansies", "drippy; I was spoilt for choice - ultimately dismissing them as "a foint drizzle of poignancy". I regret these (uncharacteristically) thuggish comments now, having come to love several vinyl Primal moments, particularly "Crystal Crescent" and the first single on Elevation via WEA, "Gentle Tuesday".

What apparently annoyed the band was the idea that the innocence of their music was a simple reflection of how they were as people: the traditional rock biographical approach.

"I know what you're on about when you talk about innocence in these articles, but I think you make everything too black-and-white. Our records are quite soft, because of the nature of my voice. And because of that we are always called 'wimps' or 'wet'.

"Now, I'm not a wet or soft person, nor is anyone else in the group. It's not a macho thing that makes us resent it irs just that it implies you're a weak- willed person, that would submit to anything, and that's just not the case. lt's a real mistake to assume that because music is soft the people making it are soft too. Love made the most incredibly delicate music, and they were all a bunch of murderous, mad bastards.

"There is a kind of innocence that we believe in, not a childishness - but I like people who aren't cynical or worldweary,people who can still say 'God, look at that tree', not in a wet way, but in a good, bewildered way. Not innocence as in some idiot sin ging about a sweetie shop, that's disgusting. But.. .well, there's this song by The Misunderstood with lyrics that go: 'With half a mind you laugh at me/Cos I speak of colours you've never seen before/You've existed in a lie that will someday show/I can take you to the sun... to the sun, but you don't want to go.' Someone cynical could never sing a song like that. There's an innocence there, but an arrogance too. We'd like to project that kind of innocent arrogance."

Primal aren't part of the cuddly pop side of indie jangle; there's something aloof un-frisky, cool about them, A gravity.

"A lot of the calling us wimps thing stems from machismo, the sort of people who're afraid to show tenderness."

The "cut the gurly cack"/give us brass-tack politics and none of this miserabilist introspection/spite, spike and "attitude" brigade. I know it well. Primal Scream's sensitivity will get short shrift from these hard heads, desperate or a confrontational posture in pop to masturbate over, any posture, no matter how inane (and you can't get much mars inane than Grebo). And it's true: there isn't much groin in Primal Scream's music. Gillespie's voice doesn't simulate the pulsions, panting and pounding of passion, it traces the bangs and the pining of the fall in love; spasms of vision and memory, nather than of the flesh. Butterflies in the heart, rather than clenched need in the gut. A voice that swoons rather than sandblasts with fiery, gritty passion.

At their best a spine-less free-flight of rapture. But sometimes, just plain spineless. The soon-come LP, "Sonic Flower Groove", (a rather generic and over-determined title) is, over all, too much "All I Really Want To Do" and not enough "Younger Than Yesterday": there's too much of the kind of trite, sighing "heard it somewhere before" tunefulness that the Mary Chain indulge in, plus a bit of that "la-la-la" shit. But tracks like "Gentle Tuesday; "Silent Spring" and "I Love You" are biffer-sweet beauties.

So, about your "complete renunciation of the pelvis"...

"We're ethereal, yeah ... that's just the way it comes out I think we will get more abrasive and rythmic. Jim's starting to play Stones-type rifts. We're starting to play more from the hips now.

"But I think our music is passionate... whereas chart music I don't think is that emotional or earthy. Something like Sly Stone is earthy, a real f**beat, an orgy. But someone like George Michael isn't sexy because he goes out of his way to look sexy. It'ss like if you see a picture of a girl sticking out her tits it's really gross, she looks like a piece of meat, whereas if you maybe you just see a girl sitting there in a sweater, but she's got a look in her eye, and you think she's got it that's sexy. I think if someone tries to make a sexy record then it won't be sexy."

What kind of girls do you lot go for? With "your kind" of group I always imagine the songs are addressed to thin, sepulchral, sad-eyed girls with lots of black eyeliner. The Nico look, as opposed to a more conventionally brassy, curvy ideal of beauty.

"It varies. For me, a current ideal would be Beatrice Dalle. And she's quite fleshy really. Otherwise... Marianne Faithful looked really beautiful."

Pursuing my hunch further ... why are you so thin?

"I hardly ever eat I dunno - I think I've always been like this ... I mean, you couldn't be in The New York Dolls or the Stooges if you were portly!"

Do you like. food?

"I don't mind it"

What do you eat? Do you eat?

"Trash. Some days I almost forget to eat. Then I just get any old crap and shove it down my gullet I only eat cos I've got to, in order to live."

Hmm. I've never met anyone who's indifferent to food. (Bit of a trencherman, myself). What of the accusation that Primal Scream are musical anorexics, regressive rockers? That you've turned your back on the future?

"I don't think it's a question of going back I think music should be like books - you go in to a library and there's thousands of books and you can choose any of them. Great pop records should be timeless Although a lot of really good records aren't timeless, they're good for the moment and that's fine.

"We're no Luddites either, just because we only use guitars. I like some bands that use synthesisers. Like Suicide, they used the technology abrasively, and they also had a lot of heart too. We're not scared to use technology, but neither do we feel there's an obligation to use it the way someone like Matt Johnson thinks there is."

What do you think of the argument that hip hop and sampling is the future (and you're the past)?

"Some hip hop I've heard is psychedelic. The use of space, the space it opens up in the head. I've thought 'God knows how he sculpted that!' It's interesting, but the trouble is we just don't get to hear much of it. Same with old soul."

Does the sexism offend you?

"Well, it's not very sensuous music, there's not much role for the female there. But then, some of the greatest records have been sexist 'Under Your Thumb', garage records... there's not much you can do about that. But with a lot of that aggressive machismo you realize that it's the attitude of losers, people who are scared of women and so overcompensate. All those garage records with words like 'Go away/I don't need you', you know the guy has n ever had a woman in his life."

And the anger and violence is so exaggerated and absurd it becomes dislocated from any real target, becomes like a burst of abstract energy, a real buzz.

BOBBY GILLESPIE is 25, and has followed the classic decade-long course of development fat an indie popster. The Pistols turned his head, aged 15. "I never really liked music before...well, I'd liked T. Rex, Gary Glitter and Bowie on the radio, but I'd never gone to buy their records.

Like everyone else, he followed through the logic of punk: the origins of Primal Scream are a PIL-type band. "We used to mess around in the scoutshal, learning to play from Jah Wobble and Peter Hook basslines." Then, the great crossroads in the post- punk impetus: you either chose white noise or black dance, aloof isolationism or shiny entryism. Gillespie went along New Pop for a while~- "I liked Soft Cell and ABC, but not Spandau."

But as 1982 spilled over into 1983, New Pop got fat - it was the year of the obligatoy black backing singers, the string section. what 'was once ironic luxury, a post-post-punk binge, backfired. An expensive, "classy" sound was de rigeur. Mavedck, imposter spirits like The Associates faded away. People began to realise the enormity of the con.

There were dissenting spirits. Edwyn Collins pointedly wore a Sex Pistols T-shirt, a sullen reproach to the new gaiety. There was a general retreat from what Julie Burchill called "beigebeat' - white versions of black dance pop - to a whiter- than-white new rock aesthetic - The Birthday Party and The Fall, later The Smiths, Go-Betweens, The Membranes' flocks of bastardised Beefheart, Creation's nouveau rockism. "Beigebeat', the emergent sound of Planet Pop, the soundtrack to yuppie health, unproblematic sexuality and self- assurance, was countered, (impotently) by a revived belief in the misfit-as-a-way-of-life. "Beigebeat" was and is all about warmth; - soul with its fiery, ecstatic elements tempered, turning it into a medium for "communication" rather than an ecstatic expression. The new white rock was and is all about the chill of awe and alienation.

There was a retreat from the whole 1982 notion of eclecticism - the cocktail, the Culture Club/Style Council rainbow coalition of races and eras, the black plus white = lukewarm water equation. A retreat to a dream of "pure pop". More and more sure that today's planet pop offered them no place, either as consumers or performers, people began to look back, lonpingly, to a time when pop did,

Julian Cope's celebrated article on garage psychedelia was influential, providing a lot of discontents with crucial data (what compilations to buy...) You could take Cope as a kind at emblem for the retro mood and its fallibility. Here is a man with superb perception about what's great in rock; who can say something as beautitully true as: "what kind of person would choose Bacharach and David over Arthur Lee?", (a romanticist blast against the classicism of New Pop); who knows exacily what needs to be done but who can only praduce something as null as "Saint Julian". The fatal flaw of literate rock: an understanding of myth and magic is no guarantee that you too can be magkal- in fad, an understanding of the process is prabably counter-productive. Never let a rock critic near the guitar.

Primal Scream - like The Smiths, Husker Du, Jesus & Mary Chain - are regressive rockers who've (largely) evaded the Julian Cope Syndrome. None of these bands indicate a way into the future, they're more like a triumphant full-stop to a long line of development. At their best, Primal Scream, like those bands, are like an ancestral reproach to the future - a future, if planetary pop is any indication, of secular, demystified, hyperactive bland repletion. They make me wonder whether it wouldn't be so bad if the future stopped here.

Originally appeared in Melody Maker, August 29, 1987.
Copyright © Melody Maker.

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