Primal Scream
GILLESPIE RE -LOADED
Primal Scream’s `Screamadelica` was critically acclaimed and won the Mercury Prize before tumbling into relative obscurity. TIM WORTHINGTON revisits this seminal early 90s LP.
The 'history books', for want of a better word, would have you believe that the history of Creation Records runs something like this; the label spent six or seven years putting out nondescript records by moaning indie bands who went way over budget but weren't good enough to sell any records, plunging the label into spiraling debts that were only escaped once Oasis came along and saved the world with their uncomplicated brand of 'honest guitar music'. The reality, however, is rather different.
Yes, Creation had indeed run up massive debts by the time that the Gallagher Brothers were hailed as wheel-reinventers for the modern age by virtue of having clumsily added new words to old Neil Innes songs, but that was primarily down to the fact that the managerial side of things was run in a notoriously chaotic and haphazard manner. The fact of the matter is that not only were Creation already among the most commercially successful 'indie' labels ever to operate in the UK - something that gets repeatedly written out of history is the fact that in the early 1990s, Ride enjoyed a consistent series of what were, by the standards of the day, substantial chart hits for an indie act - but on an artistic level, they were virtually untouchable. Scan through the early stages of a Creation discography, rather than relying on self-important third-hand accounts of events, and you will see dozens of names who continue to exert a huge influence over popular music to this day. Most significantly, the latter half of 1991 saw the label's output reach an artistic and creative highpoint that frankly has rarely been equalled. Within the space of a couple of weeks, Creation put out My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless", Teenage Fanclub's "Bandwagonesque" and Primal Scream's "Screamadelica", while their offshoot label Heavenly released St. Etienne's "Foxbase Alpha".
It's no overstatement to say that reviewers fell over themselves to praise the above albums on their original release, nor that every single word of that praise was thoroughly deserved, but few at the time could have realised the enduring importance that this handful of releases would come to have. "Screamadelica" and "Foxbase Alpha" both made bold moves to reacquaint modern dance music with the form and structure of traditional pop and rock, but approached the idea from totally different perspectives and came up with impressively disparate results; "Bandwagonesque" finally kicked free of the outdated post-punk indie ideal that certain genres were deemed 'undesirable', and welded a love of early 1970s American soft rock and power pop to a very 'British' songwriting style; while "Loveless", to put it bluntly, sounded like a transistor radio with its dial stuck between a pirate station playing hardcore electronica and the feedback siphoned off from the loudest amp at a heavy metal concert, recorded onto a crumbling old C90 that had the sound of a sulky indie bedsit girlie band poking through underneath. It's often claimed that homegrown alternative music was too flimsy to withstand the onslaught of grunge when Nirvana's "Nevermind" growled its way up the charts towards the end of 1991, but it's a claim that's only really made by people who've forgotten to take all four of these sterling efforts into account. Each of them is worthy of detailed analysis and critical attention - and arguably, "Screamadelica" is the most significant of the lot.
Primal Scream had in fact already been around for a number of years by the time that "Screamadelica" was released. Lead vocalist and main driving force Bobby Gillespie was a childhood of Creation boss Alan McGee, and he started his musical career as the drummer with the label's early signings The Jesus And Mary Chain. He left the band to form Primal Scream in 1985, and his new outfit duly signed to Creation. Primal Scream's earlier offerings, 1987's "Sonic Flower Groove" and 1989's "Primal Scream", capture the band at an awkward, feet-finding stage. Their musical reference points are clear - 1960s garage bands, The Rolling Stones, soul and r'n'b - but they still have yet to coalesce into something truly individual. While they still make for entertaining listening, they are sorely lacking in the sense of purpose and direction that has driven all of the band's subsequent output. However, it was to be the very nature of their disparate and loosely attached influences that would lead them towards their musical breakthrough.
Shortly after the release of "Primal Scream", word reached the band that influential DJ Andrew Weatherall was regularly playing 'I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have', a track from the album that bore the clear influence of Memphis-era Rolling Stones - as part of his sets. Wetherall initially wanted to do his own remix of the track, but Gillespie sensed the opportunity to do something new and interesting and set about the remix as a collaborative process. The track was stripped down into its component parts of blaring brass, crunching power chords, strings, gospel-styled backing vocals and bluesy slide guitar figures, and these were duly rearranged over the top of a hefty looped drum sample into an anthemic dance instrumental that was, to all intents and purposes, an entirely new piece of music. ‘Loaded’, as the dramatically rearranged track was now renamed for single release in early 1990, fitted well with the mood of a time when the fusion of alternative rock and dance music was something exciting and new and generally done with imagination, and with the aid of unexpected heavy airplay from Radio 1 it managed to break into the top twenty (another part of Creation’s history that gets conveniently forgotten by the rewriters). This was followed over the summer by the top thirty-skimming ‘Come Together’, a track that continued the flirtation with modern electronic dancefloor sounds but threw such intriguing elements as folk rock and gospel influences into the mix. A full year passed before the appearance of the startling ‘Higher Than The Sun’, a record that transcends genre boundaries and defies description even today, and despite deservedly becoming NME’s Single Of The Year for 1991 somehow only managed to scrape the top thirty. ‘Loaded’, ‘Come Together’ and ‘Higher Than The Sun’ had all sounded completely different to each other yet somehow broadly unified, and this remarkable feat was only compounded by the release in the late summer of 1991 of ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’, a track that daringly sidestepped all indie-fuelled notions of musical snobbery to present what was essentially a more abrasive take on the chart-friendly throwaway lightweight House Music ‘rave’ sounds favoured by faceless Europop combos with names like DJH Featuring Stefy, Twenty 4 Seven Featuring Captain Hollywood and The Source ‘Featuring’ Candi Staton, and itself credited to Primal Scream Featuring Denise Johnson.
Tellingly, few knew what to make of ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ (which stalled outside the top forty despite its obvious chart friendly nature), and equally few knew what to make of its parent album. Although modern audiences are more familiar with “Screamadelica” as a visionary Mercury Music Prize-winning masterwork that ushered in a new era of musical adventurism and facilitated the conversion of base metal into precious stones, the fact of the matter is that its release was a curiously muted affair, wildly enthused over by the music press and by Mark Goodier on Radio 1’s “The Evening Session”, but not really breaking beyond the core audience of hardcore devotees whose curiosity had been aroused by the preceding singles (and most of them had viewed ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ with no little suspicion anyway, which narrowed the prospective listenership even further) until 1992, when hit singles, high profile award-winning and general roses and tulips galore convinced the wider world of music lovers to investigate this previously rather obscure offering. Yet strangely, unlike most other albums ever to be saddled with the somewhat awkward ‘classic’ tag, its contents (with the exception of ‘Loaded’) do not enjoy ubiquity and in this age of Gareth Gates, The Coral and Westlife seem more remote than ever.
“Screamadelica” opens with ‘Movin’ On Up’, the track that was extracted as a single early in 1992 and, by way of an impressive live performance on “The Word”, catapulted band and album into the upper reaches of the album and singles chart. From a present day perspective, despite the uplifting arrangement and jubilant chorus, it sounds a little hackneyed, slow moving and clichéd. After all, countless hundreds of no-hopers have played the Memphis-era Rolling Stones wannabe card (including Primal Scream themselves on the 1994 follow-up album “Give Out But Don’t Give Up”), with such uninspiring, slavishly replicated and crushingly predictable results that the resultant overexposure is almost enough to turn even the sanest of listeners against the Rolling Stones themselves. However, tarring ‘Movin’ On Up’ with this same brush of bland over familiarity is not really fair – if “Screamedelica” is to be considered on the basis of its musical groundbreaking, then it has to be accepted that at the time of release there was practically no-one else mining this particular seam of influence, and that (as with Teenage Fanclub’s “Bandwagonesque”) there was a real sense of the music that the post-punk era forgot being reclaimed as a vital and exciting form in its own right. More to the point, the adoption of such influences was an inspired move that, in the first manifestation of the theme that informed pretty much the whole of the album, reconnected modern dance music with its more organic and spontaneous roots. Hearing the gospel-tinged backing vocals and rolling piano figures that dullards like Paul Weller would have us believe are the exclusive preserve of ‘real’ music (because he got feeling, maaaaan) blaring out through decidedly modern production techniques is still really exciting, and in any case it’s miles better than the dismal still frustratingly ubiquitous M People (or, for longtime readers of “This Way Up” and its preceding titles, ‘The Underwater M People’) number of the same name.
‘Movin’ On Up’ is certainly a statement of musical intent, but it is with second track ‘Slip Inside This House’ that proceedings really start to get interesting. For the uninitiated (and if you really are uninitiated, investigate the band at the earliest available opportunity), ‘Slip Inside This House’ is a cover version of a song that originally appeared on “Easter Everywhere”, the 1968 album by Texas garage psych band The 13th Floor Elevators. Somewhat distanced both physically and spiritually from the scenes of peace and love that were concurrently playing out in other areas of the USA, the band were advocates of a hedonistic drug-fuelled lifestyle that makes the pathetic mock-‘rebellion’ of Noel and Liam Gallagher look like a schoolyard tantrum, and yet (again unlike the Gallaghers) they still found time to sober up long enough to write deeply philosophical lyrics inspired by religious and scientific texts, and create music that rippled like a splashed lake, frantically wailed like the siren of an old-style fire engine, and changed gear and careered all over the place like a rollercoaster (perhaps unsurprisingly, on songs titled ‘Splash 1’, ‘Fire Engine’ and ‘Rollercoaster’). ‘Slip Inside This House’ clocks in at a hefty eight minutes, but is far removed from the bloated and unnecessary overlong tedium that would soon be pioneered by the likes of Led Zeppelin; instead, it’s eight dynamically punky minutes full of frenetic, speed-crazed guitars and drums and spiraling, Buddhist-inspired lyrics about the mystical beatific properties of water (along with something about three-eyed men who aren’t complaining). Primal Scream had long been devotees of the band and their enigmatic leader Rocky Erickson – Gillespie had in fact sneaked a copy of their 1967 debut album “The Psychedelic Sounds Of…” into a “Smash Hits” photo shoot in 1990 – and their version of ‘Slip Inside This House’ had originally been recorded for a Rocky Erickson tribute album (which also featured contributions from Julian Cope and REM) the same year. Instead of opting for the sort of slavish and futile note for note reproduction favoured by mainstream AOR nonentities, spiky-haired “Fame Academy” nobodies and the perpetually annoying Gwen Stefani, Primal Scream take the opportunity to apply a bit of imagination and make the song into their own. Thus the tempo is slowed down considerably and the song is built around an Italio House-style piano figure and thumping programmed bassline, combined with droning sitars and distorted vocals (not to mention a nod towards the original arrangement in the thin, spidery tones of the guitar solo) mixed way below the instruments in a remarkable fusion of ‘old’ and ‘new’ psychedelia that sounds every bit as arresting now as it did at the time of the album’s release. Primal Scream’s phenomenal reworking of ‘Slip Inside This House’ closes with a sampled voice chuckling “ha ha ha… we blew your mind” – an assessment that few could take issue with.
With its disorientating collision of stylistic approaches, ‘Slip Inside This House’ effectively acts as a neat conceptual link between the rootsier and more traditional ‘Movin’ On Up’ and the stark modernity of ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’. Presented here in its full length version, the song contains no affectionate appropriations of the sounds of the past whatsoever, leaving the listener to contend with a percussive mélange of electronically generated chirping noises, near-atonal sub-bass, whooshing electronic effects, repetitive drums, occasional bursts of piano, and Denise Johnson belting out lyrics about “getting high, getting happy, getting gone” while dancing all night. Yet as unlikely as it may sound, even this was an impressively ambitious attempt to link the sounds of yesterday and today, as the band’s stated intention was to create a modern equivalent of the percussive yet tuneful Northern Soul sounds that had thrilled all night dancers in the 1970s. Certainly, when considered at a safe distance from the mindless musical snobbery and sniffiness that dogged the single at the time of release, ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ succeeds in capturing the sound and mood of the early 1990s ‘rave’ movement and infusing it with the tunefulness, imagination and inclusion of a proper musical structure that had become depressingly detached from dance music in recent years. Within the kaleidoscopic (well, to be honest, the bridging of previously hostile musical forms calls to mind one of those ‘traffic light’ coloured bulb arrangements bouncing off a huge mirrorball in a huge cloud of dry ice rather than something as straightforward as a kaleidoscope) aesthetic of the album as a whole, ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ makes perfect thematic sense and is a deliriously upbeat number to boot.
As if the opening tracks weren’t exciting enough, they are followed by ‘Higher Than The Sun’. Recorded in collaboration with ‘ambient dance’ pioneers The Orb, this is without question the most forward thinking song on an album that was already straining at the leash to race off into uncharted musical territories. Examined on face value, ‘Higher Than The Sun’ could perhaps best be described as a beautifully serene song about ascending to a state of intense blissed-out nirvana. In itself, that makes it sound impressive but hardly remarkable; what is truly remarkable is the arrangement. Possibly containing no actual instruments whatsoever, and certainly lacking any traceable melodic figures, the backing is built up from indistinct and unidentifiable sounds of the ‘natural world’, a murky and pulsating wall of noise that sounds like it wasn’t so much played as cultivated on the bark of a tree. Yet this near free-form collection of sounds still somehow manages to have a rhythmic and melodic unity, and gives the sense that while Gillespie is lyrically thrusting his head into the clouds, his musical feet remain not only rooted to the ground but also tramping barefoot through wet grass. ‘Higher Than The Sun’ sounded so deeply avant-garde back in 1991 (after all, it was effectively a meeting of the avant-garde and the traditional pop song) that listeners and critics were initially baffled by it – a memorably bewildered review in “Smash Hits” hinted that the writer had actually found it so out of the ordinary as to be frightening, while Mark Goodier pointedly asked his audience to persevere with the track if they didn’t ‘get’ it straight away – but once its atypical musical approach had been allowed to seep in it became apparent that this was a truly remarkable record. In the first verse, Gillespie claims to be “drifting in a space, free of time”, and in truth there could never be a more accurate description of the track itself. It sounds like nothing that had come before, and quite honestly still sounds like nothing that has come since.
The instrumental ‘Inner Flight’ has been described as the band’s intentional homage to The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds”. The history of rock (well, the history of rock since 1966) has been littered with similar attempts at paying tribute to what is arguably one of the greatest albums ever made, most of which lamentably never rise far above the level of writing an inappropriately twee pop song completely at odds with the depth and subtlety of “Pet Sounds” and throwing a few tinkly chimes into the arrangement (for a particularly misery-inducing example of this, see The Manic Street Preachers’ ‘So Why So Sad?’, a terrible song that sounds about as close to the brilliance of “Pet Sounds” as, well, ‘The Masses Against The Classes’ does to the incendiary “The Holy Bible”). In keeping with their habit of absorbing and adapting influences from the past rather than just lazily attempting to copy them directly and ending up with a track so weak and inconsequential that it practically splutters to a halt right before your ears, Primal Scream simply take their stylistic cues from the sleigh bell and banjo-festooned pocket symphonies of Brian Wilson, and then mess around with modern day electronic keyboards and a decidedly transcendental vibe. Whereas the wonderfully tightly packed monophonic arrangements and sound quality of “Pet Sounds” call to mind a blizzard-strewn American high street in the long-lost world of black and white television, the clinical precision of ‘Inner Flight’ conjures up twinkling twilight starscapes and is about as far removed from a cynical imitation of “Pet Sounds” as it is possible to get.
The first half of “Screamadelica” has been fantastic so far, and thankfully ‘Come Together’ does not disappoint. This is not the same version that appeared as a single in 1990; rather it is an extended version stripped of all of Bobby Gillespie’s vocal pleas to “ride me to the stars”, and in the tradition of ‘Loaded’ is effectively dismantled and then reassembled into a completely new piece of music (the single version, incidentally, is now very hard to get hold of). There are a lot of instruments in this reconstituted piece of music that Paul Weller and his army of dullards might normally associate with ‘real’ music that has so-called ‘soul’, but in keeping with the overarching spirit of “Screamdelica” these are gleefully transported into the world of loops and sampling, sounding about as far removed from the tiresome world of ‘authentic music’ as it’s possible to get and all the better for it. Opening with some strange oscillating bleeps that sound as though they have escaped from a creaky old BBC science fiction play performed live in black and white, the album version of ‘Come Together’ is rebuilt around the organ track that had hovered in the background of the original arrangement, bolstered by a few isolated and reverb-drenched sounds from the previously dense percussion track, and the occasional fragment of brass and backing vocal. Over the top of this are extracts from a speech made by an enthusiastically voiced Jesse Jackson at a music festival in the early 1970s, proclaiming that “today on this programme you will hear gospel, and rhythm and blues, and jazz”. On the fantastically evocative ‘Come Together’, and indeed on the whole of “Screamadelica”, you hear all of those and a lot more besides.
Next up is the track that started it all; ‘Loaded’. Well, alright, technically ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’ was the track that started it all, but let’s not stray too far into the realms of pedantry here. Presented in its full seven-minutes-plus version, from the opening sample of dialogue from heavily banned cult biker film “The Wild Angels” to, erm, the closing sample of dialogue from heavily banned cult biker film “The Wild Angels”, its musical contents are probably more familiar now to people who’ve watched football highlights on television, bought “The Best Somethingorother Anthems In The World… Ever! Volume Three”, or fought for space on a dancefloor crowded with annoying ringtone-toting students who think that liking Ali G and Coldplay makes them rebellious and ‘alternative’ than it ever was amongst followers of the ‘indie’ scene (at a time when the term still carried some stylistic clout and even vitality) back in 1991, and as such it’s difficult to find anything new to say about the track. Yes, it still sounds fantastic even after all this time – it’s practically an entire album’s worth of ideas packed into one track, from speaker-blowing powerchords to dusty slide guitar blues (not to mention Bobby Gillespie going “ah yeah” in a risibly weedy voice for no apparent reason) – but what grates about it is that it has consistently overshadowed the rest of ‘Screamadelica’. As good as it is, ‘Higher Than The Sun’ and ‘Slip Inside This House’ to name but two are even better, and it is frustrating that they have never been afforded their due recognition. Incidentally, it is something of a telling irony that while people have always been quick to knock the track for its supposed resemblance to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy With The Devil’ (superficial at best), they weren’t in quite such a hurry to badmouth Fatboy’ Enemy Of Proper Musical Structures’ Slim’s recent perplexingly acclaimed character-stripping remix of Jagger’s drawling ode to the assassination of Russian Princesses and American Presidents.
Unfortunately, the hushed semi-acoustic ballad ‘Damaged’ is where it all starts to take a bit of a nosedive. There’s essentially nothing wrong with ‘Damaged’ itself; it’s just an immensely ordinary track, merely pleasant where the rest of the album’s contents so far have been dazzling and seemingly endlessly inventive, and sounds decidedly out of place. The same goes for ‘I’m Comin’ Down’, a hazy and somewhat meandering track that flirts impressively with notions of free-form music but ultimately sounds a little too much like the inevitable byproduct of the drug-addled indolence that it seeks to evoke (and features an annoying and intrusive saxophone to boot). Baffling for entirely different reasons is the splendidly named ‘Higher Than The Sun – A Dub Symphony In Two Parts’. As the title suggests, this is a lengthy refit of ‘Higher Than The Sun’, built around a couple of isolated sounds from the original arrangement and a hefty pulsating bassline from special guest Jah Wobble. It certainly sounds impressive, mainly on account of Wobble’s contribution which sounds so dense and heavy that by the laws of physics it should not rightfully be able to be contained by a mere compact disc, but it is impossible to avoid wondering what the actual point of the exercise is. ‘Higher Than The Sun’ has already appeared on the album once, and is arguably the highpoint of the entire set. The inclusion of a second version, no matter how refashioned, smacks of at best a misguided attempt to invent electricity twice, and at worse a move so cynically crowd-pleasing that it ranks alongside the League Of Gentlemen’s smug, self-congratulatory and ultimately irritating insistence on bringing Papa Lazarou back as a ‘surprise’ in every sodding thing that they do because people laughed a lot on his first appearance (which should also have been his last, really). In effect, this is little more than filler needlessly inserted into an album that was already good enough not to need any, and if it had to be included then it should have been as a hidden bonus track.
“Screamadelica” closes with ‘Shine Like Stars’, a mesmerising yet discordant ballad built up from ‘old skool’ electronic bleeps, out-of-tune keyboard twinkling, and the surprisingly effective use of a melodica (better known to most people as one of those funny piano keyboard type things that you played by blowing into, and which was only ever owned by children from posh families who refused to let you play on it because it was ‘boring’), creating a strange euphoric ambience that sounds like a surrealist nursery rhyme played on toy instruments. In fact, as much as the likes of Kate Thornton, Jamie Theakston and Peter Kay might like to bleat on clip shows about how everyone involved in 1970s children’s television must have been ‘on drugs’, the fact of the matter is that this track is probably far closer to what might have resulted if someone had force-fed Jonathan Cohen some powerful hallucinogens while he was writing and recording music for “Playschool” (which in itself is a very disturbing image that it does not do to dwell on). Whereas ‘Damaged’ may have been rather too rooted in everyday musical mundanity for its own good, ‘Shine Like Stars’ is drifting freely into a deep pale green void of its own imagining, and is a fantastic way in which to finish such an adventurous album.
While many bands may pathetically claim to have been “really out of it, maaan” when recording their latest slab of revolving mediocrity, the truth of the matter is that Primal Scream genuinely did spend most of the recording sessions for “Screamadelica” out of their minds on dope and speed (and probably plenty of other chemicals that Julian Cope hasn’t even had nightmares about too), and the glorious collisions of styles and genres were probably due as much to simply sounding good together when phoned in through shafts of multicoloured light from somewhere across the Crab Nebula as they were to a desire to challenge the conventions of alternative and dance music, and while the intricate construction of ‘Higher Than The Sun’ must have taken a lot of coherent and clear minded thought to accomplish, it’s also probably safe to say that the arrangements of ‘I’m Comin’ Down’ and ‘Shine Like Stars’ did not arrive fully formed from nowhere. With this in mind, it’s difficult to talk about the album in terms of tracks that could have been included instead of the slightly weaker moments. The inclusion of ‘Higher Than The Sun – A Dub Symphony In Two Parts’ suggests that there wasn’t exactly hours and hours worth of leftover recordings and unreleased tracks lying around, and this supposition is borne out by the contents of the accompanying singles. Basically, ‘Loaded’, ‘Come Together’, ‘Higher Than The Sun’ and ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ contain nothing more substantial than remixes and the odd live track (although special mention should be made of Andrew Wetherall’s ‘American Spring’ mix of ‘Higher Than The Sun’, concentrating on the more eerie sounds of the original arrangement and throwing in a haunting harpsichord that conjures up bizarre mental images of Mr. Claypole from “Rentaghost” prancing around behind a nirvana-bound Gillespie). ‘Movin’ On Up’, however, was ostensibly the lead track on something called the ‘Dixie Narco EP’. No prizes will be given out for identifying the origins of that title, and perhaps unsurprisingly the new tracks inhabit the sort of hazy, soporific sonic universe that might reasonably be expected from a band labouring under such influences. ‘Stone My Soul’ is pleasant but undistinguished, and their cover of ‘Carry Me Home’ (sadly, the song recorded by former Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and not the ludicrously-lyriced Eurodisco classic that would become a huge international smash for Amazing Crying Man and self-proclaimed cup-lifter Glowworm a couple of years later), performed in such a laid back manner that it barely exists, is interesting but hardly on a par with ‘Slip Inside This House’, and the ten minute epic ‘Screamadelica’ (an obvious candidate for inclusion on the album if ever there was one) tries to cram in too many ideas and ends up sounding confused and chaotic. Sadly, while being extremely listenable and an interesting companion piece to the album, the ‘Dixie Narco EP’ is ultimately little more than a fascinating curio and its contents would certainly not have fitted as well as the three slightly out of place sounding tracks on the album itself. However, at the time of the album’s release, the band were performing live covers of three songs – John Lennon’s run-of-the-mill ‘Cold Turkey’, Sly And The Family Stone’s superlative ‘Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey’, and John Coltrane’s avant-garde jazz classic ‘A Love Supreme’. Who knows – if they had tried to tackle one of those in the studio with the same invention that they had applied to ‘Slip Inside This House’, particularly ‘A Love Supreme’, the results might well have been phenomenal.
A year after its release “Screamadelica” won the Mercury Music Prize, was hailed as a revolutionary vision of the music of the future, and then was quietly forgotten about. In its immediate aftermath, the majority of homegrown alternative bands went in completely the opposite direction and returned to the traditional guitar-driven songwriting values of ‘Britpop’. When the music press decided that the time had come to start sneering at Blur, Elastica and Menswear for using a piano and writing songs about Vimto or something, their place was effectively taken by a bunch of insufferable dullards who had completely misread “Screamadelica”, and decided that its overriding message was not that musical snobbery should be transcended for the sake of experimentation but that reviving the ‘serious’ sounds of rhythm’n’blues and venerating Paul Weller was a perfectly good idea. Primal Scream themselves followed the album with “Give Out But Don’t Give In”, an album that only narrowly escaped being bracketed with the dull retro-nostalgia brigade by virtue of featuring a couple of great songs and a couple of reggae inflections to even it out, but then reverted to their previous status of musical outsiders with the gloriously off-centre “Vanishing Point” and “XTRMNTR”, which were not quite as epochal and awe-inspiring as “Screamadelica” but still managed to combine a willful desire to stay completely out of step with current musical trends with a sense that they were at least trying to do something that looked to the future as well as to the past. To be frank, they were never quite cut out for mainstream megastardom anyway, as their few unhappy moments of flirtation with the big time (most notoriously Chris Evans including footage of the band, notorious for their outspoken anti-royal leanings, in his hastily assembled ‘Diana tribute’ edition of “TFI Friday” – and satisfyingly, unlike those tabloid reader-courting latterday Manic Street Preachers, they were sufficiently embittered to complain about it). “Screamadelica” did rewrite the musical rulebook, but the sad reality is that few actually read what it had rewritten and simply went back to an older edition. Its only true heirs have been the handful of albums that have followed a similar template and realised that inventive and unlikely cross-pollination is the key to making exciting and groundbreaking music (see Portishead’s “Dummy”, and arguably Blur’s “Parklife”, neither of which sound anything like “Screamadelica” but share its joyous abandon in exploring the possibilities of combining contrasting influences into a decidedly modern whole).
Back in 1992, whilst singing the praises of Kylie Minogue in an interview with “Select” magazine, Bobby Gillespie used the fantastic line “U2 could never be as good as ‘Shocked’”. The blunt fact of the matter is that U2 could never be as good as Primal Scream (as is proved by their contemporaneous album “Achtung, Baby”, which was hailed as some sort of musical milestone but frankly sounds like a boring joke compared to ‘Higher Than The Sun’). “Screamadelica” sounds as good now as it did back then – in fact, possibly even more so as it still sounds far more exciting than the unadventurous tedium that has become the inexplicably acclaimed norm in this day and age (as a particularly pertinent example, it makes short work of the notion that The Coral are doing something ‘inventive’ by wedging their heads firmly in the past). Rounding up the albums of the year in 1991, the NME surmised that “Screamadelica” was the album that Bobby Gillespie “always talked as though he could make” – and unlike many other architects of great albums who are prone to self-aggrandising statements about the worth of their work, he’s yet to resort to rubbish it while desperately making pathetic attempts to plug a willfully threadbare later effort, which only serves to make it even more likeable. Just don’t follow the advice of one particular fanzine editor, who shall remain nameless, who remarked over a decade ago that the best way to enjoy ‘Inner Flight’ is to “bounce around the room”.
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