Lead singer and icon Bobby Gillespie attributes this to the band reuniting with DJ and producer David Holmes, whom the group first worked with on parts of XTRMNTR.
“David pretty much provoked us into writing songs,” Gillespie explains. “He would play Andrew and I strange, obscure French library psychedelic funk records from the 1960s. This would set an atmosphere up, and then he’d play some drum loops and see if we would start jamming along or write something. If it caught our imaginations we would just start writing a song right off the bat. It was amazing.”
Although this was a new and untested method of composition, Gillespie says the band has always strived to find fresh ways of forming material. “We’re always looking for a different approach to creativity. We never really went in for that ‘acoustic guitar, chord type’ way of writing because it never works. You just come up with the same fucking conventional, boring, rigid, rock song structures. We’ve always been a bit more avant-punk, a bit collage-y and kind of cut out. I can write melodies all day long. If you smash two dustbin lids together I’ll start writing a song because it will inspire something in my head. I like rhythm.”
Although no dustbin lids were harmed in the making of More Light, Bobby says they played a surprisingly pivotal role in Primal Scream’s early beginnings. “When we started Primal Scream we had a very primitive approach to making music,” Bobby recalls. “Before we had guitars and knew what chords were, we were smashing dustbin lids together and screaming in a scout hall. We had one electric guitar, a tiny amp and a fuzz pedal and Jim Beattie, who I started the band with, could only play one chord.
“We’d go to the scout hall, where Jim’s mum was a caretaker and I’d basically play the drum beat you hear on The Jesus and The Mary Chain’s Moe Tucker on the dustbin lids. We’d both just scream, and Jim would play one chord. Then we’d make tape recordings of this stuff and that’s how Primal Scream started.
“For us, making songs has always been about that primitive, simplistic, feral way of doing things. Although More Light is sophisticated in terms of the songs and the layering of sounds, there’s still that feral spirit we’re looking for.”
Lyrically, the album’s opener, 2013, is the biggest statement of the bunch – a sprawling, epic nine minute number that sees Gillespie nagging at the state of pop culture today. “It’s generally about the lack of dissent and culture and the way everybody just blindly goes along with everything,” Gillespie explains. “There seems to be no questioning of authority and no dissent all across the arts. It’s a critique of that.”
Gillespie believes that it is a deep political shift that been at the root of this. “Over the last 30 years people have been de-politicised and I believe that this has been a deliberate thing encouraged by power structures everywhere,” he says.
“When people are together they have power. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a church group, community group or trade union – when people get together, talk and exchange ideas, that’s when things happen. I think authorities are scared of that and they want people to be atomised so they can just do what they want and there will be no opposition to it.
“Thirty years ago there was a strong trade union movement in the UK and even Margaret Thatcher’s government couldn’t put through the austerity measures that David Cameron’s government are. The trade union movement isn’t as powerful as it was, so there’s no army to fight, whereas 30 years ago there were millions of people. That’s why I think they’ve encouraged the atomisation of society.”
Gillespie believes that it is the duty of an artist to challenge these authorities and inform the public about what is going on. “I think that artists have got a voice that they should use. Ezra Pound said that ‘artists are the antennae of the race.’ The idea is that you’re supposed to see things before everybody else and inform people about the way you think things are going, but what exactly are artists picking up on these days?”
So are Primal Scream carrying out their duty at the moment? “We’re definitely saying something that’s relevant to the time. We’re not a nostalgia act and we don’t just rely on old songs. Unless you’re doing new work, I think you kind of die as an artist. The only way to become a successful artist – and I don’t mean financially – is to be constantly creative. I think we’ve always done that.”
BY CALLUM FITZPATRICK
