PRIMAL SCREAM
Thirty years on, how Screamadelica got on one, turned ‘indie’ upside down… but exacted a high price. “It goes to show just how fragile we all are.”
As the ’80s ended, PRIMAL SCREAM were out of time and running out of road, playing to empty clubs and watching everything that could go wrong, go wrong. Then, after remixer and visionary Andrew Weatherall brought acid house satori with 1990’s hit Loaded, it all started going right. Their 1991 magnum opus was a triumph of collaboration and seizure of the gestalt, but how did they get there? And what did it cost? “It was a beautiful time,” they say, “but there had to be a comedown.”
Bobby Gillespie: We released the second album [Primal Scream] in September 1989. We thought we were a great rock’n’roll band and we gave it our all, but we didn’t sell many records. We went on tour and we were playing Dudley Junction to 20 people. There was a real possibility we’d have to get day jobs. I remember standing in the dole queue and feeling like a complete fucking loser.
Andrew Innes: Andy Weatherall came to review one of our shows [Exeter Arts Centre, September 21, 1989, for NME]. He was the only person who said anything good about us. He had long hair, tattoos, leather trousers – he looked like he could be in the band. When he said he had a signed copy of Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak, we thought, “OK, he’s not just some weird acid house guy.”
Alan McGee: Bobby started going to the clubs, Shoom and Spectrum, although I think it was Innes’s idea to get Weatherall to mix the band. There was no far-reaching plan, we just wanted to hear a Primal Scream record being played in the clubs.
BG: There was a real belief things were changing because of the culture of acid house, because of ecstasy. I felt that moment deeply.
It felt that there was a crack in the sky and some light had got in and people were waking up to their true potentiality in terms of being creative, open, socialistic, loving, inclusive. Indie felt solipsistic, grey, dull, unglam, snobbish. The acid scene was open, inclusive, druggy, sexy, glammy. I had to get involved in it and use it, [not] in an exploitative, nasty way, but it was like a new psychedelic era opened. There was a world of possibilities.
AI: The first time Weatherall played Loaded [February 1990’s deconstructed remix of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have] out at [London’s] Subterania, everyone started doing the Sympathy For The Devil-type “Woo! Woo!”s. Martin Fry and Kevin Rowland were there and said, “Is that your record? It’s great.” There were a few ‘indie traitor’ remarks, but we were transitioning.
AM: I wanted more of Bobby on Loaded [a Number 16 hit single in March 1990]. Innes said, “Keep out of the records McGee, you’re just the fucking manager.” Throb [Robert Young, Scream guitar] hated Loaded, he didn’t get fully into what they were doing until [August 1990’s Number 26 hit] Come Together.
AI: We recorded it in [London’s] Jam Studios with a gospel choir. Nicky Brown, the choir leader said, “The girls want to read the lyrics first because they won’t sing anything vulgar.”
Hugo Nicolson: The first time I met Primal Scream was when they came down to Eden to hear the mix of Come Together and had a crazy party in the lounge, and it turned into bedlam.
BG: In July we got an advance, a couple of thousand, and Andrew had the idea to build a studio, which we did in Hackney. That summer, autumn and winter, me, Robert and Andrew began writing the songs that would become Screamadelica, writing on piano, whereas before we wrote on guitar. Robert was into major sevenths, the Carole King/Beach Boys chords… it was a beautiful time, the three of us were incredibly close.
AI: Getting a sampler opened up new ways of constructing. Suddenly you could have tablas, strings, brass, and before that you’d have needed a major label budget.
BG: Come Together got to Number 26 and we followed it up with Higher Than The Sun [Number 40 in June 1991]. When we played it to Alan, he went, “This isn’t going to be a hit but we’re going to release it anyway because it’s a statement, the best fucking record ever made.”
Alex Paterson: We were all interconnected. I knew Alan McGee from going to see Chelsea, and my manager Alex Nightingale, who became Primal Scream’s manager, gave Innes a copy of [The Orb’s November 1990 single] Little Fluffy Clouds. He got it, and they sent me Bobby’s vocals for Higher Than The Sun, and then we applied The Orb’s ethos to it.
Henry Olsen: A courier brought the DAT of Alex Paterson’s mix and I thought, “What a magnificent sound, but are any of us on it?” I really didn’t know if it was an Orb record or a Primal Scream record. But it didn’t matter. Primal Scream were approaching [Miles Davis’s] In A Silent Way territory… there was a real sense of anything goes. Denise [Johnson] singing [August ’91 single] Don’t Fight It, Feel It was a part of that whole thing.
“I GOT THE HEADPHONES ON AND COLLAPSED ON THE FLOOR.” Bobby Gillespie
AI: Denise took us to another level. I’d been working with Tony Martin from Hypnotone, he was teaching me how to use the sampler. They were doing a PA and I went to check them out, and Denise was singing live. It was, OK, this is exactly what we need.
HO: Listening to Denise sing wasn’t just an aural experience, it resonated with the whole body.
Martin Duffy: Not being confined to working with the band was liberating. We were seeing music as sound, as textures and layers, and we were listening to everything – soul, ’60s and ’70s out-there jazz, avant-garde classical, experimental electronic music… it was all feeding into what we were creating.
AI: With the exception of Slip Inside This House, which had been done for a 13th Floor Elevators album to raise money for Roky Erickson, we were aiming to make singles that sounded good in clubs. Then McGee said, “You better finish the album.” And we were like, “What album?”
BG: Alan booked us into Jam studios in Finsbury Park in summer ’91 for three weeks. We were serious about getting the work done. I had missed singing Slip Inside This House because I’d hammered myself bad. I got to the studio from Brighton, got the headphones on and collapsed on the floor. You can hear me in the middle going “trip, trip, trip”. Robert did the rest. I wasn’t doing that again.
AI: The sessions at Jam ended abruptly. We left the studios on the Friday evening and came back on the Monday morning and the place had been stripped – the grand piano, mixing desk, even the cabling between the rooms, and also our 24-track for Inner Flight. Fortunately, we’d saved all of Henry’s fantastic Beach Boys stacked vocals to floppy disc. We finished it at Eden where Weatherall was mixing.
BG: We knew the album would begin with Move On Up and end with Shine Like Stars, and it was then a case of Andrew making it work in terms of mood and arrangement.
HO: Andy Weatherall and Primal Scream fit like a glove. Weatherall was one of those people who was completely immersed in music all the time.
He was intuitive and forceful, and of the attitude ‘Let’s just see where this goes.’
HN: We’d get the multitracks then we’d be, I like this, I like this, I like that, let’s get rid of this and that bit, and let’s put this beat here, and that bass line there. After Loaded, the gloves were off. Andy could do whatever he liked, and my attitude was to take the tracks as far away from the originals as possible, and make them as out there as possible.
AI: You always wanted your bit to be a bit louder than everyone else’s on the record, but you’d get a track back from Weatherall and find you’re not even on it! You couldn’t be egotistical.
AM: Once we had the acid house tracks done we needed a producer for the rock ones. I said, “You’re obsessed with the Stones, I know Jimmy Miller, let’s get Jimmy Miller”, and fucking hell, it was as brilliant a match as Weatherall. He was a legendary fuck-up, but he came good for a second time with Primal Scream. He nailed Damaged and Movin’ On Up. Then we got Paul Cannell to do the artwork, a great guy.
AI: I went into Creation one day and upstairs there was a guy with long hair and paint everywhere. I said to McGee, “Who’s that?” McGee went, “It’s the artist in residence.” He’d given him a little space to paint. If Alan liked you, he’d support you.
AM: Screamadelica came out in September ’91 and made Number 8. More importantly, it was a fucking classic.
AP: The live shows at the time were great. I did a warm-up DJ slot, Weatherall did a slot after, the group played in between. It really worked.
MD: Felt had played with Primal Scream in the late ’80s, in these drab, grey indie venues. Then suddenly we were playing shows with a club element to receptive audiences, like we’d gone into Technicolor. We’d always wanted success, to be on Top Of The Pops and have hit singles and be on the front covers of magazines. But it all happened so quick, and, inevitably after going so high, there had to be a comedown.
AI: By ’92 we were starting to crash. We were going to clubs and being escorted into back rooms where we sat all night, and the next thing you knew the cleaners were coming in saying, “You’ve got to go home.” You’d not heard a record or danced, you were just getting wasted.
AM: By ’92, they were all junkies – not just the band but the people on the peripheries too. It got bad for a while.
HN: They were still touring Screamadelica when we went into Roundhouse studios to start recording the follow-up [in September ’92]. I was producing, and one thing I hate is when bands romance their heroes, and say things like, well the Stones did smack on this album which I love, and The Velvet Underground did smack on this one which I love, so in order to get to that place, we have to do smack. And that’s what Primal Scream did. They were all pretty much smack addicts.
What had been a utopian experience, with
Screamadelica and with acid house, then got ragged. Coke was king, and for some people smack was king, and they stopped being a gang and it became very selfish. They nicknamed Roundhouse “Brown House”, and when we went on tour to Australia [in late ’92] I cracked and jumped ship.
HO: It did get chaotic and rudderless. It’s a sobering thought, thinking of all the people on that record that have since left us. All these wonderfully talented musicians, Andy Weatherall, Denise Johnson, Robert Young, taken before their time. That is incredibly sad.
AP: It goes to show just how fragile we all are, and how fleeting life can be. They did such great work, and the ones who are left are lucky to still be here.
AI: The turning point was when we decided to make records at 11 in the morning, without having a drink or doing anything beforehand, with [1997 LP] Vanishing Point. It took a long time to get creative again, but we did.
For its 30th anniversary, Screamadelica is available now as a 10 x 12-inch single box set and a double-vinyl picture disc. The unreleased collection Demodelica follows on October 15 (Sony).