Q ’n’ A: Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream

Just over 30 years since Bobby Gillespie formed Primal Scream with school mate Jim Beattie as a means of having something to do, the band has become something of an indie institution. Even as they’ve gone through a multitude of members (Gillespie is the only consistent member) and a hefty swag of various substances, the band has produced ten studio albums that have melded a dazzlingly wide pool of influences and styles.

Released in May, the band’s tenth studio album More Light has been hailed as their best release in a decade and sees them taking a more experimental approach to their sound than on their last couple of albums. Gillespie’s veracious love of music was on full display when TMN spoke to him as he and the Scream were gearing up to open for The Rolling Stones at Glastonbury.

How are you doing, Bobby?

I just saw Neil Young last night so I’m feeling pretty good.

I was going to ask some Neil Young-related questions later on but let’s start there. He’s had a wildly varied musical output over a long career. Has that had an influence on the way you approach your own career?

Yeah, totally. I think he’s a real artist, Neil and that’s the thing. Now whether you like everything he does or you don’t, he tries to do different things. Even last night, he had an arena full of people and he played a lot of songs from the last album, Psychedelic Pill. It had that classic Neil/Crazy Horse sound. The songs were good; ‘Ramada Inn’, you know, is about an old couple and the guy’s drinking too much but they’re just trying to get through life whatever way they can. I mean, he’s writing sounds about people who are old and their relationship. He’s writing songs about people his age and you think, yeah it’s a rock song but it’s dignified and it’s cool. It’s not like he’s singing about trying to get off with 18 year old girls.

I think he’s the only guy from the 60s that’s still – I mean I haven’t really checked out Leonard Cohen’s latest music so much – he’s still got an edge and he still means it and he’s never settled, he’s never got too comfortable. He’s always trying to challenge himself and his audience. He’s a serious artist in that respect and I think that’s an inspiring thing. I really love the Psychedelic Pill record, I think it’s great, there’s some great stuff on there. The first track was fucking 27 minutes long, Driftin’ Back. He’s not really trying to please anyone, it’s not like he’s trying to get a hit record or something. So yeah, he’s inspiring and last night’s gig was fantastic. It was a great selection of songs and I love Neil when he has the Crazy Horse band behind him. They’ve still got it.

I think the thing that amazes me is that he’s still basically putting out an album a year.

Did you read his book where he was talking about giving up smoking and drinking? I think it was smoking that gave him his muse and then he gave it up and he didn’t write a song for nine months or ten months and it was freaking him out because he never had problems writing songs before, they used to just flow through him. He even wrote a song about it, Driftin’ Back. I was thinking about it last night. I was thinking, ‘God, he must have been pretty stoned onstage and now he’s up there and he’s straight and it’s still great’.

You just played Glasgow Green over the weekend with The Stone Roses. How was it?

Yeah, it was great. We did two shows at the weekend; we did the Stone Roses show which was to 50000 people in a park, Glasgow Green, right in the dead centre of Glasgow. Then the night before we did one. Jim Lambie’s a friend of ours. He’s an artist. He was up for the Turner Prize a few years ago and he’s maybe a little bit younger than me, maybe four years. He designed the cover for More Light and he designed the Dirty Hits album cover as well. Anyway, he’s got a poetry club. He’s taken over this railway arch in Glasgow and he’s painted it up and put artwork in it and stuff. He’s just made it a really cool rock n roll place. Every Friday night they have a night called Neu Reekie! and they have a little bit of music, a little bit of poetry.

We played a 40 minute psychedelic set in front of 100 people because it’s such a small club. We played some song from More Light like Tenement Kid, Turn Each Other Inside Out, River Of Pain and some of those we’ve never played live before and then we played some songs from the Vanishing Point album like Burning Wheel and Out Of The Void. It was a really cool psychedelic set. Jim had an oil lamp projecting over our faces and he filmed the whole thing. He was documenting everything. He brought Lawrence up from Felt, Davy Henderson from The Fire Engines was there, Michael Clarke the dancer was there, Douglas Hart, bassist in The Jesus And Mary Chain. It was a fucking great night. Then we did the Stone Roses gig and that was great. 50000 people just up for it. Completely wasted. They’d been drinking all day and doing whatever else they do to get themselves through a rock concert.  We played a good set, the Roses played a good set and I think everyone went home happy.

You mentioned you played some songs from More Light that you’ve not played before. How many tracks from the album are you including in your current sets?

I tell you what it is, right? We haven’t been playing that many gigs. We’ve played about maybe three gigs in the last month because we’re getting ready to go out and play festivals. Depending on where your slot is at the festival, that determines how many songs you can play in a set. So for instance, we’re playing like a 50-55 minute set at the moment so it’s roughly five songs from More Light and five older songs. When we go out and do it on tour later in the year, we’ll be playing a lot more songs from More Light. I still think with a festival set, playing five new songs out of ten is pretty good.

Sure. Especially when a lot of bands tend to veer towards hit-heavy sets at festivals.

I mean, we put some hits in but for a set say…  we’re playing Glastonbury. We’re on just before The Rolling Stones and we’re going to do the same set. We’re going to do five new songs and five old songs to upwards of 70000 people. We’re going to play River Of Pain, Goodbye Johnny, Invisible City, It’s Alright, It’s OK and 2013.

What about the older songs?

We’re going to play Rocks, Country Girl, Loaded, Come Together and… I can’t remember… Swastika Eyes! We’ll play five singles and five album tracks. I think that’s a pretty good mixture of old and new.

A review I read of More Light described it as being like every other Primal Scream album in that it doesn’t sound like any other Primal Scream album. Do you think that’s a fair statement?

Oh, that’s good, isn’t it! It’s funny because I saw Mani on Saturday night and he said the same thing. I sent him a copy and he said it was just like the Best Of Primal Scream or something to that effect.

Is that element of diversity down to wiping the slate clean when you finish an album and starting from scratch?

Well, kind of, yeah. It’s more to the point that what you’re trying to do is basically, you’ve finished an album, toured it, find some kind of set that feels right and you take a few weeks off, doing family stuff then you go back in the studio doing exploratory stuff, seeing if there’s anything we can come up with that’s new. We always have an unspoken thing that we’re going to try and find something new. We never want to do the same record twice.

I think you kind of always want to do what you didn’t do on the last record. Let’s say our last record, Beautiful Future, the songs were written as concise pop/rock songs. That was just the way it went. It was like ‘let’s try that for a bit’. Most of them were written to guitar riffs. Angular guitar riffs Andrew [Innes] was coming up with and we’d just write around those. There wasn’t a lot of space in it. We knew for this album that we wanted to do something that had some more space in it that was more stretched, more psychedelic, more experimental and just freer, hence the long songs.

Last year, before the album was released, we were doing the full nine minute version of ‘2013’. Now we do a three minute version, like a single edit. It sounds great. It’s like the Psychedelic Furs or Roxy Music or something. It’s got this real rock song bit that works in the live arena. Yet again, people have bought the album and we’re doing a totally new version [laughs].

You played the full nine minute version of ‘2013’ as the opening song when you toured here last year. It seemed quite a ballsy move to open with a ten minute song not many people knew.

Well, you know, we were really proud of the track. I just think that when you’re a performing artist, if you’ve got great new songs, you’ve got to play them, even if they haven’t been released. I think if you played a whole set of new songs that nobody knew that would be too much for the audience; it’s too self-indulgent but to play live, you’ve got to do new stuff to feel like you’re a relevant artist. I just wouldn’t like to be someone that just plays old songs. I mean, whatever you think of Neil Young’s last few records, when he plays live he always tries to be an artist that lives in the present time. I’m not going to say who but I think most of his contemporaries from the 1960s are fossilised. If you look at their set lists, it’s the same set lists they’ve been playing since 1972 or 73. It’s kind of like arrested development or something.

What do you make of Alan McGee’s return to music?

I think it’s good. I mean I haven’t heard any of the artists but I’m sure he’ll come up with something good. You know, he’s a record man. That’s the thing; he’s an old school rock n roll guy. Guys like Seymour Stein love that about Alan because they recognise something in him that they had in themselves. He’s a natural for it. I think it’s good that he’s back.