Bobby Gillespie knew about the Oasis reunion roughly 10 days before the news officially broke. “I kept it to myself,” the Primal Scream singer smiles from behind his famous shock of dark brown hair. “I’m quite good at keeping secrets, I think. Although I did tell a mutual friend of mine and Noel’s, just before they made the announcement. She was like: ‘Whaaaaaaa!’ She screamed.”
The smile widens and the 63-year-old suddenly looks like a bashful teenager. “It was Kate Moss, actually. I’m gonna be a name-dropper.”
After more than three decades of stardom, Gillespie has earned the right to drop a name or two. We meet at Melomania, a swish venue in Bermondsey, south London, where he and producer David Holmes are going to bat for ‘Come Ahead’, the new Primal Scream album. It’s the 13th record Gillespie has released with Scream, though the only consistent members are now himself and guitarist Andrew Innes.
Ever since 1991’s ageless ‘Screamadelica’ demolished the divide between rock and dance music with the likes of ‘Loaded’ and ‘Movin’ On Up’, they’ve proved far more experimental and eclectic than the vast majority of their peers. Here’s a band who’ve swung from grinding industrial rock (2000’s brutally brilliant ‘XTRMNTR’) to sprightly electropop (2016’s ‘Chaosmosis’, their last album).
“ Bobby has never been shy about singing about what’s happening in the world politically, unjustly, socially” – David Holmes
And now? Primal Scream have dug out their disco dancing shoes. ‘Come Ahead’ combines aching gospel choirs with sweeping strings, a distinctly glam stomp and shimmery guitar licks directly from the Nile Rodgers playbook. Yet these escapist sounds accompany Gillespie’s world-weary social commentary on financial inequality (the swaggering ‘Innocent Money’), populist politics (lead single ‘Love Insurrection’) and the need to come out swinging when times are tough (the wiry ‘Love Ain’t Enough’). On ‘Innocent Money’, he decries “closed down the factories” as “a rope made of gold / To hang ourselves on”.
It’s a compelling clash that occurred almost by accident, explains Holmes: “We were feeling our way through it. We’re excited by the same things, and one thing we’re excited about is people telling the truth – on a piece of music that you could put on at a dinner party! ‘Cause it’s got a joyfulness to it, but when you zone in closer, it’s actually saying something that needs to be said.”
Despite this, Gillespie had wondered if ‘Chaosmosis’ might be Primal Scream’s final album. Pre-pandemic, he felt burnt out by the cycle of touring a record, heading into the studio to begin another, touring that… and then starting up all over again. “I felt: ‘I don’t wanna do that anymore,’” he says. “‘I need some space. I need to think. I need to do something on my own, outside of the group idea.’ I needed to get off the train.”
First, he recorded ‘Utopian Ashes’, a collection of country-flavoured duets with former Savage Jehnny Beth. Then, when Covid shrunk our worlds, Gillespie suddenly had time to write a book, a memoir charting his life from a hardscrabble Glasgow council estate to bona fide rock stardom with ‘Screamadelica’. Tenement Kid, a depiction of all the thugs and drugs he encountered along the way, bagged the Best Music Book gong at the BandLab NME Awards 2022.
Was he changed by the experience of writing it? “I think it gave me a confidence,” he replies immediately. “I’m definitely a more confident person than I was before writing the book.”
That confidence courses through the album’s freeform, often narrative-led lyrics – a departure from Scream’s trademark sloganeering. He began jotting down poems at the end of 2019: “I didn’t even know what they were gonna be used for. They just came to me.” When Holmes, who produced 2013’s ‘More Light’ and some of ‘XTRMNTR’, speculatively sent him a piece of music, they were amazed it fit ‘Ready to Go Home’ – which became the album opener – like a velvet glove.
Typically, Primal Scream’s music would come first, followed by the lyrics. This process was reversed for ‘Come Ahead’, which is named after a Glaswegian phrase that might be uttered in a fight. The title is a fair reflection of lyrics that came to the singer with unusual ease. “Bobby has never been shy about singing about what’s happening in the world politically, unjustly, socially,” notes Holmes. “I said, ‘If you’re gonna fucking scream from the rooftops, there is no better time.’”
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The cover of ‘Come Ahead’ bears a photo of Gillespie’s father, Bob, a trade unionist with staunch socialist values, who died last April. There’s been a lot of death in Gillespie’s life in recent years. Andrew Weatherall, the visionary producer who helped to conjure ‘Screamadelica’, suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism in 2020. Two years later, Martin Duffy, who played keyboards in Primal Scream since their first album, died after falling at his Brighton home while intoxicated.
The keyboardist’s son, Louie, told an inquest that Duffy was in debt, having, in his eyes, been unfairly excluded from Primal Scream’s £5m rights deal and “forced off” their tour. He also alleged that the group mishandled his father’s alcohol problem. Gillespie contested all of this in July, telling the Restless Natives podcast that they only asked Duffy to step down until he successfully sought treatment: “We loved him.”
Today, he says of Duffy: “He was a very naturally gifted musician. He knew when to play and sometimes, more importantly, when not to play. He was great at accompanying songs or music that had already been written. And that’s where his talent was.”
‘Circus of Life’, a track from the new album, portrays an alcoholic “masking his feelings with two bottles a day”. Was this a way of processing Duffy’s death? “No,” Gillespie says quietly, “that song’s lyrics were written a couple of years before his death. But, I mean, he had been drinking for a long time. He was an alcoholic when we met him, when he was a teenager.”
“If you were born into the working class, you’re always gonna be a member of the working class” – Bobby Gillespie
‘Come Ahead’ faces down pain, loss and disappointment with the kind of stoicism that Gillespie absorbed in childhood, as depicted in Tenement Kid. He says he feels no working-class guilt at swapping the dole for rock stardom: “I think if you were born into the working class, you’re always gonna be a member of the working class. I don’t think I’ve left anybody behind.”
Holmes, who produced Noel Gallagher’s softly experimental 2017 album ‘Who Built the Moon?’, reckons this is why he connects with both musicians: “We’re all working-class men. That’s how we were born.”
Still, Gillespie now knocks about in leafy north London with neighbours such as Fontaines D.C. guitarist Carlos O’Connell. The singer is chuffed that, in an NME interview, Fontaines bassist Conor Deegan III referenced ‘XTRMR’ as an inspiration for their 2022 album ‘Skinty Fia’. He also seems happily bemused that actual pop stars Lorde and Dua Lipa described Primal Scream as influences on their latest records: “That’s a left-field thing, in a way, isn’t it?” he chuckles. “Who would have known, you know?”
All of this might be a million miles from the early years depicted in his book, but ‘Come Ahead’ proves that being a celebrity name-dropper needn’t mean you can’t square up to the issues of the day.
Gillespie toyed with naming the record after a couple of its tracks. “But then I thought: ‘Fucking come ahead, you cunt! That’s the fucking title of the album!’ It chimed perfectly with the photo of Dad. He looked cool and it’s a good tribute to him. I guess some of the themes are things that he cared about – they found their way into some of the lyrics. I think that stuff’s just in your blood, you know?”
Primal Scream’s ‘Come Ahead’ is out now via BMG