The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie speaks exclusively to The Courier.
Lead singer of Primal Scream promises a great rock ‘n’ roll party to start off 3D Festival tonight
The lead singer of Primal Scream said he has been enthralled by the building of the V&A Dundee which, he says, is a “fantastic thing” for Dundee and Scotland.
Bobby Gillespie has promised a great rock ‘n’ roll party at Slessor Gardens tonight to kickstart the 3D Festival celebrations.
“The show for the opening of the V&A is both a big gig for us and a special event for Dundee,” Bobby said.
Appropriately for the event, celebrated artist Jim Lambie, who has designed album covers for the band and was previously nominated for the Turner Prize, is collaborating with them in a specially commissioned new work, which will be unveiled for the first time tonight.
“As with every gig we’ll play as well as we can but it is a big day for Dundee and for Scotland.
“We don’t know what Jim is doing, he’s creating a film but we have no idea what it’s about so it’ll be as much of a surprise to us as it will be for the audience.
“We trust Jim to do a good job. “I think this new museum is a fantastic thing, it’s unbelievable, they should have them all over the country.
“Things like this democratise us. I think it goes a long way towards that, it’s great that it’s going to be free entry to a lot of the exhibitions, that makes it a more social place.
“I’ll be hanging around to have a look at the V&A, it’s a great thing and we’ll be having a look in there.”
The free-entry Slessor Gardens gig will also help Bobby and the boys as they promote their “new,” (forgotten) album, which they actually recorded in Memphis in the summer of 1993, but shelved it almost immediately after the band and the record company decided it wasn’t the right vibe for them at the time.
Now though, Bobby explains, after the discovery earlier this year of the tracks in rhythm guitarist Andrew Innes’ basement, it’s time for the original mix to be revealed to the world.
Give Out But Don’t Give Up: The Original Memphis Sessions, is finally released on October 12 and will be accompanied by a BBC4 documentary on the album.
The mix by legendary producer Tom Dowd at his Ardent Studio in Memphis, along with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, Bobby says, is “timeless.”
“We started remixing and re-recording it in Memphis at the time. It was crazy,” he said.
“I don’t know what we were thinking about, maybe we thought it was too clean and sophisticated, too slick.
“I think we were a bit shocked at how great it was recorded, we were used to stuff that was a bit more fractured.
“We’ve just left it as Tom Dowd has mixed it. This is the mix that he played to us, there are nine tracks.
“I’m very happy, really proud of it, proud of the band, proud of the level of playing.
“We can’t really play much of it live though, it’s really a ballad album. It would be difficult to do it that way.”
So the gig at Slessor Gardens, Bobby says, will be “a rock ‘n’ roll party.
“It’s like a festival,” he says. “A celebration.”