Primal Scream

Welcome back the leaders, the movers, the darkside groovers, the one and only Primal Scream-sounding more than ever like an iron fist in the face – you know, like all those “exciting” new bands should, but don’t. And at last, meet the world you know in musical form, a world riddled with violence, hatred, and disease. Fetid cities, no fun, and one political party. Crap food and unremitting gunfire (the beat you can eat, baby!) Squadrons of fucking great bombers spewing fire over every last country that hasn’t surrendered to satellite TV. This is the world of ‘Swastika Eyes’, a sickened slab of disco that rallies hard and furious against the evils of global militarism and starts its own war in your head. It also sounds like the best party in town. Get organized. Get your rocks off. You decide. “I don’t like to get into it too much,” says Bobby Gillespie. “We’re just a rock ‘n’ roll band. It’s just a rebel song. It’s a really heavy image.”

The Scream’s sixth studio album is about to be unleashed on the world. Recorded and produced themselves, with mixing duties covered by a cast including David Holmes, Brendan Lynch, Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), Hugo Nicholson (Andrew Weatherall’s sidekick around the time of Screamadelica), The Automator (Dr Octagon, etc) and The Chemical Brothers. It’s the latter who’ve concocted the main version of ‘Swastika Eyes’, which has also being reworked by Holmes, and, former Sabres Of Paradise Jagz Kooner’s new project, Spectre. When pushed, Gillespie has this to say about the single’s subject matter. “You know that CNN view of the world?” he asks rhetorically. “That Americanization of the world? US international terrorism? I guess it’s about that. We thought the swastika was the most powerful image of totalitarianism, and we thought it was a fantastic insult: ‘you’ve got swastika eyes’ “That was a good image. We thought those words were good words. It’s the new world order, America just dropping fire everywhere and anywhere they like. Under the guise of NATO or the United Nations, America drops bombs all over the planet. Fucking does what it fucking likes, and no-one fucking cares. And Britain’s part of that.” He pauses for breath. “It’s just anti-authoritarian. I guess that’s it really.”

The Scream began in a bedroom in Glasgow in the early 1980’s. They were inspired by alchemical experimentalists like Can, Suicide and Public Image Ltd, and featured a young Bobby Gillespie battering out spontaneous rhythms on a pair of dustbin lids. After joining Creation in ’85, they refocused onto Byrds-style ’60s pop and then Stooges/MC5-vibed raw-power rock ‘n’ roll. For the epochal Screamadelica in ’91, inspired by the all-welcoming idyll of acid house, they embraced many musics in a lysergic splurge of brilliance. On Give Out, But Don’t Give Up (1994), they hit on a funked- up Rolling Stones sound. 1997’s Vanishing Point -a collection of scuzzy, often malevolent recordings – set the tone for the ’99-model Scream. On a creative roll after Vanishing Point, they’d begun writing the next album before they’d even begun touring the old one, and it goes without saying that, cancerously, the same mood of subterranean urban soundscaping has carried over.

Today’s Gillespie will cite the same influences as the early-’80s one, plus militant funkateers like James Brown and Sly Stone and politicized jazzers such as Fela Kuti and Miles Davis, whose live double-LP from 1975, ‘Dark Magus’, took improvised funk to extremes of abstraction and evil. There are those who’ll hear ‘Swastika Eyes’ and anticipate that the Scream have returned to the dance fold, to lead acid house out of the wilderness of its own banality. “It’s a dance record,” observes Gillespie, “but our kind of dance record. It’s not a conventional dance record, it’s like a funk record, more than anything. But our kind of funk record – abstract, hard, fucking whatever.” So, it’s not inspired by contemporary dance culture? “I don’t think I’m invigorated by any culture. I think I’m pretty disgusted by most of what passes for culture, and I guess that’s what we’re writing about. I don’t really go out that much, I’ve got tae say. I’ve not been going out to many clubs. We’re just writing about what we see.”