Hot Press meets Primal Scream

There’s a classic yarn about Primal Scream in the early ‘90s that indicates just how hair-raising life once was for the Scottish hell-raisers.

Bobby Gillespie and his band of merry wasted men were arguing in New York over whether to go for a Vietnamese, a Chinese or an Indian. A naïve journalist who was only trying to be helpful suggested grabbing a burger, only to be told, “It’s heroin we’re discussing, not food.”
At the time, you wouldn’t have put money on Primal Scream successfully crossing the street, let alone soldiering on to release their tenth studio album in 2013.
“It’s truly incredible,” begins a fit, healthy and very trim-looking Bobby Gillespie, who turned 50 last year. “I only realised it was our tenth album when someone said it to me the other day.”
More Light sees Primal Scream reunite with former Belfast chef and hairdresser David Holmes.
“We just don’t seem to make those five-guys-in-a-room records,” Gillespie states. Ever since Andrew Weatherall quite literally turned modern music on its head with the kaleidoscopic, psychedelic masterpiece that is Screamadelica in 1991, this has been the match tactic for the Scream Team.
“Both David Holmes and Andrew Weatherall had creative lives as a result of acid house,” Bobby says. “The excitement of the club became the catalyst for people finding out that they want to be creative. Everything was a creative act then. A few years after that, it turned bad, or at least it did for me and my friends.”
Gillespie talks at length about how drugs turned, and in the immortal words of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, destroyed some of the finest minds of his generation.
“I know people who went to clubs and did an E every other weekend and maybe some coke, but they went back to work on Monday morning and had long careers. I know other people who just became stuck and fell into addiction. Ultimately, it was just destroying everybody. It felt like we were a bunch of suckers. I started to think that in the late ‘90s, but at the same time I still liked taking drugs.
“I’m not under any illusions that any of us were any threat to the government or the administration or our country. But being a powerful artist is a political thing. It gives other people encouragement. I think it was TS Eliot who said that artists were the antennae of the species. Well, we’d snipped off our own antennae.”
On the subject of Primal Scream’s reputation for guzzling drugs, Bruce Springsteen’s right-hand man and star of The Sopranos, Steven Van Zandt, had some choice words to say about Gillespie and the Scream Team.
“I tried to get Primal Scream to come over to America several times,” Zandt claims. “I had a whole tour for them. Their agent talked me out of it. He said: ‘They can’t do 20 shows.’ I’m like, ‘Come on, man. We do 20 shows a month.’ I don’t have patience for it. I’m like, ‘Alright, you want to be a drug addict? Go be a drug addict. Don’t waste my time.’”
Fair comment?
“The truth is Van Zandt asked my management to put us on a tour, but we were never told about it,” Bobby responds. “Later on, they said they never told us because we were having real problems in our lives at the time. It would’ve just tipped us over the fucking edge at that point in our lives. I know he went on a rant about it and I’ve never really replied to him or said anything about it. But you know what? I thought that he obviously cares and likes our band. Actually, I was quite touched by what he said.
“I’d really like to meet him some day and tell him that I had bad problems, but I’m better now. We had a lot of problems back then. It wasn’t just the band. It was management. It was everything. Nothing was simple. The financial reality is that we also have a lot of people in the band. If we were a four-piece with two roadies, then maybe. However, we’re at least an eight-piece band with a horn section and eight or nine roadies. That’s two buses and at least 30 grand a week to put the show on the road. We had no record company back-up at the time, so the whole thing was just impossible.
“I understand completely why Steve Van Zandt thinks we’re a bunch of lazy junkies. We’re not lazy though. The proof is there in the amount of work we’ve done. Whatever you think about us, we never made the same record twice and you can’t say that about most bands. Even if we took some detours along the way, I think we’re allowed to.
“I’m not putting us up with fucking Miles Davis, but you look at him and not every record is good. He went through a lot of stylistic changes. Same thing with Neil Young. At least they were brave and had the balls to go out there and do it, instead of one record every 10 years like some other bands. I like fearless people. Part of it all is putting yourself out there. You are open to praise, but you also must leave yourself open to ridicule.”
Our lengthy discussion touches upon the various oeuvres of Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Gillespie’s first band the Jesus & Mary Chain, Lou Reed and Guns N’ Roses, to name just a few. There’s no doubt about it, music is Gillespie’s true drug and first love. His first gig was a good one, which altered the history of alternative music in more ways than one.
“I was into football when I was a kid, but I saw an advert in the paper for Thin Lizzy in the Glasgow Apollo,” Gillespie reveals. “I used to go to Celtic games all over Scotland. I’d never been up the town for a rock ‘n’ roll concert. I had no-one to go with. There was this guy called Alan McGee who was a year or two ahead me in school. I didn’t know him. However, I knew he was into music at a time when everyone else was into football. He used to carry LP sleeves down the street. So I got the phone book out and rang up his house. He just said, “Alright, I’ll meet you at the bus stop at 7.30pm.’ The gig was absolutely fucking amazing. Phil Lynott had a mirror on his bass and a light would hit the mirror and reflect it back. I remember smoke bombs during the first song, so it must have been ‘Jailbreak’. The whole thing was totally fucking amazing. It’s important that the first band you go and see is a motherfucker. After that, everybody has to be that good. Otherwise, they’re just a shit band in a pub.”
It’s an encounter referred to at the beginning of the excellent documentary Upside Down – The Creation Records Story as a pivotal moment for modern music.
“The relationship that developed between Alan McGee and Bobby Gillespie is fundamental to what happened,” author Irvine Welsh reflects. “They were two old-school Glaswegian punk rockers who became best mates. They had this giant vision – Bobby as an artist, and Alan as an enabler.”
On the subject of Lizzy, Bobby absolutely adored the Hot Press Phil Lynott exhibition that he caught when he was in town for Arthur’s Day.
“That was incredible,’ he enthuses. “It’s the best one I’ve ever seen. I saw the Bowie one recently. I didn’t like it. I went along to the opening and it was all a bit chaotic. I don’t think rock ‘n’ roll belongs in a museum and the great thing about the Phil one is it wasn’t, it was just at the top of a shopping centre. Suddenly, you saw the big Thin Lizzy sign. For me, that was like touching a holy relic.”
An hour in Bobby’s company flies by in what seems like 15 minutes. He signs a beautiful Screamadelica tour photo by Hot Press snapper Graham Keogh for MS Ireland, strolls out of the boardroom to mingle with the staff in his management’s office, and signs off with a warm smile and handshake.
“Nice to see you Big Man,” he beams. “Peace, love and more light.”

More Light is out now. Primal Scream play Forbidden Fruit on Sunday June 2.