Primal Scream with Chris Ryan

Today we’re talking about a band who managed to change their sound every single album while still staying absolutely, totally, and utterly themselves: Primal Scream. Bobby Gillespie and co started in the 80s but they most meaningfully bookended the 90s with their two most notable albums – from the hopeful optimism and upbeat acid house that started the decade in Screamadelica to the dark, caustic grit and gunmetal sounds that embodied the end of the dream on XTRMNTR. Join Yasi and guest Chris Ryan as they chart the history and discography of one the most unique bands of our time, Primal Scream. EPISODE PLAYLIST: Listen to the songs we talk about HERE. CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Chris Ryan IG: @crashactivated Twitter: @ChrisRyan77 // Listen to the The Watch Producer: Liz Sánchez Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:02Speaker 02

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• 1:33Speaker 02

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, fansplain?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Fansplain, fansplain, fansplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Fansplain, fansplain, fansplain, fansplain.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Band Splain.

• 2:12Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Band Splain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about Primal Scream. If you've never heard Primal Scream, we're gonna have a good time, babe. We're, we're gonna have a party.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  We're gonna have a good time. We're gonna have a party.

• 2:33Yasi Salek?

  My guest today, you guys, is the Andrew Weatherall of Band Splain.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  R.I.P.

• 2:37Yasi Salek?

  R.I.P. The sergeant of the Sea Army. This is a thing I just made up. It's Christopher Ryan.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  You know what's hard about doing Band Splain, aside from how long it takes, is when you find out in your research that someone else should have done this. And I just want to apologize to everybody, Band Splain Nation, that I am not Dua Lipa. I watched Dua Lipa talk about Screaming Delica and I was like, I'm, she should be here.

• 3:02Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Did you contact her about this?

• 3:05Yasi Salek?

  I should have. I didn't.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Book club. She has a book club. She's probably really busy.

• 3:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she's got stuff going on, but Dua Lipa, if you ever want to come on the pod, one of many unexpected Primal Scream mega fans.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:17Yasi Salek?

  Really made me like her.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Am I unexpected?

• 3:19Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:20Yasi Salek?

  No, this is fully within the Sea R wheelhouse. Because you're like, I'm not like other girls, you know, a little bit.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 3:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I did have to cajole and bribe you to come back to do this episode because it's, you know, Band Splain is also not like other girls. But why, what is it about Primal Scream? Like, what was your entry point? Why do you love them?

• 3:43Speaker 04

  I love them because they're the church of everything cool.

• 3:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  Like, they're, like, The Clash, a couple other bands that you can use as, like, the entryway into all this other kinds of music. And if I ever had a band, I have no musical ability, but what I would want it to be is Primal Scream. I would want it to be dub, krautrock, rap, techno, punk, garage, psych, you know, The Stones, I, everything that goes into the sort of fabric of what makes their music, I think is great. And not, and not only that, Like you learn so much and feel so much listening to their music. So it was, this is a very easy, yes, let's do this.

• 4:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  That's quite for me.

• 4:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's, it's very interesting to me because I feel like they prove one of my core beliefs, which is that the church of cool, as you put it, is rooted in a sincere and earnest love and belief.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:41Yasi Salek?

  And that's what Bobby Gillespie has.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:43Yasi Salek?

  And the rest of the primal screams too, but it's not what people think it is. It's not an ironic detachment, you know?

• 4:48Speaker 04

  No, he's evangelical about the power of music.

• 4:51Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. And he is a devotee to, and Joe Strummer was too, you know, the other things that you name. So, and we'll, we'll talk about it, but it's a good like overarching thesis statement out primal scream is that no album is the same genre wise, but it all comes from the same spirit.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:09Yasi Salek?

  And it's just expressed differently.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  I don't know if there's another band that I love this much that almost undermines or subverts my priors about like what, how bands are constructed.

• 5:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  Like there should be, like, I don't, I wouldn't necessarily say Bobby Gillespie probably doesn't even think he's the best lyricist.

• 5:28Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  There isn't a signature musical signature to primal scream. Like it moves, you could say, you could dance to it. You could say whether it's like boogie rock or chemical brothers remixes, it has like a rhythm, it is a very rhythmic band, but like, it's not like Paige and Plant or Mick and Keith. It's like, it's like cool and cooler. I don't, I don't know how to say it, but like, there's something where it's almost like taste is the artistry of the band.

• 5:55Yasi Salek?

  Right, right. I would even maybe say it's like, kind of pertinent to discourse on the internet lately. It moves from the hips, not from the shoulders. Like that's the one thing through line I can see through all of the different expressions and genre, you know, formations of primal scream is no matter what, it's sexual and it moves from the hips. And that's a bluesy rock thing as opposed to, and Bobby Gillespie talks about it, like, while punk changed everything, punk was not sexual, punk did not move from the hips.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:23Yasi Salek?

  You know? And I think that is a great way to kind of put it. I don't see it talked about a lot and we'll get into it when we get to Screamin' Dark but like. For sure, this band owes a debt to the Happy Mondays, who I think is criminally underrated in terms of what they did. And they're even maybe one step further. They're like, if the spiritual coolness was Rain Man level, they're not even articulating it or able to be like, this is a thing. It's just so pure and coming channeled through God through them. But they have a similar thing going on, especially around Screamedalga.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  You know, the last time we talked was for Blur. Blur, also chameleon-ic, also has a very charming, enigmatic frontman. But Blur kind of moved to their own rhythm a lot, like, kind of followed their own map. They went from chimney suites to alt-rockers to world beat guys. That's very broad, but just go with me here. Primal Scream, I feel like, as a teenager living in the east coast of America, to the extent that I could understand this, and then as a guy in his twenties, was very much like a snapshot of culture each time they put a record out. So they were avid listeners as much as they were musicians,

• 7:38Speaker 04

  and were out there being like, what's happening? What is going on out in clubs? What's going on in the streets? What's going on when we go out and play shows? What are people reacting to and what are people making? And they kind of reflect that, and they do it, to my mind at least, two times to a masterful level with albums. But just as a project, was such a great barometer of where music is going and what music can do.

• 8:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's good stuff. It's good stuff, you guys. Let's get into it. Where are we gonna start? I'll tell you where. Robert Gillespie. Born June 22, 1961. He has a cancer in the Springburn district of Glasgow, Scotland. Moved to Mount Florida in southeastern Glasgow. He was born to a 21-year-old mother, Will McGeady Gemmell Gillespie, and a 23-year-old father, Robert Pollock Gillespie. His father's really important, I think, in the story of Primal Scream and the story of Bobby. He came from a very poor background. He got a job, I think, I want to say in like a printing... Space, bookbinding, something like that. And he joined the union.

• 8:41Yasi Salek?

  And joining the union kind of radicalized him to become like a young socialist. Like, he was really big in the politics of like, union organizing and the labor movement and stuff. He also had the words "Hong Kong" tattooed on his knuckles and a Black Panther tattoo on his arm.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Pretty cool.

• 8:58Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry, Bobby Glasby. Actually, your dad was like, low-key, a little bit cooler than you.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  And he shows up later as on the cover of one of their albums.

• 9:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and how cool does he look? I'm like, "That's your dad." "Cool Dad Alert" is what I wrote. It's kind of like, there was no real need to rebel against that anyways. Like, in his household, like, yeah, man, play rock music.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Seems like he was more inspired by it than rebelled against it.

• 9:18Yasi Salek?

  There was a huge poster of Che Guevara on the wall in his home. And also, this is the ringer.com moment. The US gold medalists, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who did the Black Panther salute. Yeah, in the 1969 Olympics in Mexico City. So sick.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:34Yasi Salek?

  I did also learn that they were, one of them was wearing the wrong glove. They had like, grabbed gloves to do it, but they had grabbed the same hand, like, the wrong hands.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  Did you go down like a Tommy Smith, John Carlos rabbit hole?

• 9:45Yasi Salek?

  Really, it's a real professional hazard of mine. Like, I don't know how to manage my tie.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  It's hard.

• 9:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  It's hard. I feel you.

• 9:53Yasi Salek?

  His father was into music. He ran a folk club called Midden. He would record performances at the club, play them in the house. And he was like, into cool shit, like "Muddy Waters," "Motown," Ray Charles, Bob Dylan protest songs. His dad told him at eight or nine, "Whatever you want to do, if you want to go to art school, study art, or be a musician, I'll pay for lessons." My heart hurt when I read that personally. Child of immigrants, who was like, "We'll pay for you to go to Kumon, math class after school."

• 10:20Yasi Salek?

  I turned out fine.

• 10:23Yasi Salek?

  It was really fun. But he was like, at that age, I didn't know. I was like, outside with my mates, playing football, doing Scotland shit. Bobby and his brother Graham loved Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and "San Quentin", which was the B-side. And he said, "That was the first Rebel song I ever consciously listened to." Chris Ryan, what was the first Rebel song you ever consciously listened to?

• 10:45Speaker 04

  "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy.

• 10:47Yasi Salek?

  Nice.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Probably.

• 10:48Yasi Salek?

  It radicalized you as a child.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Very much so.

• 10:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:51Yasi Salek?

  What did it make you feel or think?

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Uh, shame.

• 10:55Yasi Salek?

  Okay, it was a little different. You were like, oh damn it, I'm who they're talking about.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  But that paired with Do the Right Thing and, you know, late 80s, early 90s independent cinema and rap music. It's like my, my big awakening.

• 11:09Yasi Salek?

  You didn't get into Clash till later?

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Not till later. It was like, high school. So yeah, I wasn't like, there wasn't like a punk thing for me until I almost was like, understanding it intellectually. I was never like, the 14 year old in like, the circle pit, you know?

• 11:22Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  And then I never, I never really have gotten in a circle pit, to be honest.

• 11:27Yasi Salek?

  You had an opportunity the other night and you-

• 11:28Speaker 04

  I refuse.

• 11:29Yasi Salek?

  Pissed out.

• 11:32Yasi Salek?

  It was a pretty weak circle pit. I feel really lucky because they played Rock the Casbah on 106.7 K-Rock out here. So I got into Clash very early.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Did you understand The Clash as like, a political, like a punk outfit? Or was it more like, damn, these guys make, Should I Stay or Should I Go and Rock the Casbah?

• 11:49Yasi Salek?

  That was the first, like, oh catchy, amazing. But because I had already-

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Cause that's how I got into them too. Where I was like, damn, Should I Stay or Should I Go is a really good song.

• 11:57Yasi Salek?

  Fucking goes so hard. I learned all the Spanish lyrics, so I could sing the Spanish lyrics long. I was radicalized by Nirvana. Like, it wasn't necessarily political, but was it not kind of political, you know?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Sociopolitical, I guess.

• 12:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was, it was anti, it was certainly anti-establishment.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  It was like, Bush is cool.

• 12:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. It was anti-everything, basically. And I feel like that was my kind of gateway. And then through, because I've always been this way, I studied to get myself to understand punk and The Clash and The Sex Pistols and stuff like that. And, you know, Black Flag and stuff. But, it's come up several times and I feel like it's because these bands that were into, because of their age, they had glam rock, or T-Rex.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Boy and T-Rex, yeah.

• 12:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and The Sweet.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:42Yasi Salek?

  And, um, right? And I, I find that really interesting, cause it's like, some of that DNA is probably there. And it's just like, awakening this feeling of, oh, I love hard rock and roll music.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  You know what I, this is kind of a digression.

• 12:56Yasi Salek?

  We don't do those here.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  I don't want to get too carried away, but when I was reading about Bobby Gillespie's younger life, and thinking about being born in the early 60s, coming of age in the early 70s, then getting punk, then getting everything that we'll get into.

• 13:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  When we're talking now, pop music stretches back 70 years now, 80 years, you know? And, you know, you can, you can kind of like, pick and choose the little eras that you want, but- How almost incomprehensible it must have been to grow up during this time period. And every time you walk into a record store, like a like a seriously world changing, life changing record has been put into the stacks to say nothing of the fact that you might have come across Ray Charles or a Motown record or a blues record or a whatever record. But he's born as Dylan and the Beatles are like changing music. And I don't know.

• 13:48Yasi Salek?

  It couldn't be more. It's a perfect time to be born, in my humble opinion. That's the perfect trajectory. Like now you're like, oh, you want noise music? There's 6,000 bands on Bandcamp.com and people are just like.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  But he picks up one album by the pop group and is like, now my mind is completely altered.

• 14:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And the pop group was signed to a major label, you know? Like, it's like, that's the times we lived in. We don't have to go off on that forever. The first single he bought, like we were talking about, was Hellraiser by Sweet. Did you ever have a Sweet phase? I have a pretty blind spot for Sweet. I've listened now because it's come up so many times.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  This is kind of like for me also like Mott the Hoople.

• 14:21Yasi Salek?

  Mott the Hoople sounded like a fake band to me.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  British glam outside of T-Rex kind of escaped me.

• 14:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So he's into pop music. He's hanging out at the record store every day after school. Who can relate? Same. Same Bobby lost me. He also was into this band that I just wanted to bring up because I think find it interesting because it was the same band that Robert Smith from The Cure was also very early on super into that gelled him and Poral, the guitarist. And it's they're called the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. This is another band I only know about because of The Cure, but they were a Scottish band who were kind of a little glam, but also like really dark creepy like voodoo vibes. Like they had this like song called Faith Healer.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Like late period hippie or what?

• 15:07Yasi Salek?

  Here's how he described it. "The hard rock voodoo dread epic Faith Healer, a sick pagan anthem built on malevolent throbbing sequencers and topped off with power chords and dramatic soaring and swooping Beirut lightning bold lead lines." Beirut is the town that Wagner was from. I had to look that up. Did you know that?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  I did not know that.

• 15:25Yasi Salek?

  And then you call yourself a music writer. I can't even typify it. Like it's such a it's like a bizarre, weird, like only what happened, I guess, in the mid 70s in Scotland. But I just found it interesting that and because Robert, The Cure is not that far off on this timeline.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  No.

• 15:40Yasi Salek?

  Because Primal Scream started really early.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  It's actually kind of cool to go back. I'm sure you've done this, but like, look at like various like chronologies and timelines of bands as like, where were they even before the band?

• 15:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  I was having a lot of fun looking at all of my favorite Scottish writers that are also growing up in Scotland at this time.

• 15:59Yasi Salek?

  You have a lot of favorite, like Irvine Welsh?

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Kelman's a little bit older, but this period in Scotland produced an insane amount of art.

• 16:09Yasi Salek?

  Like, like, like almost where you're like, what the hell?

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:11Yasi Salek?

  What did they put in the fucking water in Glasgow that like all this shit came out

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Well, obviously, working class support of arts, you know, it's like.

• 16:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but they had that in other parts of the UK and we don't have that many things from Bath or like whatever I made up a place, Birmingham.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  Depression and depression.

• 16:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I love this little story. So he gets really into Thin Lizzy. You feel like you might.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  I definitely had a Ted Leo triggered Thin Lizzy phase.

• 16:36Yasi Salek?

  Interesting.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  He covered Little Girl in Blue, so I only knew Boys is Back, Boys are Back in Town and stuff like that. But then he covered Little Girl in Blue on like one of his early EPs and he would do it live. And that's when I got into like Thin Lizzy album tracks and Phil Lynott solo albums.

• 16:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, there's actually a whole generation of Ted Leo-loving, like, New York-dwelling, indie people.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Right here.

• 17:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, who got into Thin Lizzy this way. Like, you're not the only person who's told me this. And God bless Ted Leo for that. So he is into it. He called it "a mix of tough street rock combined with beautiful yearning pop melody worthy of the Ronettes and Springsteen-like minor chord runs topped with Phil Lynott's street poet celebration of male camaraderie."

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Is Bobby Gillespie like the third best rock critic ever too?

• 17:25Yasi Salek?

  Like, he's a, he's a pretty amazing writer in describing, but it makes sense because he loves music so much. He's probably at the top of my like list of people I've studied who are so deep in their knowledge and devotion.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Well, there's guys who have really good, there are people of great taste, but there's all, it's rare to find someone who has great taste and is able to articulate that taste and also is great at making albums.

• 17:50Yasi Salek?

  The trifecta.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:52Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so they come to Glasgow.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  Thin Lizzy comes to Glasgow.

• 17:54Yasi Salek?

  Thin Lizzy comes to Glasgow. And Bobby really wants to see them play. I think, like I said, he was like 14 years old. And he knew this other boy at school named Alan McGee, who was a bit of a weirdo also. And he said he always saw him carrying rock albums. He knew he was like, were on the same wavelength. And he just goes to his home, knocks on the door. And Alan McGee was like, my mom was like, Bobby Gillespie's at the door. And he was like, what? Like, we're not from, why is Bobby Gillespie at my door? And he goes, can you take me to the Thin Lizzy concert? And Alan McGee was like, okay. He's like, why wouldn't you just go yourself? I don't know. So they go to the Thin Lizzy concert themselves, like, together. And Alan said in a documentary, he was like, I could see him like in that moment, like, really fall in love with rock music.

• 18:38Yasi Salek?

  I thought that was so cute. Like, he really used to live in a time. You just went and knocked on the door of a kid from school that you thought also liked rock music and said, will you take me to Thin Lizzy concert?

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Does this now become one of the most important Thin Lizzy concerts to ever happen in Scotland?

• 18:52Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent. This is like the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade, lesser Free Trade Hall moment for Glasgow.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  Where there's like eight bands come out of this?

• 19:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like this is, this is crazy. This is Oasis. Like, it's, all is right, the kernel of it is right here.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  They may have like hooked up as friends later anyway, but like, that's a pretty great A D B C move.

• 19:13Yasi Salek?

  It's a real big bang right here. So they go together. The rest is history, or it would be, except I'm gonna go into arcane detail about it. Bobby said, I lost my rock and roll virginity to fill in Thin Lizzy. And I need to ask you now, Chris, when did you lose your rock and roll virginity?

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Probably to Bono.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  I think, um, he was a sensitive lover. No, I think, uh, I think it was Joshua Tree. That's when I like, that was the first album that I remember coming out that I like, bought knowing it was like a contemporary, like this just came out and I like remembered getting so excited for it. Like in the run up to it. So what was that, 86, 87?

• 19:53Yasi Salek?

  87.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  87. So I was 10.

• 19:55Yasi Salek?

  Okay, you were 10.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  So that was like, we had MTV, I was aware of it. The songs were like,

• 20:00Yasi Salek?

  You were like with or without, you rocked my world.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  But I also like loved that band. Like, that was the first band band that I was like, oh shit. Like, that's the guy with the long hair and that's the guy who wears the hats. And like, so that's my virginity story.

• 20:14Yasi Salek?

  Did you go to the show with your father?

• 20:16Speaker 04

  I did go with my mom.

• 20:17Yasi Salek?

  With your mom? Cute. Big, big U2 fan?

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Uh, no.

• 20:21Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  But I begged.

• 20:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sure. Again, to your point of like, can you imagine being alive and a teenager at this point? Because then 1977 comes and all of a sudden you turn on the TV program that you watch for music and The Damned is on there.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:35Yasi Salek?

  Do you know The Damned put the first punk single out?

• 20:38Speaker 04

  I don't think I did know that.

• 20:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was N- New Rose? It was New Rose.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I- The Damned are great.

• 20:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so he gets really into it, sees them playing "Neat, Neat, Neat", he's like, "What the fuck is this?", as in every story we tell of people of this age who start bands, punk radicalizes them. Bobby got super into Sex Pistols when he heard "God Save the Queen" on the John Peel Show. He said, "I felt like I had been possessed by the Holy Spirit, like I had been electrified, and never before experienced such an overwhelming feeling. I'd been converted, I'd seen the light." We said it earlier, but he uses a lot of spiritual language to describe his relationship with music, which I totally relate. The Holy Spirit came and it was in the form of "God Save the Queen", so he buys a 7-inch, he's cranking the volume all the way up. He says, "We're just orgasming", him and his brother.

• 21:27Yasi Salek?

  "We felt we had both experienced psychic jailbreak."

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:30Yasi Salek?

  It was a damn-

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Have you ever experienced psychic jailbreak for music?

• 21:33Yasi Salek?

  Now you're doing to me what I didn't do.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Well, that's a good question, though.

• 21:35Yasi Salek?

  I think it really was Nirvana, Nevermind album. Because it hit me at the exact right time, I was like 11 or 12, so I was really angsty, but I didn't have any words or language to understand why I had that feeling, it didn't seem like anyone else did. So, to have it reflected back-

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 21:50Yasi Salek?

  -was a complete psychic jailbreak. I was like, "Okay, like, somebody gets me", you know?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:54Yasi Salek?

  So, I don't know if that's the same, but it did feel that way.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can get that from reflection of yourself back into music, and then I think there's, the other one would be like, "This is something that, this is a realm I've never been to before",

• 22:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  you know? Probably for me it would be "Enter the Wu-Tang".

• 22:08Yasi Salek?

  Incredible.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Well, just because like, I had never-

• 22:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  The idea of like, Kung-Fu stuff-

• 22:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  -like, daytime television, action movies, or whatever you're like-

• 22:18Yasi Salek?

  Like, it was fan- it was the fantasy of it that sort of broke you out to like, you could like, let your imagination run free?

• 22:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it felt- Like an entire world inside of the record rather than just a record. But I also think that it felt like a new language for the most part.

• 22:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:34Yasi Salek?

  God, music is so powerful.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty good.

• 22:36Yasi Salek?

  It's pretty good stuff.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  I suppose it's worth mentioning.

• 22:39Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Thematically.

• 22:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  That this chasing of the dragon that he does musically is like, I think, the operating ideal for Primal Scream, right? No matter what kind of music that they're playing, I feel like Bobby is trying to recreate.

• 22:54Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Hearing "God Save the Queen."

• 22:56Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  On record.

• 22:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think he's definitely trying to recreate, like recreate that spiritual feeling, but maybe not the like novelty feeling.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  No.

• 23:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you know, because there's the part of like, what was so groundbreaking, compelling about Sex and the Beast was like so new.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:16Yasi Salek?

  Like, no one had done anything like that before.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  It's also just kind of blowing my mind that in one man's young life, he witnesses the beginning of punk and also the introduction of ecstasy.

• 23:27Yasi Salek?

  Also, you realize, or I do realize through this Britpop season where I'm like, man, they had everything there. Like Bobby talks about it later where he's like, we would come back to America and we would be like, what, these acid house records or these like dance records that come from America and you guys don't even know about them? He's like, we love them and you have no idea outside of like Detroit. Like, people are not bumping this. And I was like, like I say, we should be recall and I said, I'm starting that movement. No one likes that when I say that. The other thing that he loved about Johnny Rotten, I think Bobby Gillespie has two driving forces, and it's the love and spirituality of music and the love of looking fucking cool.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 24:05Yasi Salek?

  Of fashion. Bobby Gillespie is devoted to fashion and looking sick.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  I think I would probably throw a third thing in there.

• 24:12Yasi Salek?

  What?

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Identification as working class.

• 24:14Yasi Salek?

  Yes, yeah. And, you know, what, like we talked about with that upbringing, with the father and the movement.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:20Yasi Salek?

  And being very leftist.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  There's something kind of DIY about Primal Scream. I mean, you could say like, it's pretty impressive to teach yourself or convincingly convey multiple disciplines of music, multiple genres of music and just be like, I am now an electronic music producer. You know what I mean? Like, that's hard.

• 24:41Yasi Salek?

  It's also the hunger, right? Like, at the time, he kind of downplayed it, which makes sense. Like, it was like, oh, it's not about money or whatever when he's 25. But later, he was, he's very like, direct about. I grew up poor and it was always motivating me that I never wanted to be poor again. And there's a hunger and he talked about it on another podcast interview that I listened to that he was like, I'm not diminishing music that comes from middle class or like higher class backgrounds, but like, you can hear when a band comes from a working class background. Because he's like, there's like a hunger. Yeah, desperation. Desperation. Yeah. And I was like, I think that's probably quite true. It's the blur and the oasis of it all, you know? The big deal for him with Johnny Rotten was also that he was like working class and stylish.

• 25:24Yasi Salek?

  Like he's like, oh, he wasn't a handsome or a sex symbol, but he was like so cool looking. Yeah. And Bobby's like, I'm gonna do that. Leave school at 16. They're not allowed to do that anymore in the UK, but you used to be able to do that. And he gets a job through his dad's connections, nepo, nepo printing job. Nepo printing factory job at a place called John Horns. Starts hanging out with McGee a lot. They're really into punk music. They're going to see all these gigs, The Clash, The Ramones. And then Alan, the next year, I think in 78, introduces him to Andrew Innes. Born May 16th, 1962, a tourist like myself. Alan and Andrew were forming a band. They wanted to have a punk band. And Bobby was like, yeah, I'll hang around.

• 26:08Yasi Salek?

  Like, he says that Andrew Innes at 15 could already play like almost anything on guitar. They would just cover punk songs and Bobby would like roll around on the floor. Right. A major thing that happens for Bobby is while he's going every Friday when he gets paid, taking the bus into Glasgow Central to go record shopping, he starts seeing the same group of like young, cool looking guys. And they kind of strike up a friendship because they're into the same music. And it turns out they're in a band called Altered States. So they invite him to come to practice. It was this guy Johnny, this guy Tish, and this guy Tinny. So he starts like kind of becoming the roadie. He moves their gear. He learns how to set up and like.

• 26:48Yasi Salek?

  Rudimentary play a drum kit, rudimentarily play a drum kit. They get tapped to go on tour with Susie and the Banshees, so that's a huge deal. And Bobby is like, oh, of course, I'll come. So he goes. And then at one of the gigs, the drummer for Altered States is like, I'm not playing. And they were like, um, okay, Bobby, you play drums. And he was like, um.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Don't know how.

• 27:11Yasi Salek?

  I don't, okay. And he did.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:13Yasi Salek?

  He played drums and he said, what a feeling it was to be part of the magical energy summoned up by a rock and roll band, a band of friends. Magic being created in real time by like-minded spirits. Time seemed to slow down, like I was starring in a movie. This was a hit like no other, a deep hit to the soul. I wanted more. So now he's like, I want to be in a band.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's hooked on it.

• 27:32Yasi Salek?

  I had a taste. I had a taste of the big, the big time.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  No.

• 27:35Yasi Salek?

  Andrew Ines and Alan McGee had started a band called The Laughing Apple without Bobby. They took it very seriously. Bobby was designing the art for them. They did a EP called Ha Ha He He. Honestly, got teary, I got teary. Really surprising.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  That would be like, today we would call it like LMAO. The LMAO EP.

• 27:55Yasi Salek?

  So dark. So this guy Caesar that was in Altered Images had left Altered Images, started a new band called The Wake. His real name was Gerard McNulty. So they're like, join our band, join The Wake, play guitar and synth. And he's like, okay. So he joins their band. Caesar hunts down Rob Gritten, that's Gretton, but Rob, who was the manager of, at this point, I guess, New Order, but had been the manager of Joy Division. And tries to get him to like, sign them. And Rob's like, okay, I mean, I guess you guys can sleep on my floor, but you need to go home. I'm not, I'm not going to sign you. But then he called and was like, do you guys want to open for New Order and make an album with Factory? That's how it was back then.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  It's, this is my favorite part about band origin stories from this era is in our minds, I think we're like, talking about Lyndon Johnson. And you're talking about like, this is like incredibly historically significant thing that really only comes out because Bobby Gillespie takes a bus into town and sees guys that look like him standing next to a bunch of records. But meanwhile, all of Glasgow life. Is like happening outside that like it's such a small like self selecting group of people who are like know like music matters as much and punk music matters as much and also since it's such a small genre like a guy who doesn't play music can just become the drummer one night so.

• 29:13Yasi Salek?

  Just become and also that you can just procure the manager of New Order's phone number.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:19Yasi Salek?

  Call him, show up on his doorstep.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Eighty-two, so like New Order's big and a big deal because it's coming out of Joy Division but like relative to what we understand as big is probably pretty small.

• 29:30Yasi Salek?

  Sure, sure.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Like are they as big as Dua Lipa? No.

• 29:34Yasi Salek?

  Nobody is, babe.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:36Yasi Salek?

  Dua Lipa, come on the pod. They go to play their big New Order gig, February twenty-six, nineteen eighty-two. They stop to pick up their bassist. Guess what? He's not there. He's not coming to the show.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  This band has some roster trouble.

• 29:48Yasi Salek?

  A little bit. Well, people just keep just saying.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Attendance issues.

• 29:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so Caesar is like, Bobby, can you play bass? And he's like, I guess. Can you play bass? Who knows? He had said he had learned, tried to learn a little bass when he was younger. They have no bass. They have no amp. They get to the show and they're like, um, can we borrow a bass and an amp from New Order? Yeah, and they're like, you have to go ask Hooky. And Bobby was like, I was shitting myself. Hooky was my hero. I caught a glimpse of him bantering with some of the guys from the crew, plucked up my courage and sauntered over to him and nervously told him who I was and repeated the same story I told Rob. There was an awkward silence. Hooky stared at me and said, fuck off. And then he said, of course you can. They're up there on the stage. Use the Yamaha and tell Eddie I said it's all right. He played the fucking Yamaha bass that Peter Hook played in the Joy Division Love Will Tear Us Apart video.

• 30:36Yasi Salek?

  It's your second ever show.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:38Yasi Salek?

  Fuck you, Bobby Glassby, honestly.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  And he's on tour, he's already toured with Susie and the Banshees.

• 30:41Yasi Salek?

  And he's already toured, well, yes, in a help capacity, but yes. So they play a bunch of more shows with New Order, things are going great. They record a fucking album at Strawberry Studios in Stockport with this guy Chris Nagel who had worked under Martin Hannett. Tony Wilson visits the studio, major deal. They put out an album. It's called Harmony, F A C sixty. Nobody really cared about it, if we're being honest, except for one guy from Sounds called David McCullough who came to Glasgow and did a feature on them. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, Bobby had been making music with another friend named Jim Beatty.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 31:16Yasi Salek?

  Bobby said, "Jim would take his really cheap Japanese Les Paul classic copy and a small guitar amp, and I would take the metal lids from the dustbins by the shed outside. Beatty would plug his guitar and amp in, and I would place two dustbin lids on the parquet floor, and he would play a one-chord Banshees or Public Image Limited-like screaming guitar riff, and I would join in with primitive tribal beats on my dustbin lids, making a clanking metal industrial sound, and we would both scream endlessly. No lyrics, no words, just scream, scream, scream. We made an amazing sound. Neither of us could really play, but we didn't care. That wasn't the point. The point was to make an exorcism happen."

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:53Yasi Salek?

  They decided to call themselves Primal Scream.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 31:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I thought this was interesting. I knew about, obviously, the therapeutic origin.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:02Yasi Salek?

  But I didn't know that they had found it through a spoken word piece that is part of The Fall album called Live at the Witch Trials, where Marky Smith says, "I believe in the R and R dream. I believe in the Primal Scream."

• 32:17Speaker 02

  I still believe in the R and R dream. R and R as Primal Scream.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  And so now we have material connections between this kid from Scotland, who's just now found himself rolling through, like, some of the most vital and important music ever made, and, like, two bands, The Fall and New Order-

• 32:41Yasi Salek?

  Manchester Legends.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  -playing, like, these sort of instrumental, yeah, and then the connection between classical and Manchester, yeah.

• 32:47Yasi Salek?

  Primal Scream is a really good band name.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  It's an awesome band.

• 32:50Yasi Salek?

  He did good on that one.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:52Yasi Salek?

  So, John Lennon famously did Primal Scream therapy with the guy Arthur Janov.

• 33:03Yasi Salek?

  Fady really liked the name because it was punk, this is Bobby, and post-punk. So we had a name for our noise experiment stretching all the way back to summer of 1981. Over time, people have asked me if there was a John Lennon influence, but we had zero idea about the Lennon and Arthur John of therapy links back then. We were young punks and had a year zero mentality. We never listened to the Beatles until Paul Weller ripped off Taxman for start, and Beatty bought Revolver as a result. Even then, we only dug She Said She Said and Tomorrow Never Knows. We thought the rest of the album was rubbish.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  This is like when Julian Casablanca says like, "I've never heard television." You know?

• 33:37Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Okay. Also, like, even if that's true, don't admit that.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Well, I think that was kind of like a cool pose for a time.

• 33:45Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  You know, just like, we just came up with this sound.

• 33:48Yasi Salek?

  I do believe Bobby Gillespie that he wasn't fucking with the Beatles, though.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. This is a really good time to be like, "I don't fuck with the Beatles."

• 33:54Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Punk rock started. You're supposed to wipe all that stuff from your face.

• 33:56Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna bring that back, though, actually, now, in...

• 33:59Speaker 04

  That you don't fuck with the Beatles?

• 34:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, in light of like, the seven films that are about the Beatles that are coming out, that everyone's gonna be the most annoying ever on the whole planet. And I'm gonna be like, "Who? I haven't heard any of that music."

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Do you like the Beatles?

• 34:09Yasi Salek?

  Sure. I mean, who doesn't like the Beatles?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Bobby Gillespie.

• 34:12Yasi Salek?

  Do they, do they free me from psychic jail? No.

• 34:16Yasi Salek?

  Like, they wrote some great tunes.

• 34:22Speaker 05

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• 34:26Speaker 05

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• 35:24Yasi Salek?

  All right, it's 1983 now. Time has flown. Time's flying when you're making an album in Manchester with your band The Wake that no one has ever heard of since. He gets kicked out of The Wake that summer. Apparently he had gotten really bored with the band and at one show, he walked offstage in the middle of the show. And I think he was still kind of surprised he was kicked out of the band, but that to me feels like an HR violation. He said, "A huge part of my frustration and boredom with The Wake's music stemmed from the fact that I'd been listening to a lot of psychedelic era 60s music with Beatty. We were both so untouched and underwhelmed by what passed for contemporary rock that we began unearthing the holy sounds of Syd Barrett's Floyd, Dylan, Velvet Underground, Arthur Lee's Love, The Doors, The Byrds, Rolling Stones, and The Kinks that led us both to dig down further, deep into another world of garage punk artists like 13th Floor

• 36:08Yasi Salek?

  Elevators, The Seeds, Electric Prunes, Chocolate Watchband, and The Pebbles."

• 36:12Speaker 04

  It's probably like the Nuggets collection. I don't know if it's out by then.

• 36:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he mentioned that later. Don't you feel like every like 15 years, there's like a 13th Floor Elevators revival?

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's really interesting. It's like clockwork. Like people are like, "Hey, have you..."

• 36:25Speaker 04

  It's also the cycle of drugs of like as psychedelics get back in.

• 36:28Yasi Salek?

  Right, totally. Great band. I'm just, it's interesting to me that it's been revived like several times since. So he gets kicked out of The Wake, which is sort of the impetus for Bobby Colaspy to call up Jim Beatty and say, "Okay, look, we need to really start our band now because I don't have this other band anymore." Beatty gets a 12-string acoustic to get the folk-rock Roger McGinn core sound going. And right around this time, this is to me is the craziest talk about Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here, in come the Jesus and Mary Chain.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:57Yasi Salek?

  Here go the Jesus and Mary Chain, who are also just living nearby. And they had a friend from high school named Nick Lowe, not that one, not the musician, who was best friends with Andrew Innes and was a promoter at this place called The Candy Club. Bobby and Beatty had gone to that club a bunch and they had told him, "Oh, we're starting a band." Now, Nick Lowe in 84 has received a demo tape that he is just like not that into to book at the club. But it is taped on one side of a Syd Barrett tape, Mad Cap Laughs. The other side is this new band. And he knew Bobby loved Syd Barrett, so he was like, "Here, you might like this band or you might just want half of a Syd Barrett tape. I don't know, take it." It had these songs on it. "Never Understand," "Upside Down," "Inside Me."

• 37:39Yasi Salek?

  And in a hole and one Douglas Hart's number on it. I think they weren't called Jesus and Mary Chain yet. They might've had a different name.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 37:45Yasi Salek?

  The Daisy Chain or something. They had it like set on their name. Bobby listens and he's like, fucking hell, this sounds like Suicide with Billy Idol on vocals. So he thinks, oh, we should call these guys and have them be in our band, Primal Scream. So Bobby calls the number. Douglas Hart is like 15 years old.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  And his mom picks up.

• 38:03Yasi Salek?

  That's right. And he's like, I'd like to talk to whatever about being in a band. And his mom, apparently, allegedly, according to lore, was like, are you famous? And Bobby allegedly said, not yet, but I will be. He himself doesn't remember that, but it's been told in many Jesus and Mary Chain stories. Him and Douglas Hart end up just talking on the phone for a super long time, like two hours about music and movies.

• 38:26Yasi Salek?

  I love it so much. Imagine, like, again, could you ever imagine just calling someone you've never met before? And then next thing you know, you've been talking for two hours.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  I did spend two hours like talking on the phone about like movies and music when I was a teenager. Cause I didn't have anything else to do.

• 38:41Yasi Salek?

  Sure. Yeah. I just love it. They arrange to meet up with the Mary Chain on a nice summer day in June. They hang out. Bobby's like, will you?

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Join my band.

• 38:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And they're like, um, no. And then they're like, well, can Primal Scream play a show with us? Can we do a show together there? And Bobby's like, mm, we don't have a drummer or basses per se, but we will get back to you. Yeah, we're sort of lacking here.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  We're kind of hoping you guys would fill out that part.

• 39:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we'll work on that. We're gonna get back to you. And then another major fucking data point in the world of the music that we love. Bobby, the original A and R, hits up Alan McGee, who at this point has moved to London. He's running a club night called The Living Room and has just started Creation Records. And he's like, you need to, you need to sign Jesus and Mary Chain.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  They should make a Mad Men type show about this.

• 39:36Yasi Salek?

  You guys, if you're listening, Christopher Ryan and I are available to make a Mad Men style show about this.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  I'm sure what they would really want is us two making a Scott Mad Men type show about Scottish.

• 39:44Yasi Salek?

  Who knows more than us, honestly?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Alan McGee.

• 39:47Yasi Salek?

  Alan McGee, well, yeah, but he can't, he can't be pinned down to make a television program. Enter Robert Young now into the mix, of course, as Scorpio, November 19th, 1964.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  I'm November 17th.

• 39:59Yasi Salek?

  He was known as Dungo at this time in the Mount Florida area. There's like a cool one hour BBC documentary about, it's called like The Lost Memphis Tapes or something, ostensibly about Primal Scream making give out, but don't give up. But it kind of tracks their, you know, origins and Bobby like stands outside the like flat, the council flats or whatever, where he's like, this is where I lived and this is where Robert Young lived and like, they had known each other since they were like little kids, like playing football in the streets. And he's like, oh, I remember when Robert Young got his first guitar at 14 years old for Christmas and I went up to his house and he could already play so sick. He played a Clash song, I can't remember what the Clash song is that he played, but he like played it perfectly. And so Bobby was like, hey, can you come play in our band? We need a bassist.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 40:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He was in a band called Black Easter, not as good of a name as Primal Scream. Then they get really into acid.

• 40:50Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 40:50Yasi Salek?

  Hey, we would give our money to a guy named Jukes.

• 40:56Yasi Salek?

  Ugh, it's, see, we could, I could written this in a TV show.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  One thing I don't know even at 47 is how they make acid. Back then, they're probably like looking stamps and stuff like that.

• 41:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  That they're getting it from, but like, isn't it fucking crazy that?

• 41:09Yasi Salek?

  Someone sat around and figured out.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Figured out how to make acid?

• 41:12Yasi Salek?

  All of it, ecstasy. These are all synthetic things that people made in labs. It's crazy. LSD, there's a whole world of like lore about how it got made, right? And why, and I don't have time to get into the CIA of it all, but.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  The MKUltra.

• 41:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah. All we have here is Jukes, okay? Showing up.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Jukes and his Kramps records.

• 41:31Yasi Salek?

  And his Kramps records. Juke sounds cool as fucking hell. I'm sorry, like, that's what you're known for? If I could be known for two things in the footnote of a story of another person and it was, I loved the Kramps and I provided acid, untouchable.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  You should, I don't, I don't know if you use the app X actively anymore. I think you do.

• 41:48Yasi Salek?

  I sure do.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  You should change this, your bio to this.

• 41:51Yasi Salek?

  Jukes?

• 41:51Speaker 04

  No.

• 41:51Yasi Salek?

  Loves Kramps and.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Give me your money and I will give you acid and Kramps records.

• 41:55Yasi Salek?

  Kramps records, yeah. Jukes also becomes a member of the band, but we'll get into that later.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  It's a big 10.

• 42:00Yasi Salek?

  Because you could just be in the band.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:03Yasi Salek?

  Then they draft this guy Tam McGurk, which is truly the most Scottish name I've ever heard in my life, who lived in a district called Pollock, which was quite a hard area. And he was very into Echo and the Bunny Man, Simple Minds, The Smiths, and quote, "Not much else." He didn't dress like us or think like us. McGurk had a bit of an attitude. He was up for a drink, a fight, and a fuck. In other words, a typical 20-year-old kid from a Glasgow scheme full of spunk. So we have a bit of a lineup now. Meanwhile, Alan McGee, as a favorite to Bobby, because he was not that into the Jesus and Mary Chain tape, is like, "I'll put, I'll put, give them a show in London." He sees the show. The show is an unmitigated disaster. They sound crazy. They are fighting the entire time. Primal Scream is wonderful. Jesus and Mary Chain, I was crying from laughing.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Just because they fight so much?

• 42:48Yasi Salek?

  And they're so fucking funny. Like, about it, like, the way they fight and the way they talk about each other and everyone else, it's like, you're just weeping. Even Alan McGee, one of my favorite Alan McGee quotes from his book, is he talks about how miserable the Reed brothers are. And he's like, "If they won the lottery, they'd probably be fucking pissed." I don't know why. Crying, crying, laughing. So McGee becomes obsessed, starts managing them. Now it's September of 84, and Alan McGee's like, "Hey, Bobby, um, Jesus and Mary Chain have sacked their drummer. They would like you to be their drummer." And Bobby's like, "Well, it's a nice idea, McGee. The thing is, I'm not a fucking drummer." But he's like, "I'll go to the rehearsal. I'll, I'll come on." And it goes great. And I think that's all they wanted.

• 43:29Yasi Salek?

  They wanted, like, Mo Tucker energy level of skill. Meg White, for those of you who are younger and don't get the Mo Tucker reference. So now he's also in Jesus and Mary Chain. Primal Scream finally has a band and enough songs for a short set, so they do a joint gig.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  So he's doing double duty?

• 43:47Yasi Salek?

  Double duty. I mean, he's young, full of spunk, because, you know. It's October 12, 1984. The venue in Saucy Hall Street. They split the cost for the venue and the P A system. They have Alan McGee's band, Biff Bang Pow, and a band from East Kilbride called Aqua Five. I put this in just for the nerd culture people. A guy in Aqua Five was named Grant Morrison.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  Is it the Grant Morrison?

• 44:12Yasi Salek?

  Yes, who became the DC comic writer.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  How is this possible?

• 44:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So you know.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  So he, Grant Morrison.

• 44:19Yasi Salek?

  Was in Aqua Five.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  Was like playing a show with Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream in 1984.

• 44:24Yasi Salek?

  Correct. You're welcome for that little tid. He wrote Green Lantern, Animal Man, Arkham Asylum, graphic novel. Yeah, you all know. Anyways, just wanted to point that out. I think it's very cool.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  I think it's really cool.

• 44:34Yasi Salek?

  When we make our TV show, that will be like a freeze frame, you know? Like, it'll be like, this guy will never, you know, he won't play in the story, but here he is. Okay, so Primal Scream's lineup at this point is Bobby on electric guitar and vocals, Robert Young on bass, Tammy Kirk on drums, Beatty on miked up 12-string, and Jugs Babe, he's on the tambo.

• 44:54Yasi Salek?

  Jugs on tambo and acid. Bobby said, "I remember at the sound check, Jim Reed was standing out in front, in the dark, empty club, Jim Reed, the singer of Jesus and Mary Chain, watching us. And he came up to me excitedly after we'd finished and said, Bobby, you're the greatest band in the world."

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Scottish and English bands of this time constantly seem to be telling each other this, or telling themselves that.

• 45:15Yasi Salek?

  You got it, babe.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  But like, they are really like, we have like two practices and it's like, clearly we are the best band in the world.

• 45:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  And like Oasis was like that.

• 45:24Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I think you got it, babe. How else are you gonna keep going on?

• 45:28Speaker 04

  You could just be like Lil Pav and be like, yeah.

• 45:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we have a different.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Staring at your feet and being like, we don't really want anybody to listen to this.

• 45:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, don't look at us. Please don't perceive us.

• 45:38Yasi Salek?

  I think Pavement also thought they were the greatest band in the world, though. They just weren't gonna say it.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  I would just kind of point out, as a personal passion project, I'm very interested in the 1984, 85 miners' strike going on in England at the time.

• 45:51Yasi Salek?

  Sure. Has a huge impact on music.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  And people's feelings towards Margaret Thatcher, quite hostile.

• 45:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  There's a great David Peace novel called GB84, if you're interested in reading about this era, both politically and also for working-class people. And he wrote The Red Riding Quartet, that's about like a serial killer. It got made into some movies. But in any case, GB84 and this period of time is very interesting. And as a like, kind of background noise to the setup of like these bands.

• 46:19Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that you're so personally invested in these stories because of your bloodline going back to England?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  I try to understand, I mean, my dad was already in America by this point, but I try to understand that side of things. And also, like, I just find English culture and Scottish culture and Irish culture pretty fascinating.

• 46:35Yasi Salek?

  Well, Felia.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  That's why I'm here.

• 46:37Yasi Salek?

  I think the Thatcher thing is the most interesting because she both was the most hated villain, but also through some of her weird schemes, created the possibility for a lot of these bands to exist. She made this enterprise allowance scheme thing where all you had to have was a thousand dollars in the bank and they would give you all this, they would give you monthly money. It was like, it was like a year-long dole instead of having to go every week, which meant bands could tour. It was great. You couldn't tour if you had to show up every week to get your dole check.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. No, Happy Mondays used it, Creation Records used it. A lot of bands and labels use this to like form and exist. Backfire, bitch.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Rest in peace, man.

• 47:24Yasi Salek?

  Rest in peace. Maggie. Okay, this I tried really hard for you guys. You know I go the extra mile, but Discogs is slow on shipping. In 1984, Primal Scream's first recorded material appears on a tape series called Pleasantly Surprised. I believe Pleasantly Surprised was the label. This is really hard to find information about this. I plucked it out of a out-of-print Primal Scream book by Chris Needs, who started Zig Zag Magazine and was a DJ. They had two songs on here, one called "An Introduction" and one called "Circumcision." I think on the tape it says "Intro." You can't find them on the internet. I ordered the tape from Discogs. It has not arrived yet.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 48:04Yasi Salek?

  But I'll tell you what Chris Needs described it as. "In-your-face white noise."

• 48:10Speaker 04

  When you get stuff.

• 48:12Yasi Salek?

  When you're unwell.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  When you get stuff delivered to you after you've recorded the episode, is there like a little bit of like a, what am I gonna do with this now?

• 48:19Yasi Salek?

  No, I love it.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 48:20Yasi Salek?

  As you know, I love stuff.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  I know you love stuff.

• 48:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  But like when the Primal Scream tape arrives in like June, are you gonna be like, oh, great, I will one day like listen to this? Or is it an instant like goes into your tape deck?

• 48:33Yasi Salek?

  I will listen to it, as well as the ID Magazine drugs issue, which will also not arrive until after this podcast is.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  That's too bad.

• 48:40Yasi Salek?

  I know. It's great. And it's not on the internet. It's Irvine Welsh interviewing Bobby Lafferty. Okay, guys, it's 1985. It's spring. It's time to put out our first official Primal Scream release. Did you listen to this?

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:54Yasi Salek?

  What do you think?

• 48:55Speaker 04

  It doesn't sound like Primal Scream to me. Yeah. Obviously, this is the beginning of a more jangle pop, twee guitar, chiming guitar era of this band. It's also their first era. In some ways, this feels like the outlier to me to all the rest of their music. Like, when you listen to Screamadelica and you listen to Exterminator, you can feel the two talking to one another. This feels like the different version of the band.

• 49:21Yasi Salek?

  Interesting.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  Like, if this had been called Bobby and the Jangle Puffs, it would have made more sense.

• 49:27Yasi Salek?

  It's actually Jugs and the Jangle Puffs. I more see it as like, if it was like a canvas, Primal Scream is like a painting on a canvas. It's like the layer that I think really is underneath all of their stuff.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Which is like solid guitar music?

• 49:42Yasi Salek?

  Just like Psych-informed Ronettes, Shangri-Las. Like, it has that. That's the twee, maybe like, girl group thing that like, even a little Velvet Underground-y, you know? I think that was like the baseline for everything for them. Even when they get into like their Memphis cosplay, for, you know, to be not generous of it all. Like, I do think like there's an underlying bit of like, going back to Psych and to like, the girl group-y sort of Motown.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:16Yasi Salek?

  That's just my feeling. And Emmy called it Peachy Sweet Pop. He got a little interview Bobby Gillespie and he said, "I'd like to try to make timeless records." That's good. This song is okay.

• 50:36Yasi Salek?

  The cover is really cool. It has an image from a 60s Francois Hardy album, but Bobby cut it so it's just half her face so you can't recognize her. He did a lot of the cover art in the beginning. Okay, so this summer after that comes out, he starts a club night called Splash One, named after a 13th Floor Elevator song from 1966, at a club called Daddy Warbucks in Glasgow. And they would put on shows, Jasmine Minks, The Pastels, spiritually in conversation with the- First iteration of Primal Scream, The Weather Prophet felt Sonic Youth's very first show in Scotland was there, thought that was cool. And I like this, Bobby said, because of our club, all these kids were forming bands. Suddenly you'd meet someone like Norman Blake, who was in a band called The Boy Hairdressers with the artist Jim Lambe.

• 51:19Yasi Salek?

  And then they split up and Norman formed Teenage Fan Club. The other band that started there was the one Kurt Cobain loved, The Vaseline's. Francis and Eugene met each other at Splash One. I remember making Eugene tapes of Velvet's bootlegs and stuff, and he started growing his hair like John Cale. It was a cool scene and people would take acid and come to the club tripping out of their skulls to groove to the psychedelic punk rock soundtrack.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Chills.

• 51:41Yasi Salek?

  So good. There's an NME write-up in August of Primal Scream and The Bodians. This one quote from Bobby I thought was so interesting. To me, it's just the total fucking erosion of British culture by American crap. Really ahead of his time on the, what ended up sort of fueling all of Britpop.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, also, this is the first time in your research that I'm like, uh, this is Bobby talking his shit. Cause they'll like, they'll eventually go back around and be like, what this band is is from Memphis. But like, that kind of push and pull with American culture is fascinating. And obviously plagues a lot of the Britpop bands, except for Oasis, who are like, we are indifferent to everything.

• 52:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we don't even know what you're on about, that's fine. I think he said it a lot, that he just felt that rock music in the eighties was like, nonexistent. Like, it was just such a joke and he hated it. And maybe he's referring specifically to like, American rock music, but maybe all of it. He's also like 20 years old or 22 years old.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  It's good podcasting. He's just like, it's you only speak in definitive declarative hyperbolic statements.

• 52:45Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Somewhere Black Flag was like, what's your, what do you want to on, mate?

• 52:48Yasi Salek?

  I just think that new bands in this country are choked even before they're born. There's a lot of new, really good pop groups in Britain who are totally fucking ignored as a result of American rock. And inverted fucking racism on the part of journalists. That I don't know what he's talking about. Does inverted racism means like, white lives matter?

• 53:05Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 53:06Yasi Salek?

  I don't want to speak for Bobby, 22-year-old Bobby Gillespie, however old he is at this point. Primal Scream is booked to go play two shows, opening for Jesus and Mary Chain in June. So they do a show in Manchester and they randomly ask the Jesus and Mary Chain, Karen Parker, who is Bobby's longtime girlfriend, to play drums instead of Bobby. And according to Bobby, she was like, "Okay, well, no, because I don't play drum. I don't know how to play drums." And they were like, "We really want you to do it. What can we give you to persuade you to do it?" And she was like, "I will do it for one gram of speed." And they were like, "Deal. Sold."

• 53:37Speaker 04

  This is how, this is how we made things.

• 53:40Yasi Salek?

  This is how we made moves back then. Bobby was like, "There was something going on and I sensed it. Sold out for a gram of pink champagne." That's what they called Manchester speed. "It was weird. The Scream Boys were all asking me why I wasn't playing. What could I say? The Reed Brothers wouldn't speak about confrontational stuff like this, and I couldn't speak up either. I accepted it because it was their band. We were all dysfunctional, truth be told, but it left a bad taste. That was the start of me getting moved out of the band." November of this year of 85 Psycho Candy comes out. No big deal.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Oh, man. There is a different simulation of real life where that's the end of Bobby Gillespie's career.

• 54:18Yasi Salek?

  Can you even, like, you've already-

• 54:20Speaker 04

  And he was like, "I was in JAMC until the second before they put out this world-changing album."

• 54:27Yasi Salek?

  But he played on it.

• 54:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:28Yasi Salek?

  Like, you haven't even made a move that's important with your own band yet, but you already played on one of the most important bands of the 80s. Or important albums of the 80s.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Talk to me about 1986.

• 54:49Yasi Salek?

  Best-selling albums of 1986. True Blue by Madonna.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Good record.

• 54:54Yasi Salek?

  Really important for me. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Pretty good record.

• 54:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay. Graceland, Paul Simon.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Good record.

• 55:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I love it. Controversial, but-

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Is it? Still?

• 55:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 55:05Yasi Salek?

  You know, people like to bring that up and out again. The stealing of the culture and stuff.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:11Yasi Salek?

  Life's rich pageant, R.E.M.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Good album.

• 55:14Yasi Salek?

  America is up to their America-ing, and the Queen is dead, the Smiths. Once again, one of those things where you forget that this is also happening at the exact same time. Bobby leaves the Jesus and Mary Chain, January of 1986.

• 55:24Speaker 04

  Did he leave or was he shoved?

• 55:26Yasi Salek?

  He was given the option. He was, um...

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Of drumming for his life? A drum off with Karen?

• 55:32Yasi Salek?

  What is it? He was given an ultimatum.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 55:35Yasi Salek?

  That he could either be in Primal Scream, or he could be in Jesus and Mary Chain.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  I personally probably would have chosen at that moment to be in Jesus and Mary Chain.

• 55:44Yasi Salek?

  Can you believe the, his...

• 55:46Speaker 04

  Self-belief.

• 55:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He said it was unusual because Jim Reid called him around tea time. That's dinner. And usually Douglas Hart was the one that talked to him, but now it was mostly McGee because he was managing them. And Jim said, "We want you to be the drummer in the Mary Chain full-time. We don't want you to be in Primal Scream anymore. You can't be in both bands. You have to make a choice." Bobby said, "Well, I'd never seen this coming." I think I immediately froze in a state of shock, all the strength draining out of my body. I couldn't speak. I went silent for what seemed like ages, was probably just for a few seconds, and then answered, "Okay, I'll just be in the Scream then." He said, "Looking back on it now, I think the Mary Chain set me up. They were clever in offering me the choice between being their full-time drummer or the leader and songwriter of Primal Scream. They already knew which path I would choose. It was a way of getting rid of me without openly sacking me. They gave me a soft parachute.

• 56:31Yasi Salek?

  We never fell out. I love both William and Jim Reid to this day, and Douglas Hart was the best man at my wedding in 2006." It's really touching.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:39Yasi Salek?

  And then he goes, "And they did replace me with a drum machine," which is cool. I liked that a lot. The next album they released, the classic existential blues record Darklands, is my favorite Mary Chain album, and it's all drum machines.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  It's my favorite Mary Chain album, too.

• 56:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's so good.

• 56:59Yasi Salek?

  A couple of months after, Primal Scream puts out their next single, which is "Crystal Crescent," with the B-side, which is much more important and remembered, "Velocity Girl."

• 57:20Yasi Salek?

  Where do you land on "Velocity Girl"?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  Cool song. I think I like the band Velocity Girl more than that Primal Scream song.

• 57:34Yasi Salek?

  What about the Stone Roses song that ripped off Velocity Girl?

• 57:51Speaker 04

  Probably like Primal Scream's version more.

• 57:52Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Velocity Girl was supposed to be a ballad. Like, he wanted it to be like Caroline Says Too by Lou Reed. But then the band made it really fast. It gets put on the C86 tape. It's a tape that was put out by NME in May of 86. And they put all these songs by these bands that kind of sound in that twee, cute-

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Jingle pop.

• 58:19Yasi Salek?

  Jingle pop feel. Velocity Girl is the lead song. It's number one. There's also songs by The Pastels, The Soup Dragons, The Bodians, The Mighty Lemon Drops, The Shop Assistants, The Wedding Present. I really like The Wedding Present.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  I love The Wedding Present.

• 58:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Come Up and See Me.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  But I like their albini stuff the most.

• 58:34Yasi Salek?

  Of course you do.

• 58:38Yasi Salek?

  It's almost like you didn't have to say it, you know? So Velocity Girl just fucking pops off. It goes crazy. They start getting booked on all these gigs. They're like, it's a big, that's their kind of like first small to medium-sized break. This is how they meet Jeff Barrett, also known as Foxhead, who books them at the place that he is a promoter of called Ziggy's in Plymouth. They do not like being part of the-

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Twee.

• 59:04Yasi Salek?

  Twee, jingle pop-

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 59:05Yasi Salek?

  -scene. Jeff Barrett said, "It was a horrible fucking albatross. It was something that I don't think they felt allied to at all. They were never part of that scene." "We've got nothing in common with those bands, Gillespie told Melody Maker. Independent music is pretty inferior. They can't play their instruments and they can't write songs." I'm not sure you guys can really play your instruments either, but- "Independent music means anyone can make a record, and that's a bad thing." I don't disagree.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:30Yasi Salek?

  Bring back gatekeeping. There have been more crap records made in the last eight years than ever before. Velocity Girl gets number four on the John Peel Festive 50. It is the shortest song on the list that year. For your context, number one was "There Isn't a Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Tell me if I'm wrong.

• 59:46Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  One of the moves that Bobby Gillespie pulls kind of a couple of times over the course of his career is that Primal Scream will make a stylistic choice.

• 59:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  It will- Let's just say, let's say it's leading the way, but it could also be somewhat of a following move. And then he'll turn around and be like, everybody who does this is lame.

• 1:00:07Yasi Salek?

  And also, I'm gonna do something completely different.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like, kind of like ruins the party on his way out the door. Like pulls the fire alarm, is like, this shit sucks, but now we're making ecstasy music.

• 1:00:17Yasi Salek?

  It feels to me almost like he felt like, oh, the way I'm doing it is not the way you're doing it. You know, like, it might sound similar, but where I'm coming from is not where you're coming from.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  But it also keeps people on their toes, right?

• 1:00:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. They go on tour with the Weather Prophets, and it's on this tour, it's important to note that Robert Young gets his enduring nickname.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Throb.

• 1:00:40Yasi Salek?

  Throb. Bobby said, "We had some fun times on the road early on. One time in 86, we're all standing on a grass verge by the hard shoulder just off the motorway." So many British terms in that sentence that we say different things for. "Somewhere in England, on the way to a gig, having a piss, and someone said, 'For fuck's sake, would you look at the size of that thing?'" Everyone turned around to look what was causing the commotion. Robert had a huge cock. He was like a horse.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  It wasn't until we started doing research for this pie, I thought throb was an affectionate term for his guitar tone.

• 1:01:08Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  Honestly, it never occurred to me that that's what this was about.

• 1:01:11Yasi Salek?

  Me neither.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Which is totally fine.

• 1:01:12Yasi Salek?

  Totally fine. I think that's probably better. I feel like that Robert was like, "What's your guys' problem?" And then he gets so great. Bobby's like, "I said, 'The size of your cock, you bastard, it's like a fucking python.'" He just laughed and said to me, "It's not that I'm big, it's just that you guys are all too wee." From then on, he was known in the band as Throb, not Dungo anymore, because of his throbbing basslines, and also because he liked putting it about. I remember saying he was a hoe.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He was flying the flag for the band. He was a very good-looking man. May he rest in peace. So now it's summer of 86. Paul Hart, the guitarist, quits. They get a guy named Stuart May to replace him. There's a lot of people that come in and out of Primal Scream that maybe aren't. The core important people, but just to put respect on their names, I'll mention them.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  I think there's a fair amount of turnover and it's also just worth noting that they were elite talent scouts and collaborators. So like finding people to bring into the Primal Scream tent, picking people who were like maybe on the way up or had not done anything in a while.

• 1:02:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sure. With like producers and stuff, definitely. So Alan McGee at this time is fired by Jesus and Mary Chain. And he's super bummed, right? He's like, nothing was going well. Creation's not really popping at this point, let's be honest. But then Rob Dickens, who I'm deeply fascinated with, he was the chairman of Warner Music UK and he, many of the amazing things we have also have to do with him having just really good taste and being fucking cool. He gives McGee, he's like, no, don't quit. I'll give you a little imprint. It's called Elevation. Or it became called Elevation because McGee named after a television song, unlike Julian Caspian, who has heard television. And he signs immediately, Primal Scream, good. The Weather

• 1:02:59Yasi Salek?

  Prophets, okay. Did not pan out the same way as Primal Scream. And he's like, all right, let's make album. Like, who, who do you want to produce it? And Bobby sincerely goes Jimmy Page or Prince? And Alan McGee's like, lol. Here's Stephen Street. Stephen Street gets a little bad rap in our, in our stories. Cause remember Blur also didn't like totally get on with him?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  I mean, Stephen Street's goaded to me.

• 1:03:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, come on, but.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  And also just like continues to make good records for these people while they're like, I don't know.

• 1:03:32Yasi Salek?

  He did the Cranberries, like he's made amazing music. Bobby said, I don't know how it happened. I wanted our records to sound like The Doors and Love. I'd already had experience working with Stephen Street, of course, with the Mary Chain, and it hadn't gone brilliantly. Stephen Street had tried to do the Never Understand single and they didn't really get along with him. And they also told Alan McGee that he would secretly turn their guitars down. Anyways, Bobby said he was a nice guy, but kind of straight and ordinary, not rock and roll at all. He came to see us play in Edinburgh at the Onion Cellar in late summer 1986. I remember telling him, I didn't think our drummer was good enough. At the gig, Street said to me, I think he'll be fine. But actually, he was not fine. He was a bit of a disaster. Tam McGurk, he could not keep time. Bobby said he would slow down and speed up within a bar, not even over 60 or 30 bars within a bar.

• 1:04:17Yasi Salek?

  So they work with Stephen Street for a while. Tam McGurk can't keep time. Bobby's having trouble singing some of his own songs. McGee comes by to see what the fuck's going on and he's like, okay, this is not going well. So they send Tam McGurk and Stuart May home and it's just Beatty, Bobby and Throb with a drum machine. And McGee's like, look, maybe you guys need Andrew Innes to come in here and just like, zhuzh, you know, help a little bit. Yeah. You're having a rough time. So Andrew Innes comes and he's like, I'm sorry, um, what the fu- No one can play to this drum track. It's so out of time. And he's like, also Bobby, these songs are in the wrong key for your vocal range. But they didn't know any of that because they don't know music. They're literally like, what's a key?

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  That would always happen when I would be in some sort of nascent band practice and somebody would say, this is in D. I would be like, I have to go.

• 1:05:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So in Crash Activated, you weren't the one being like, let me set the-

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  We didn't have keys. But yeah, like even in like, I want to start a band that's like, sounds like the Allman Brothers. And it would just be like, sure. And then be like, no, we're not, we're not going to get there.

• 1:05:13Yasi Salek?

  I don't know what a, I don't know what a key is. We'd be like, oh, you're singing off key. I'm like, I don't know what singing on key is. Couldn't tell you, sorry. So McGee's like, okay, wrap it up, babe. This is not working. But they had recorded Imperial. McGee had showed it to Rob Dickens and he loved it. And so McGee calls Bobby, he's like, don't worry. He loved that song so much, he's going to send you guys to Abbey Road with Clive Langer to record your next single.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  How expensive was it to record at Abbey Road?

• 1:05:37Yasi Salek?

  It sounds like it would be a lot, but I don't know how much studios cost.

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  Relatively functional at this point where it's like, well, we need to keep the lights on. So we need bands coming in.

• 1:05:44Yasi Salek?

  What I do know is that what made them move on from there after they made the single they make is that the producer was too expensive. Maybe they didn't say it was because of the studios, because Clive Langer himself was too expensive. So I don't know if he's like attached to the studio or not. So at this point, they kicked out. Tam McGurk and the man whose name I Stewart, man, sorry Stuart. And it's just Bobby Beatty, Throb, and they're like, we need you, Andrew, and as please, you know what keys are. We don't know what keys are. Please come to our band. And Bobby, we kept the useless tambourine player for some reason.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Jukes?

• 1:06:16Yasi Salek?

  Everyone was on equal wages, even the fucking tambourine player. Jukes is getting the same money as everyone else in the band. Jukes is living, babe.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 1:06:26Yasi Salek?

  They're socialists. They're having a great time at Abbey Road, babe. They're buying coke from Cedric.

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:31Yasi Salek?

  Who was Ronnie Woods' alleged dealer. Cedric's coming by the stew to take-

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  Great alleged there, yeah.

• 1:06:37Yasi Salek?

  So Rob Dicken's like, okay, here's 30 grand.

• 1:06:41Yasi Salek?

  Go make an album. Cause he loved how that single turned out. It was Imperial. So Imperial's the demo that he liked and then they made it. And Clive Langer was like, I don't, I need more money than that. So good luck to you. So McGee's like, what about Mayo Thompson?

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:54Yasi Salek?

  Who was in the psych band Red Crayola.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:06:57Yasi Salek?

  Are you familiar with Mayo Thompson before?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Yasi Salek?

  Because of Primal Scream or because-

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  Because of Red Crayola.

• 1:07:01Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Are you, do you have a big psych background?

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  I don't, but I had to work at like Kim's and record stores where it'd be like, there's a Red Crayola reissue. Like, all right, put it on there.

• 1:07:11Yasi Salek?

  Super normal guys were probably coming in asking for that.

• 1:07:20Yasi Salek?

  They asked Dave Morgan from Weather Profits to play drums and they get to fucking work on Sonic Flower Groove.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  Low key, one of my favorite things is asking a guy to produce your record. I don't feel like it happens as much anymore, but you know, you just would, when you look at records from 75, 77 through like even the early 90s, it'll just be like, why was Elvis Costello producing this record?

• 1:07:45Yasi Salek?

  This is high key, my favorite thing.

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  Or why was Bowie?

• 1:07:47Yasi Salek?

  This is really, we used to be a proper country because the producer would just come in, be like, no, it's not working. Here's a bottle of red wine. I'm pouring it on the piano. Do you see the energy? I want you to-

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  No, I'm out. Yeah. And it would just be like produced by Elvis Costello, master of reggae.

• 1:08:02Yasi Salek?

  And it fucking worked. We need that back. Bring that back. I'll produce records.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  It would be kind of funny if, it would be like if Ariana Grande produced the Chapel Room record. Like, I would like to see that.

• 1:08:14Yasi Salek?

  No, it would be like if...

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  Because we don't have enough bands now where I'm like, there are people in this band.

• 1:08:19Yasi Salek?

  It would be like if the kombucha meme girl produced the Chapel Room record. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's more that. At least Ariana Grande knows how to like sing and has made records before. Like, it would literally be like, we like your energy. You've done some records before. You will bring, you know, Cedric to the studio. Like, I could do that.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  Maybe you should become a producer.

• 1:08:41Yasi Salek?

  Hire me to make your album.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Some band out there is gonna say yes.

• 1:08:46Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes, and this is gonna be surprising coming from me, sometimes I think that's what Jack Antonoff does.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I think he's pretty musically adept.

• 1:08:54Yasi Salek?

  Sure, but I don't think that's what he's doing. I think he's like vibes managing. Yeah.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  I would agree with you until I saw that video of him like assembling a 1975 song out of like 87,000 portraits.

• 1:09:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, maybe his best of both worlds. Yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  That's why...

• 1:09:09Yasi Salek?

  If you were making an album right now and you could pick one of these kinds of producers, vibes producers, who would you choose?

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  God, I don't know. I mean, I think it would be really, I would just like to have been able to have like Joe Strummer produce my record.

• 1:09:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Like he did with The Pogues or whatever.

• 1:09:23Yasi Salek?

  I love it. I might have like Liam Gallagher.

• 1:09:25Speaker 04

  I think Joe Strummer was big. Like, here's some beads and some red wine I've produced.

• 1:09:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he did do that a lot, right?

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Yasi Salek?

  Love it.

• 1:10:08Yasi Salek?

  All right, let's talk about Sonic Flower Groove. It was out October 5th, 1987 on Elevation, produced by Mayo Thompson. And then Colin Fairley and Clive Langer worked on a couple of the songs. Listen, it hit number 62 on the UK Albums Chart. Nothing to sneeze at. Bobby said when we released the album, nobody was that excited. Not our press officer, not McGee, or the fans.

• 1:10:30Speaker 04

  I gotta admit, it's not, not a record I return to a ton.

• 1:10:33Yasi Salek?

  I put it on and I was like, this is nice. And there's actually a couple of songs I quite really like.

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  There are 10,000 other records that do what it's doing better.

• 1:10:42Yasi Salek?

  Yes. You can really hear what they love, though, right? I'm like, oh, okay, there's like a big star through line. There's the Ronettes, Shangri-Las, like boom, boom drums coming through.

• 1:11:03Yasi Salek?

  It's very sweet. I like Treasure Trip. I really enjoyed that Bobby said about Mayo Thompson. Our producer, Mayo Thompson, was asleep most of the time through the recording of the album. He just sat in his chair by the mixing console with his eyes closed. And occasionally he would wake up and push his glasses back up into position and make an encouraging comment. He was never negative, always patient with us. But it felt as though he was just going through the motions. He was no Phil Spector, but then again, I'm no Ronnie Ronnet.

• 1:11:33Yasi Salek?

  I love it. He got into this thing where he like didn't like that people thought they were soft because of this, which I thought was interesting. Which is again, kinda I think why they were so mad about Velocity Girl. They were like, you might be this cardigan, you know? I guess their term was anorak. We would use cardigan here. But like, he's like, we're not that. Like, we're hardcore, you know?

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Yasi Salek?

  We have jukes.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  He was one of, he's really, he's listening to the commenters early on.

• 1:11:58Yasi Salek?

  He's in the subreddit.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Yasi Salek?

  Not I, couldn't be me, babe. In 1990, he said, "I still like quite a lot of the old Primal Scream songs. Stuff like All Fall Down and Velocity Girl. But I don't think our first album was as good as it could have been. The main problem was that we loved the melodies so much that we were too careful. And by making sure every note was perfect, we lost the spirit of many of the songs. It would have been a much better record if it had sounded a bit rougher." I think he's not wrong there. Because Jesus and Mary Chain did something similar, right? In the sense of like, it also has that DNA of like... Shangri-Las, I mean, very famously, boom, boom. But they fucked it up.

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Yasi Salek?

  They scuffed it up, they dirtied it up, they fuzzied it up, like it was dangerous.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  It was cool. It was sexual. Yeah, they, they, well, Jesus and Mary Chain were playing with like a completely different palette.

• 1:12:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but it, but it's like they kind of were starting from the same loves, right? But I think Bobby's right, it's, it's, doesn't have dirt.

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  I think, I guess my point would be like if they stopped making records.

• 1:12:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Speaker 04

  After this.

• 1:13:00Yasi Salek?

  We wouldn't have this podcast.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  We would probably just be like, that was like another good, Velocity Girl was a good song.

• 1:13:06Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  And that would be it for promo screen.

• 1:13:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. There's a song about the miners' strike.

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Yasi Salek?

  Imperial, that was my first attempt to write about the history of the left. How the left is forever factional and fighting internecine, he knows so many big words, wars and not standing together. Whereas the right always shows a real class consciousness and therefore wins every single time.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  That's a kind of like.

• 1:13:35Yasi Salek?

  Evergreen.

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  The story of, of Andor, the Star Wars show right now.

• 1:13:39Yasi Salek?

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:40Yasi Salek?

  I won't be watching that, but I'm happy that, to know that that's the storyline.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  It's about class consciousness and struggle against imperialism.

• 1:13:46Yasi Salek?

  Isn't that what all Star Wars movies are about?

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Kinda.

• 1:13:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:13:49Speaker 04

  Also, most other Star Wars movies are about like the Force, you know, like the spirituality side.

• 1:13:54Yasi Salek?

  Okay, right.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  Gotcha.

• 1:13:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Bobby Lesby coded all around, honestly. Here are the reviews. Melody Maker liked Gentle Tuesday. It's a cute song. It's the first single. But they thought the rest was not pop, it is dandelion fluff. Sounds gave it three stars. Generous.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  Do you go back and think about like whether Sounds was consistent with their reviews? Like when they pop up over and over again?

• 1:14:20Yasi Salek?

  I do know about enemy and Melody Makers because I've talked to the people that worked there and read about it so many times. That they were like always in a contest with each other, so they would bet on horses. And so they would kind of try to keep consistent for a while because it's like, this is like our band.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Yasi Salek?

  You know, we found this band. And then, of course, they all classically do the same thing where after the big album comes out, they turn on them. I put a lot of reviews in here, but they all kind of say the same thing where.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  It's pretty good.

• 1:14:46Yasi Salek?

  Right? They're like, it's okay, but not pretty good. Yeah. Record Mirror said, this was Treasure Trip is awfully weak and Love You is like the Mary Chain at their most anemic. Three stars, though. So I think Bobby is getting a lot of goodwill from having been associated with the Jews and Mary Chain because Psycho Candy was such a big deal. And Jews and Mary Chain are really popular at this moment. All right, Sonic Flower Groove comes and goes. Bobby picks up and moves to Brighton with Karen, his girlfriend, and Throb. Beatty does not want to move to Brighton and also does not want to be in the band anymore. I don't know if it's because Sonic Flower Groove didn't do well. I don't really know why, but he leaves the band on good terms, starts his own thing, Spuria X.

• 1:15:26Yasi Salek?

  Primal Scream plays a show in Lisbon where Nicky Sutton gets stabbed trying to procure smack for himself and Throb. From Small Maps? Correct. Wow. That's right.

• 1:15:35Yasi Salek?

  And then they also play one other show opening for the Butthole Surfers at Brixton Academy. We used to be a proper world. Western world. Western world. They're playing shows, but they're not playing any of really the old songs. Okay. Because they're just like, I don't want to think about that anymore. Right. That came and went, we're done. Again, I think we would be remiss if we don't mention, it probably has a lot to do with Jim Beatty leaving the band. Sure. Jim Beatty's the one with his like twinkle, twinkle, 12-string guitar, you know, like that element is gone. They start writing new songs, babe. They're, they're jamming at Bobby's house on the weekend. They put an ad in the music papers for a new drummer. They get a guy called Toby Tomonov, who had played, again, such a small world.

• 1:16:20Yasi Salek?

  He played in Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds with Vinnie Riley, whose singer was briefly who? Morrissey. Morrissey. Oh, my God. That was his first band that he was in before the Smiths. He briefly sang for Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds with Vinnie Riley from Drutie Column in Manchester. That's pretty amazing. It's pretty fucking amazing. This will be in our TV show as well. Now, this I thought was funny. It's 1989. Bobby's in the Virgin Megastore in Brighton and he hears this song playing over the speakers that sounded a lot like Velocity Girls. And he goes, hey, who the fuck is this? And they're like. It's the Stone Roses. They're doing a gig tomorrow night. I'm promoting it. Do you want to come? I'll put you on the guest list. Bobby Gillespie never once says one negative thing about the Stone Roses essentially ripping off his song.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Well, he pays them back when he rips off their sound, right? Yeah, not really.

• 1:17:09Yasi Salek?

  It's not their sound. It was Happy Mondays, more than anything. The Stone Roses had like one-

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  It's a big cycle of like influence and taking and borrowing and stuff.

• 1:17:18Yasi Salek?

  It's funny that the Stone Roses are sort of lumped in with that acid house era, but they really only had one dancy song. Like, the rest was pretty straight up, like, you know, yeah, it's good. It's great. But instead, he's like, great. I'd love to go to that gig of the band that stole my song.

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  Also, how crazy is it that he's like in Virgin Megastore, some guy's like, they're playing tonight. I will get you on the list.

• 1:17:41Yasi Salek?

  I have to plan to go to a concert six weeks in advance and like, figure out how to get out of the house at the right time so that I don't fall asleep before it's like, it's so over. I'm so washed.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  But if you were at a Virgin Megastore, maybe the whole world would go technicolor for you.

• 1:17:54Yasi Salek?

  Do you think if we still had Virgin Megastores, we would be in a better society? Like that utopia meme on the internet?

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  Well, do you think that we could start doing ironic Virgin Megastore pop-ups?

• 1:18:04Yasi Salek?

  Didn't they do that with Tower Records?

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Did they?

• 1:18:05Yasi Salek?

  I think so.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  Probably.

• 1:18:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we should though. I'm down. He goes to the Stone Roses gig. He's not into acid house yet. Primal Scream is not into acid house. However, Alan McGee has. He's moved to Manchester to be closer to the hacienda, to go and do drugs there. And Jeff Barrett, Foxhead, is the press officer now for Factory. So that's their old mate. And they're super into acid house. And they start making tapes for the Primals with like lots of Chicago and Detroit house music mixed in. Inner City, Big Fun, Joe Smooth, Frankie Fucking Knuckles, Derek May. Bobby said that Frankie Knuckles' Tears became an anthem for them all. Here's a part I didn't put in the doc, but I remembered it because it's interesting, which means I should say it.

• 1:18:49Yasi Salek?

  He said that they loved that song Tears so much that that became a like slang for them. They'd be like, hey, you want to go to the fucking kebab place? It's so Tears.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:19:00Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:19:03Yasi Salek?

  It's so cool. He didn't say kebab place, but I was just trying to think of something British.

• 1:19:15Yasi Salek?

  If you guys want to know the detailed history I did of how ecstasy got to the UK via Ibiza, you can go to the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses episode because I do a real deep dive there. But let's just suffice to say that sometime in 1987 ecstasy had come into the UK via people that would go there for the dance music, balleric beat culture of Ibiza. Through the Happy Mondays, really, honestly, I was like patient zeros because Bez was so insane and some guy would like, his friend had a bunch of E's and would give them to him to like sell. But 1988 is the year it really took over the hacienda. So Bobby had already seen the Mondays play in 87, but it was the second time he sees them in 88. He goes with Karen and McGee that he does his first bit of E.

• 1:19:59Yasi Salek?

  That actually McGee got straight from the horse's mouth, Sean Ryder.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, from Sean Ryder.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:20:04Yasi Salek?

  Imagine you're, you, sorry, again, what a blessed person.

• 1:20:08Speaker 04

  To see the Happy Mondays.

• 1:20:10Yasi Salek?

  And the first ecstasy you get comes straight from the hand of Sean Ryder? That's good stuff.

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Yasi Salek?

  God bless. At this point, bummed had already come out in 88, but this is like pre when the rote for Luck 7-inch really like goes crazy, but bummed is like in their imperial phase of the Happy Mondays. Like they're a big band. This changes things for Bobby. Ecstasy is another escape from psychic jail, I think, in a new way.

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  Another Damascene moment.

• 1:20:36Yasi Salek?

  Yes, another Damascene. I didn't even get into the Damascene moment of it all. You can look it up. So now they're into Acid House, babe. They're into ecstasy. Jeff Barrett Foxhead tells Primal Scream about this guy, Andrew Weatherall, who is a DJ and a writer who writes for a fanzine called Boyzone. Do you guys remember fanzines? Chris Ryan does.

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  I sure do. He's a ray for them.

• 1:20:57Yasi Salek?

  So good. Well, shout out to our friend Hua Su, who's really trying to keep fanzine culture alive. One mini-zine at a time.

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  I wrote for Jessica Hopper's fanzine. Hit her to quit.

• 1:21:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you did. So did our pal John Caramanica. Many, if you go look at that mass head, many great, I think Sean did too.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  I'm sure.

• 1:21:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I was too young at the time. That's not true. Sean and I are the same age. I have no excuse. I just wasn't cool enough. Okay, so Jeff Barrett tells a scream about Andrew Wetherall. Because of this Boyzone scene, he shows them an issue. He's like...

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  Are those around? Can you get a Boyzone copy?

• 1:21:29Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. Actually, that's one thing I didn't look into.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:21:32Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  That seems like something you would want.

• 1:21:34Yasi Salek?

  I'm slipping.

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  What happened to you?

• 1:21:37Yasi Salek?

  I was too busy on Discogs trying to get that, like, you rare Scottish Glasgow.

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  I would kill to see a copy of Boyzone.

• 1:21:45Yasi Salek?

  I know I do have several age-appropriate UK listeners who might be hoarders and collectors. If you have a Boyzone scene, let us know. We'd love to see it.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  Please do.

• 1:21:55Yasi Salek?

  In this particular issue, I guess, like, the people writing for it had been asked to list their favorite records of the time. And Andrew had said, "My favorites are all the ballads on the second Primal Scream", which has not come out yet. That's September 4th. So it must have been right around September when that comes out. Primal Scream, the self-titled.

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

  It's also cool to be like, "I'm already on the next record."

• 1:22:16Yasi Salek?

  Well, he was a writer, so he probably got advances, yeah. So they're doing tons of E, and then one night, they're out all night at Zap Club with McGee. And McGee's like, "Guess what? This is so fucking rave culture." There's a big party somewhere in the countryside in a fucking field, and Andrew Wetherall's DJing. Do you guys want to go? So they, like, get a taxi and, like, 5:00 in the morning to go. And that's where Bobby first met Andrew Wetherall, in a field at 6:00 in the morning, off my fucking head on E. Perfect.

• 1:22:49Yasi Salek?

  So perfect. The second Primal Scream album comes out September 4th, 1989. It's just self-titled. It's produced, the credit is Sister Anne, which is just them.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  Pause. We have to bring back, "I produced myself under a pseudonym."

• 1:23:04Yasi Salek?

  Again, we used to be a proper... No one does that anymore.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  You should have, like, Bandspine episodes of, like, it's also credited to Baroness, and Baroness is just you.

• 1:23:13Yasi Salek?

  It's just me. Baroness, that's a good one. This is an MCFive song, obviously, for this loser, if you didn't know that.

• 1:23:27Yasi Salek?

  Why didn't they want to just say "Produced by Primal Scream"? It was kind of like maybe hedging their bets. Like, if people don't like this, we don't want to be associated with being the producer. We could blame-

• 1:23:33Speaker 04

  It's also like a cool way to like make a reference that like if eight dudes get it, they're like, "Ooh."

• 1:23:38Yasi Salek?

  Cool. In your estimation, is Primal Scream album better than Sonic Flower Groove?

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  I just remember Primal Scream records based on like whether or not you can take a collection of six songs from them and be like, you know what I mean? So I think Sonic Flower Groove is probably more interesting as a snapshot of a moment in Scottish and English music. This is all right, but it's like really a prelude to what we're about to get.

• 1:24:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 04

  I don't feel like the influences had caught up with the music yet.

• 1:24:12Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:24:12Speaker 04

  Or the music hadn't caught up with their influences yet.

• 1:24:14Yasi Salek?

  Yes. But I think you can see like a progression.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And also, obviously, this one is important just in the building blocks of Primal Scream because without it, we would not have "Loaded."

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:26Yasi Salek?

  "Bobby on this album in 1990. When it came to the second album, we decided it was stupid to spend days and days working on a single song, so we recorded a lot of the tracks at the first take. We just wanted to bang everything straight down and concentrate on capturing the moment. But although we were really happy with it, the reviews were disappointing. Several journalists simply couldn't understand how we could do a rock song like "Ivy, Ivy, Ivy" one minute and a slow ballad using just a voice and slide guitar the next. Instead of being praised for our diversity, we're accused of being schizophrenic. Wait till the future. Stuart McConie at NME loved it. He said, "At their best, Primal Scream are one of the most exciting pop groups of their generation. Tempestuous, radiant, unique. Their influence, while subtle, has been profound. A workable blueprint for the guitar orgy and pop heaven. Ask the Stone Roses."

• 1:25:10Yasi Salek?

  And the good news is they're back. I think one thing that's probably worth pointing out is that if it feels like the reviews don't maybe match the material as much as you would expect-

• 1:25:21Yasi Salek?

  A huge part of the influence and impact and reception of bands at this time in the UK was their live shows.

• 1:25:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Yasi Salek?

  And their like presence in the culture.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Yasi Salek?

  And that is not always really reflected in the recorded music. And I think Primal Scream were a really exciting live band. And plus, they were just like part of this like cool rock culture.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  That continues to like local scenes in the States too, up through basically the invention of the internet where like you'd be like, oh, the record sounds like shit because like they didn't have a lot of money to make it or the producer went deaf before he recorded it. But you gotta see them live and you gotta see them like hanging out.

• 1:25:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  Because they're just like an important band in the scene.

• 1:25:58Yasi Salek?

  And like Primal Scream was fucking cool. Like they looked cool. Like the, the cover of this album is cool. Like I think, is it Throb was wearing the sort of like ethnic caftany shirt and like Bobby was always wearing like-

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  The Afghani reggae outfit.

• 1:26:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Afghani reggae outfit. And Bobby was like stick thin, always had like, you know, a cool fringe haircut, like a sort of like grown out mom.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  And face covering sunglasses.

• 1:26:21Yasi Salek?

  Face covering sunglasses, often leather trousers. His hair looked really cool and he chooses a merry chain too, just like. They were just fucking cool. I think Ivy Ivy is a, it's a, it's a good song. Yeah.

• 1:26:42Yasi Salek?

  Gimme Gimme Teenage Head.

• 1:26:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Yasi Salek?

  Good song.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  It's uh, the appearance of when you get to I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have, you get the appearance of Martin Duffy.

• 1:26:51Yasi Salek?

  Major.

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  Who's a huge part of the band going forward.

• 1:26:55Yasi Salek?

  Also, Martin Duffy is a musical genius. Like they, like you said, they're like prowess for recruiting just all star-

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  It's more like a gang than a band and they like just bring people into it.

• 1:27:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so they bring him in to play piano on I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have, which is a very beautiful song, I will say.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Yasi Salek?

  Then in October, Andrew Weatherall reviews a Primal Scream show in the NME under the pen name Audrey Witherspoon. It's mostly like a tour diary of like following them around, but he's very pro. He's very pro Primal Scream. And it is interesting that like, given like his DJ and acid house tastes, he loved the ballads like that. He was sincere about that. Like, he was a big fan of Primal Scream.

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  But almost interesting to look at how the then contemporary moment of alternative music at that moment, or music is kind of coalescing around this idea of college rock.

• 1:27:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  Some British bands are getting kind of broadcast over in the States as similar to like the Pixies or similar to R E M. And it's like, they're kind of getting commodified in a different way than they were in England. Cause I remember growing up, like I had no idea that Jesus and Mary Chain were a Scottish band, you know? Like, I just thought of them as like another band in that Pixies kind of tradition.

• 1:28:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  And I wonder if Primal Scream is kind of rejecting that a little bit.

• 1:28:27Yasi Salek?

  Rejecting the idea of being lumped in with...

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're like, we're not like alt-rock. We're not like a college rock band. Or maybe that their lack of acceptance by that whole thing is pushing them more, obviously, you know, it's really pushing them, there's drugs. But still, you know, it's interesting to consider.

• 1:28:43Yasi Salek?

  I think you're on to something, because Bobby did say about Andrew Weatherall that he was into the band when we weren't fashionable. That year, it was all Stone Roses, Pixies, Happy Mondays and Throwing Muses. And he's kind of like separating himself or themselves from the Pixies, Stone Roses, like NME darlings of it all. Throwing Muses and Pixies is such an interesting, because they really didn't become famous in the UK. And then they're like exported back to us.

• 1:29:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. You would have to buy like UK singles of Pixies and Throwing, because of, I guess it was 4 A.D.

• 1:29:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So, okay, November, Jeff Barrett, or Andrew Innes, we don't know which one, whoever does the genius, comes up with the idea to get Andrew Weatherall to remix the song, "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have," because McGee wanted to release a post-album single.

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  Great idea.

• 1:29:30Yasi Salek?

  Weatherall hadn't done much up to this point in terms of...

• 1:29:36Yasi Salek?

  Remix, and he was a DJ, but he wasn't like remixing music. He had worked on one remix on the incredible Happy Mondays Hallelujah EP. I fucking love that song with Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne. But that hadn't come out yet. That comes out in December. And that's, I think, basically all he had done. He had barely been in a studio. So they go in the studio. Bobby says a lot while he had no idea what he was doing. I'm going to talk about it when we get in, when we talk about the single in a second. But I just want to point out for the timeline, they finished the single in the studio and Bobby has to go sign back on the door. And he's like, super depressed. He's like, I failed. Like, the albums didn't hit. We didn't become pop stars. We didn't, we didn't chart like come February.

• 1:30:21Yasi Salek?

  Just a mere three months later, 1990. Loaded as release February 1990 by Creation Records, producer Andrew Weatherall. So apparently, he did two versions, but he was like trying to be really safe and because he loved the song, he loved the ballads and he didn't want to like

• 1:30:36Speaker 04

  Re, re, remix it.

• 1:30:37Yasi Salek?

  Yes. And he was, according to Bobby, was showing too much respect for the song. And I guess Andrew Ennis finally said to him, stop fanning about. You've just got to fucking destroy it. Now Bobby comes up to the studio from Brighton with a bootleg VHS. Physical media alert, catch Sean Finacy on the horn. Bootleg VHS of Wild Angels, directed by Roger Corman.

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  A motorcycle movie.

• 1:31:01Yasi Salek?

  Motorcycle movie starring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Have you seen this movie?

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  I have not. I've seen clips of it.

• 1:31:06Yasi Salek?

  I'm surprised. Me too. I haven't seen it. He also brought up his copy of Outrageous by Kim Bailey. Another controversial rock music figure. Bobby said, "We took Outrageous and the Wild Angels video and suggested to Weatherall that he put some dialogue on the track. We'd heard dialogue from films and Martin Luther King speeches used on acid house." Just want to pause to tell you, that is absolutely true. Chloe Walsh, friend of the pod and former guest, sent me a mix from a club, an acid house club in, I think it was Glasgow, that in the fucking middle of it, there's just a drop where it's the "I have a dream" speech.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  No way.

• 1:31:37Yasi Salek?

  I swear to fucking God. And I cried laughing. I was like, just imagining a rave full of Scottish people.

• 1:31:43Speaker 04

  If you were on E, you'd be like, I'm fucking going to heaven right now.

• 1:31:46Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent. But like, it's just like, you're in Scotland.

• 1:31:51Yasi Salek?

  You're raving.

• 1:31:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Yasi Salek?

  And Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, "I have a dream," in the middle of the rave when you're out of your fucking head on ecstasy, you can't make this stuff up. It's too good. So Weatherall was like, "Okay, bet, go away." So he cooks in the kitchen, babe. He makes magic that whole night. He takes a bit of dialogue from the film. It's Frank Maxwell and Peter Fonda, puts it just at the beginning of the track. Just, "What is it that you want to do?"

• 1:32:16Speaker 04

  Want to be free.

• 1:32:17Yasi Salek?

  Want to be free. "We want to be free to do what we want to do, and we want to get loaded, and we want to have a good time." Every time I hear that, I'm getting the chills.

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  This song starts like four times where you think it's going to start, and then it's like, wait, there's like,

• 1:32:33Speaker 04

  and you're like, "Oh, my God."

• 1:32:33Yasi Salek?

  It's coming, it's coming.

• 1:32:36Yasi Salek?

  Also, hilariously, I didn't know this until I researched this, that Primal Scream also didn't know that Mudhoney had used more or less the same bit of dialogue on In-N-Out of Grace, which was on their 1988 Super Fuzz Big Muff album. Did you know that?

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  I didn't know that, but I do remember that song now.

• 1:32:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Speaker 04

  I mean, I know In-N-Out of Grace, I guess I didn't, yeah.

• 1:32:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think I didn't clock it because it's so much more iconic here, you know? Respectfully, we love, we love Mudhoney. So in the first two mixes with "They Hated" and "Go Away, Do It Again," he had used a generic sounding like hard rock funk breakbeat or whatever, but this time he used a break he had sampled from an Italian bootleg mashup of Edie Birkell's "What I Am." Injected in my veins, babe.

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  Well, the next factoid here is actually even more mind blowing to me.

• 1:33:21Yasi Salek?

  That the same beat was used by The Orb on the first demos of Little Fluffy Clouds.

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  And that they are neighbors?

• 1:33:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and it's, there's no way of knowing if fucking Andrew Weatherall was just, the windows were fucking open, and Alex Patterson of Orb was fucking playing the breakbeat of the Italian bootleg mashup of Edie Birkell's "What I Am," and he heard it from down says and said, "Oi, mate, what's that?" We can never know if that's true or not. It's all worth it in the end that I made myself the hardest podcast known to man to produce.

• 1:33:56Speaker 04

  To just be able to document Andrew Weatherall and Alex Patterson.

• 1:33:59Yasi Salek?

  That stuff.

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  Trading Edie Birkell breaks.

• 1:34:01Yasi Salek?

  Gives me life. Also, "What I Am," fucking goddamn gorgeous, beautiful song, goes so hard to this day.

• 1:34:13Yasi Salek?

  Loaded is perfect.

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Yasi Salek?

  Like, it's just perfect. There's no getting around it. It's just kind of amazing that they were like, "We're not gonna have vocals." Not really, right? "We're gonna have vocal samples." The vocal samples from the US soul group, The Emotions. "I Don't Wanna Lose Your Love."

• 1:34:38Speaker 04

  And then Bobby singing some-

• 1:34:40Yasi Salek?

  A line from Robert Johnson's Terraplane Blues.

• 1:34:42Speaker 04

  Quite an important blues song, yeah.

• 1:34:55Yasi Salek?

  Chris Ryan discovered this amazing fact that they were like, trying, I guess, to clear the Wild Angels sample because, you know, someone in creation could care less, but I think someone at Sire was like, they might get mad. And I didn't know this, you're a known cinephile-

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  I am, yeah.

• 1:35:15Yasi Salek?

  That Peter Fonda was like a shut-in, like JD Slender style.

• 1:35:19Speaker 04

  I didn't know that part.

• 1:35:21Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so he was living in seclusion, no one could get to him, but then someone high up at Sire was like, homies with Jane Fonda-

• 1:35:29Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 1:35:30Yasi Salek?

  And they sent her like, up the mountain with like, a copy of Loaded on 7-inch white label or something to play for Peter Fonda, and he said, "It's cool."

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  That would be amazing if that was what brought Peter off the mountain and then back into like, doing Ulysses-

• 1:35:46Yasi Salek?

  And into the rave.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Yasi Salek?

  But Roger Corman, they had to pay a penny per copy.

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:35:59Yasi Salek?

  According to Bobby Klesby, who's not an accountant and probably not reliable for these sources, but-

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  I think that's great.

• 1:36:06Yasi Salek?

  I really loved that. It made me really like Peter Fonda.

• 1:36:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, countercultural connections. That's what we'll call this part of the pod.

• 1:36:13Yasi Salek?

  That family.

• 1:36:14Speaker 04

  The Fondas?

• 1:36:15Yasi Salek?

  Really excellent work.

• 1:36:16Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:36:17Yasi Salek?

  Bridgette, all of them.

• 1:36:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Yasi Salek?

  Can't think of, can't think, just A-plus work all around. Like we said, it's, you know, it's a remix based on whatever. It sounds very little like the source material, but the song I'm losing more than I'll ever have. That Bobby did say in his memoir was the first song he had ever written where he was actually vulnerable in the songwriting.

• 1:36:38Speaker 04

  Oh, I, I didn't pick that, pick up on that in the actual song itself, but like, it's a great tune.

• 1:36:43Yasi Salek?

  Listen, me neither, but then I'm like, oh, there must have been some of that magic there, which is why it translated into such a beautifully splendid song as Loaded.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  Can I just say, not about the lyrics or Bobby Gillespie's vulnerability, that Loaded is the mile marker for me where Primal Scream really opens their music up to interpretation from other artists, from other producers, from remixers, and kind of starts to do away with the idea that the band is four guys in a room who write the songs and then the songs are what they came up with and that's what they play live.

• 1:37:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  Now Primal Scream is just as much an idea going forward.

• 1:37:18Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 1:37:19Speaker 04

  And it's very valuable and it can have.

• 1:37:21Yasi Salek?

  It's an art practice.

• 1:37:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it can have like input from a lot of different sources. And even like the band membership obviously starts to evolve after this, but this is like a very cool turning point for the band.

• 1:37:31Yasi Salek?

  It's very cool. I just want to say something. I'm sorry. If I were Jeffrey Bezos, okay? I simply would not spend that giant bag of money to send Katy Perry and Gayle King and those other females into space for 11 minutes for a tampon commercial or whatever the fuck the, the end result of that was. I would spend my money sending myself back in time.

• 1:37:59Yasi Salek?

  To 1990, where I could procure some top notch ecstasy from Bez, and then dance myself fucking blind to Loaded in the club, in the club.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  I thought you were gonna say if you were Jeff Bezos, you would create a new dole for people to go make art if they wanted?

• 1:38:16Yasi Salek?

  That would be more noble and better, but no, I wanna get super fucked up in 1990 on ecstasy procured from the Happy Mondays so I could dance to Loaded in the nightclub.

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, that is great.

• 1:38:26Yasi Salek?

  That's what I want to do. That's what I would use.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, someone would go back and kill baby Hitler.

• 1:38:30Yasi Salek?

  That's not what I'm doing, babe. Sorry. Bobby said in 1990, "I see Loaded as a dub record, and I think it's closer to the sort of radical reconstructions that Jamaican producers like Joe Gibbs used to do with reggae songs." In 1990, Bobby's like not even 30, right? So he's just, he's 28 years old, talking like this. Yeah. Hopefully, people will realize it has a different angle to something like the Mondays or the Roses might do. I don't think we can be accused of jumping on any bandwagon. It's not like we're the Wonder Stuff. The Wonder Stuff is a band that catches so many strays from Bobby Gillespie that I had to like look into what this band was because they are not remembered by time. And they were apparently just some fucking poncey like indie rock band that everyone hated. I don't know. He really, he brings up many interviews to shit on them.

• 1:39:12Yasi Salek?

  Apparently, they're now looking for a DJ to remix them, even though only a year ago, they took the piss with Who Wants to be the Disco King? That was a Wonder Stuff song? "The whole rock scene is a fucking joke. Most of the bands leave me cold, apart from the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Cramps." Jukes. "All the gigs I've been to recently have been incredibly dull. It really pisses me off to walk into a venue and find there's no sense of excitement or danger. None of the atmosphere that I can remember when I went to see bands like The Clash when I was younger. And to see half of the audience sitting on the floor staring into each other's long faces. What I wanna know is why the hell they bother going out in the first place. A rave or a club is an entirely different thing. The music is energetic and the people have an adventurous spirit. The whole house music scene has the same kind of vibrancy that punk used to have, and that's why so many young kids are into it."

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  Beautiful.

• 1:39:57Yasi Salek?

  It's what we were saying though, right? Bobby Gillespie is concerned with a spirit. That's the spirit he's talking about. And he's like, I want that. And to me, that is expressed here.

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  But he's also, A, still a punk.

• 1:40:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  And B, still a salesman. So it's helpful to him to go around denigrating a lot of other music that might be on Primal Scream's corner.

• 1:40:19Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:40:19Speaker 04

  And be like, all this other shit that you guys don't know about is cool. That stuff sucks. And this is a move many British bands pull over the years.

• 1:40:27Yasi Salek?

  They're better than us.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like, this is always this like, takes a lot of the blueprint from Bobby Gillespie in terms of just being like, fuck all these other bands.

• 1:40:36Yasi Salek?

  I do kind of feel like that's just temperamentally exactly who the Gallagher brothers are. If they had even never even met or heard of Bobby Gillespie, they would have been like that.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:44Yasi Salek?

  But I do like that they're in the lineage and on the same label. Early on, Bobby talks about going to a Spaceman 3 show.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:40:52Yasi Salek?

  And being like, not that he didn't like the music, he was just like, it's just a bunch of, he didn't like shoelaces. He didn't like the energy of shoelaces.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought he would have loved Spaceman 3.

• 1:41:02Yasi Salek?

  He was just like, I made a choice. He was like, there is a choice between like, God, I wish I'd written that. It was like between sex and like not sex or sex and like depression or something. And he's like, and I chose sex.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  Interesting. So rather than like trying to just sort of like chime your way into like oblivion, sort of you want something that moves.

• 1:41:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, basically, sex or oblivion. He was basically like, this band does not fuck. And my band is fucks.

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Yasi Salek?

  And I thought that was really interesting.

• 1:41:26Speaker 04

  I think Jason Pierce fucks.

• 1:41:28Yasi Salek?

  I don't think the music of Spaceman 3 fucks.

• 1:41:31Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I mean, spiritualized in general, like, they have, it's funny to hear him say that because I think they have a lot of the same influences in some ways.

• 1:41:39Yasi Salek?

  Sure, but expressed like totally differently, right?

• 1:41:47Yasi Salek?

  Bobby's a traditionalist, though, in the end, you know? Bobby wants to put on leather pants and do a bunch of fucking drugs and like live and like, and rock out, you know? And Jace Spaceman's on some other shit. I guess when McGee first heard the song correctly, lost his goddamn mind and was like, this is the A-side, because it was supposed to be the B-side.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Yasi Salek?

  And Weatherall was already taking it around to clubs before it came out. Yeah, and reports were coming back that like, people are going fucking crazy. And then it comes out for real. I had the, oh, I want to hear it in the club in 1990. Jeff Bezos, give me money to make a time machine.

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  I love the idea that he's not using, like, you're like Jeff Bezos, you're not, but like-

• 1:42:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you're misusing, you're misappropriating funds.

• 1:42:28Speaker 04

  No, but that like, he wouldn't, if he had the money, or if he had the tech, he wouldn't just do his tech time machine himself.

• 1:42:34Yasi Salek?

  But he wouldn't go to the correct place, is what I'm saying.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  I know, yeah.

• 1:42:37Yasi Salek?

  And he does have the money, and what did he use it for?

• 1:42:39Speaker 04

  To send his wife into space.

• 1:42:41Yasi Salek?

  To send his fiance and Katy motherfucking Perry-

• 1:42:43Speaker 04

  Briefly into space.

• 1:42:44Yasi Salek?

  And some other women who have bad PR into space with full beet makeup on their faces and bootleg cut space suits.

• 1:42:55Yasi Salek?

  I said it before and I'll say it again, feminism is over. Feminism is done.

• 1:43:00Speaker 04

  The boys are back in town.

• 1:43:01Yasi Salek?

  They should take our right to vote away-

• 1:43:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Yasi Salek?

  Because of that. The boys are so back in town. Okay, so Loaded comes out, hits number 16 on the UK singles chart, first top 40 hit. They go on Top of the Pops. Have you watched the Top of the Pops?

• 1:43:15Speaker 04

  I have, it's amazing.

• 1:43:15Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it's so good. I'm sorry, it's just so amazing. Bobby, skinny legend, little black leather pants. Does he sing? No, there's nothing to sing. Just playing the fucking tambourine.

• 1:43:26Speaker 04

  That's the thing about this band is that like, you'll be listening to it and you're like, there's a whole album where I'm like, is Bobby Gillespie on 10% of this record? But you can't make it without him.

• 1:43:34Yasi Salek?

  You can't make it without him.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  But there are several records where I'm like, he's just a fraction of what the music you're hearing, but feels like his personality is all over the music.

• 1:43:43Yasi Salek?

  And he doesn't have the ego about it, he doesn't care.

• 1:43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:45Yasi Salek?

  I was just like, he's so cool. He does lip sync, although all of Top of the Pops is obviously fake. I'm gonna get Deep Down, which is the vocal sample, so-

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  The emotions one?

• 1:43:53Yasi Salek?

  No, the, um-

• 1:43:54Speaker 04

  The Robert Johnson one?

• 1:43:55Yasi Salek?

  Robert Johnson one. Also, that's Mark Gardner from Ride, playing keys.

• 1:43:59Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 1:43:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, playing, playing keys, not playing keys. Also, after that performance, Bobby was so high, he ran straight into a glass door in front of the N Spiral carpets.

• 1:44:12Yasi Salek?

  No notes. This will all be in the TV show. The actor playing Bobby Gillespie-

• 1:44:16Speaker 04

  That should be the first shot, he's just coming through.

• 1:44:17Yasi Salek?

  You might be wondering how I got here.

• 1:44:21Yasi Salek?

  I feel like we have the bookends that we can put as like the two peaks of Primal Scream's like imperial phase, which is Screamadelica and Exterminator. Would you agree?

• 1:44:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:44:33Yasi Salek?

  And it is really interesting, the geography that they traverse in between those two peaks.

• 1:44:39Speaker 04

  I'm obsessed with this idea, that these two albums is twins and how they're different, primarily in like what kind of drug albums they're.

• 1:44:46Yasi Salek?

  Hmm, hmm. Those are my favorite topics.

• 1:44:48Speaker 04

  And also how it kind of documents like the changing relationship you might have to substance abuse and like what different drugs do to your psyche at different points. But I think I'm way more of an Exterminator person. I imagine, most people listening to this podcast are probably Screamadelica people, though.

• 1:45:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you're othering the listeners.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  I'm not trying to, but that is still the like, that goes in the Hall of Fame.

• 1:45:10Yasi Salek?

  Once again, you're not like other girls. No, no, I, I'm obsessed with this idea too. I'm also extra obsessed with the idea of how perfectly they mark the beginning and end of the decade.

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:45:24Yasi Salek?

  Because they really are like, that's what the 90s were. Like, this is like going wide-eyed into the 90s and then leaving like, the lights are on, the party's over, it's time to go home.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  The acid house smiley face to start it, and then it's just acid house smiley face with X's for eyes.

• 1:45:42Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. Bobby said about Loaded, because Loaded is the beginning of them becoming pop stars. We just said they were on top of the pops. It's gonna get bolstered with the next single, but he said the best thing about Loaded was that proved we were right, that the Primal Scream sound can be successful. That's why it's good that the Stone Roses did well. I don't think they ripped us off or anything, but I think we influenced them. And when they went really big, I felt good about it because I knew what we were doing three years ago could be commercial.

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  I think he's saying that because Manny's in the band in a couple of years, but sure.

• 1:46:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Speaker 04

  Considering how uncharitable he is to a lot of other stuff in the world, like it's weird that he would be like, it's cool that Stone Roses beat us to the top.

• 1:46:21Yasi Salek?

  But he never shit on them, even before Manny was in the band.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  Well, I think he probably sees a lot of similarities, like working class kids from Northern England, they're from Scotland.

• 1:46:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So the reviews were really great. This shit pops off. Simon Reynolds said, although some will see Loaded as an attempt to hitch a ride on the highly successful Happy Mondays and Stone Roses bandwagon, Gillespie has been talking about his love of hip hop and dance music since 1987. More significantly, the new single has far more in common with an old Stax record, and at times with the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", a favorite track with a couple of DJs at the earliest acid clubs, than with anything that's been issued in the last six months. It's almost as if Primal Scream have merely become a touch more cunning at disguising their fascination with the 1960s.

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  Such an observation.

• 1:47:03Yasi Salek?

  Simon Reynolds is a genius. Some of these writers, I'm like, Simon Reynolds, come on the pod, please. They're so good. They really like, and the fact that they were churning this shit out weekly, babe.

• 1:47:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:13Yasi Salek?

  It's so impressive.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  But it's just such a great recognition of like, this is actually way closer to the Stones than it is to like,

• 1:47:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Speaker 04

  any rip off of Happy Mondays.

• 1:47:22Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I have to say, the Happy Mondays, you couldn't invent that in a lab.

• 1:47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Yasi Salek?

  Nobody knows what they were doing.

• 1:47:29Speaker 04

  They really did invent it in a lab, but it was a very specific kind of lab.

• 1:47:32Yasi Salek?

  So true. So Jubes was also probably up in there.

• 1:47:40Speaker 05

  It's me, the

• 1:47:44Speaker 05

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• 1:48:39Yasi Salek?

  So in June of this year, after Loda comes out, Stone Roses do their legendary Spike Island gig. Bobby Lusby is in attendance. Do you ever wish that you were out there? Are you a Stone Roses guy?

• 1:48:51Speaker 04

  I am a Stone Roses guy. I'm not the Stone Roses guy.

• 1:48:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that guy is not that cool.

• 1:48:56Speaker 04

  Some of this stuff from this era of larger UK music stuff, I do think is you had to be there.

• 1:49:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, even if you guys listened to the Manchester episode, that's the two episodes that started this. I had people that were there. And during the course of reliving it, they were like, oh, yeah, I guess they weren't that good. I guess, you know what?

• 1:49:21Speaker 04

  But I wonder whether or not so much of it, and this will come up again when I talk about Exterminator, is experiential. So.

• 1:49:28Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, and also they're on the cover of every, you know, every week Melody Maker is telling you, this is the best band in the world. It's sweeping the, you know.

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  But if you go to the hacienda, I'm sure you have like a different relationship to certain kinds of music than if you're just like listening to it in your car in 2023, you know?

• 1:49:45Yasi Salek?

  And they were important. You know, they were, they had the first warehouse show ever in Manchester. Like, they were hugely important to the evolution of what we're talking about. But it is very funny when they were like, hmm, that's interesting. So in August, they put out their second single that is gonna be off this album that they just have not made yet, which will be Screamin' Delca. But this single has come together. Let's fucking go. Underweather, oh, at it again, man.

• 1:50:17Yasi Salek?

  So apparently, on the first day of recording, Toby, the drummer, showed up with a jar of pills and was like, okay, everyone open your mouths. And they were like, sure, okay. And then after they took them, they were like, okay, wait, what was, what was that? And he goes, that's what Keith Moon overdosed on the night he died.

• 1:50:31Speaker 04

  Did you ever get to the bottom on what it was?

• 1:50:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Clomethiazole.

• 1:50:36Speaker 04

  Is that like pre?

• 1:50:37Yasi Salek?

  It's meant to treat alcohol withdrawal.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:50:41Yasi Salek?

  They were like, cool.

• 1:50:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:43Yasi Salek?

  And then apparently Dick Green from Creation calls later to be like, so how's it going over there? And the engineer's like, I don't know how to tell you this, but most of the band are in a coma. Bob and Innis are on the floor, Throb's on the couch, Toby's sprawled under the mixing desk. Not one note recorded. Then they woke up, they got some cocaine from the Lord, which is the name of their dealer, and they got busy.

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  This is how Guy Ritchie movies start.

• 1:51:07Yasi Salek?

  The Primal Scream movie would just not be believable.

• 1:51:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Yasi Salek?

  It's just, it's too, it's too much. I just love those soft spot for Bobby Gillespie. Anytime I come across one of these people in my research who's just like, I feel like a kindred spirit to me is just such a pure fan.

• 1:51:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Yasi Salek?

  At the heart of it, you know? Where he was just like, I loved the gospel stuff from like the Staples Singers so much. I think we should have gospel singers on our music. And they did it. Fiona Clark from Creation put them in touch with this person named Nikki Brown, who is a singer and a musician. Sung for the London Community Gospel Choir. And he brought in some singers named Lawrence John, Faye Simpson, and Sarah Brown. And according to Bobby, they had never come into contact with the world of secular or commercial music.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  Okay, bud.

• 1:51:58Yasi Salek?

  And then they show up to the Primal Scream studio.

• 1:52:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Throb is in a coma.

• 1:52:02Yasi Salek?

  And Throb is in a coma. And Toby's like, do you want some clomaslothas of peon? And the Lord is coming by to give you some of his personal. And they're like, God would not like that. I thought this was cool. The secret to their amazing sound was that they flipped the harmonies around. The guys sang the high parts and the girls sung the lower parts.

• 1:52:18Speaker 04

  That's cool. I didn't know that.

• 1:52:19Yasi Salek?

  That was Nikki's idea, and it was a great one, too.

• 1:52:31Yasi Salek?

  Throb is the one that wrote the top line. And they had the 20-year-old singer Faye Simpson sing it. It's such a good song.

• 1:52:37Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:52:38Yasi Salek?

  If you had to choose between Loaded and Come Together.

• 1:52:40Speaker 04

  Loaded.

• 1:52:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:42Yasi Salek?

  But they're both so good.

• 1:52:43Speaker 04

  They're great.

• 1:52:43Yasi Salek?

  The minute like the sun comes out and it's like 70 degrees in Los Angeles and you just put these two songs on.

• 1:52:49Speaker 04

  So every day in Los Angeles?

• 1:52:51Yasi Salek?

  Some day. It was cold yesterday.

• 1:52:54Yasi Salek?

  Wow, East Coast bias. It's just the sound of the summer, man. Every summer.

• 1:52:58Speaker 04

  It's Primal Scream summer.

• 1:53:00Yasi Salek?

  It's Primal Scream summer. This song was like, it was kind of the same thing that the whole Madchester scene had tapped into. It was so rebellious because part of the rebellion of it was bringing young people together. And they were together. Enjoying themselves and that, you know, it's like joy is an act of rebellion. A seditious thing is what Bobby called it. I think this is like, the through line of Primal Scream is what Bobby's idea of the spirit of rock and roll is.

• 1:53:32Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:53:33Yasi Salek?

  And it comes through in every album. It just comes through in so such different ways, depending on what his idea at the time is, what the spirit of rock and roll is.

• 1:53:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's, they're a taste based band and he is basically a translation tool for like subcultures. Where he like sees all this stuff out there and he's like, actually gospel and rave is the same thing and I'm going to put it together. But the fact that they're like a decentralized band and like Bobby Gillespie's like lyrics and vocals are not like

• 1:54:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  The number one main thing about Primal Scream. The Primal Scream thing is the energy, the vibe and the feeling. So you can kind of be like, yeah, this gospel group is going to now be the singer of Primal Scream.

• 1:54:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. I just feel like he could look at anything and be like, rock and roll, not rock and roll, rock and roll, not rock and roll.

• 1:54:21Speaker 04

  It's probably a really easy ideology to like move through the world with.

• 1:54:24Yasi Salek?

  That's how I move through the world. That's so not, so not Raven, as they would say. This song does well too, hits 26 on the UK singles chart. One thing about these two singles, even though they're like Sound of the Summer, all this, there is like a sadness to them, right? Like a bittersweet quality and he addresses it in Sounds magazine that year. He said, Andrew, Innis, was trying to work out why a lot of our songs are sad and he reckons it's because we're Scottish. Celtic music is quite forlorn. It sounds defeated. There's a real melancholy feel to old blues music and Van Morrison reckons that the blues partly originated in Scotland. So many songs are ripped off from Scottish and Irish folk songs. Lay down your weary tune, lay down. He sings from Dylan's song.

• 1:55:08Yasi Salek?

  I forget the tune, but apparently it's stolen from some Scottish tune.

• 1:55:12Speaker 04

  I think Van Morrison saying Scotland invented the blues is what Sinners is about.

• 1:55:15Yasi Salek?

  Check out the Big Picture Podcast. For more. And Bobby, I need you to know is an ally. Of course. He said, I went to see Madonna the other night and it was brilliant, fantastic. A lot of the reviews she's getting are put downs. Most of them are written by men who I think feel threatened by her. There's a lot of latent misogyny in those reviews. She's such a powerful woman. She's legitimizing sexuality for women, basically. Not that women need it, but in some ways they do, you know?

• 1:55:40Speaker 04

  He likes like Virgin.

• 1:55:41Yasi Salek?

  He loves it. He had a poster in his house. It's great. Okay, so things are good. We're pop stars. Alan McGee is like, here's a few thousand more pounds, go build a studio.

• 1:55:51Speaker 04

  Call the Lord.

• 1:55:52Yasi Salek?

  Call the Lord, call whoever you need to call. Get Jugs on the horn, get back in the stew. And so they set up a little studio right around the corner from the Creation offices, which were in Hackney. For those of you outside of the British Isles. Hackney is now like the silver, like cool part of London, right? It's East London is cool, but back then it was not cool. It was dodgy.

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  Rough.

• 1:56:18Yasi Salek?

  Rough, yeah. And then they spend the rest of 1990 writing the songs for ye olde Screamadelka.

• 1:56:24Speaker 04

  And expanding the, the community of their band.

• 1:56:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about Higher Than the Sun?

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:56:32Yasi Salek?

  I love this song.

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  This is dope.

• 1:56:34Yasi Salek?

  It's such a good song.

• 1:56:35Speaker 04

  And this is the one the Orb's on, right?

• 1:56:37Yasi Salek?

  This is the one the Orb is on. Now they have the album kind of sealed and delivered. And so they want to release another single, you know, to fluff the world before. So it's June 22nd, 1991, Bobby's 29th birthday. Alex Patterson, who's the guy that is one half of the Orb, is the producer, along with Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson, who is Andrew Weatherall's not often mentioned, but very important production partner.

• 1:57:06Speaker 04

  Like Weatherall was the vibes, ideas guy and Hugo was like the engineer, right?

• 1:57:10Yasi Salek?

  Yes, like he knew how to do the beep beep boop boop stuff. Bobby had to take speed to sing these vocals. Cause he said, I just needed it to give me the courage because I knew it was a very special song. Fair enough, fair enough, babe. It's like when I need extra coffee to record a good band play, you know?

• 1:57:36Yasi Salek?

  I love that they brought in Jawwobble from Public Amendment.

• 1:57:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're just like, I do get the impression, though, that like these people like Jawwobble, who are iconic heroes to us, were gettable over the phone call at this period of time, where it's like, you can get Jawwobble, like, he's around.

• 1:57:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Also, Jawwobble, like, I think the thing about punk was that it was so, like, socialist as well. Like, they're not gonna be hoity-toity or whatever. Like, they're gonna say, "Yeah, we saw what you've done. That shit was cool. Loaded is cool. Like, I'd love to come play bass on your extended dub symphony in two parts, Wobble mix of Higher Than the Sun." Actually, the B-side of that is the better one, in my opinion. It's Higher Than the Orb. It's the Orb remix of it.

• 1:58:24Speaker 04

  That's just no Primal Scream involved at all. It's just two guys remixing a remix.

• 1:58:27Yasi Salek?

  It's just literally the Orb's song.

• 1:58:39Yasi Salek?

  Primal Scream wouldn't pass muster with HR as an organization. And at one point on tour, I think after the single, or maybe it was for Screaming Dog, it doesn't really matter, Jawwobble was supposed to come play with them. And they, like, freaked out and told them not to come, or like, the bassist, someone got mad and was like, "I don't want Jawwobble to come." And then he got upset at them. And he was like, "Don't do that to me again."

• 1:59:05Speaker 04

  I feel like drugs really heightened those interactions.

• 1:59:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. With Jawwobble, you mean?

• 1:59:10Speaker 04

  With everyone.

• 1:59:10Yasi Salek?

  With everyone. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you need speed to sing this and wake up.

• 1:59:14Speaker 04

  To be vulnerable.

• 1:59:15Yasi Salek?

  To be vulnerable in your beautiful thing.

• 1:59:18Speaker 04

  I don't really know of a lot of guys who were like, "I need speed to get in touch with my feelings."

• 1:59:22Yasi Salek?

  This band never decried speed. I'll tell you that.

• 1:59:25Speaker 04

  No, they're pro speed.

• 1:59:26Yasi Salek?

  They're pro speed for that. And you have to respect that. Bobby said, "I worked really hard on the lyrics of this song. This was exactly what I wanted to say at this point in time about my life. I had delusions of grandeur, thinking that so long as I sang this song well, it didn't matter if I died, because this would be my testimony." I'd read that in In 1967, Arthur Lee had been haunted by premonitions of his death and felt that forever change was going to be his last words to the world. It was a big deal for me to sing this song. It was an important one. He uses, again, so many religious words, right? "Testimony." It's a hymn to the transformative powers of psychotropic drugs, written from the solipsistic point of view of a drug user. "Higher" is a song that elevates the transitory beauty of a chemically altered consciousness above everything else. It has no morality, it just is.

• 2:00:10Speaker 04

  So he's just trying to be boroughs, and this is like his cut-up method? He's like bringing all these different musics together, but like what he's trying to do is communicate the experience of a drug trip?

• 2:00:18Yasi Salek?

  I think so.

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  Good for him.

• 2:00:20Yasi Salek?

  Or like not even communicate it, exalt it.

• 2:00:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Yasi Salek?

  To be like, "You guys, this is, this is God." And he's not wrong. He kinda did it.

• 2:00:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29Yasi Salek?

  Like, this song-

• 2:00:31Speaker 04

  He did it twice.

• 2:00:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Speaker 04

  That's the thing, is that like he did it once for this particular happy-go-lucky, not happy-go-lucky, but this very touchy-feely acid and E-based-

• 2:00:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 04

  -feel.

• 2:00:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:42Speaker 04

  And then he does it again for people who are speed demons turning into bugs.

• 2:00:47Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:00:47Speaker 04

  At the end of the decade.

• 2:00:49Yasi Salek?

  Into literal cockroaches scattering with the turn of the century. This is what Simon Reynolds said about it. "Higher than the sun is the first breakthrough of 1991, perhaps the first expansionist gesture of the new decade. More than expansionist, it's an expanse. Trans is the word. Transgenic, transcendent, trance-inducing, transcendental, transfiguring. Space rock acid dub, cosmic house, all of these and none of them apply. Loaded was cool, come-together lovely, but neither even hinted that Primal Scream were capable of this scale and scope. With those two singles, Primal Scream got in sync with the times. With Higher Than the Sun, they're ahead of the times, at once new and timeless. There are reference points, lots of them, but they map somewhere that's extraterrestrial."

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  They're really good at selling records over there. Just like even what Alan McGee winds up saying about Screamadelica when it comes out is like, you guys all got in a room and were like, I'm gonna say it's the best record since Anarchy in the UK. You talk about it's a transcendental experience that reflects the streets. Bobby, talk your shit, be pro Madonna. But like, you just get this feeling like, even if you listen to Screamadelica, and you're, wherever you are, and you're not having these drug experiences, and you're not having these communal rave experiences, they convince you that just by listening to it hard enough, you will have some facsimile of that experience.

• 2:02:08Yasi Salek?

  Right. Or you're like, missing out on something.

• 2:02:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. That's also like, maybe a hallmark of the Americans' experience with British music is like, I feel left out.

• 2:02:17Yasi Salek?

  Which is so weird, because that doesn't work here. Like, here, we had like, Eddie Vedder being like, literally, please don't even look at my CD, throw it in the trash if you ever come across it. Do not put it on your speakers, absolutely. Don't come see me at a show. So, don't even look at me. And we were like, please, more.

• 2:02:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was like Kurt Cobain being like, the Vaseline's are better than us. It's like, well, respectfully to everybody involved.

• 2:02:39Yasi Salek?

  I know. I mean, it's a good, decent band, a few tracks, but, let's, Eugene is, it seems like nice. Yeah, Bobby talking his shit. Our track's oceanic, I think, but I don't think it sounds like oceans on Earth. It sounds like an ocean on Saturn or some planet. The phrase that kept going through my head as we recorded it was, seahorses on Saturn, bobbing up and down in the waves.

• 2:02:59Speaker 04

  It's true, true Philip K. Dick shit.

• 2:03:01Yasi Salek?

  Drugs, drugs are awesome, dude. Ecstasy is awesome. You get a real change in the tides when the drugs start to change.

• 2:03:09Speaker 04

  On Saturn. Saturn tides.

• 2:03:11Yasi Salek?

  It's a different atmosphere.

• 2:03:12Speaker 04

  So it comes out in September?

• 2:03:14Yasi Salek?

  It comes out in September 23rd, on the most insane day of music release known to man. Nirvana, Nevermind, Blood Sugar Sex Magic by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, A Tribe Called Quest, Low End Theory, and the last Pixies album for 22 years.

• 2:03:30Speaker 04

  I think that my favorite release day ever was like, this one time in Boston where I got online at Tower at midnight to get like, a Wilco record and a Ghostface Killers solo album, so it's not quite that.

• 2:03:39Yasi Salek?

  That was your, the heart, your heart intersection. This is second.

• 2:03:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:43Yasi Salek?

  This is second.

• 2:03:47Yasi Salek?

  I'm surprised like time didn't stop to this day. Whatever. That's cool. Although, again, like, I think they all, now they're all, except for the last Pixies album, Respectfully, Trump, Lamont is fine, but held up to, you know, as these classic albums, but they all hit in different waves and timelines, you know? Probably Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic was the most immediate hit in America, at least.

• 2:04:11Speaker 04

  Probably, right?

• 2:04:12Yasi Salek?

  Creme de la Caca, obviously not in so much in America, right?

• 2:04:16Speaker 04

  I don't think so.

• 2:04:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So we mentioned, this album overall is produced Andrew Weatherall, Hugo Nicholson, The Orb, Hypnotone, and Jimmy Miller.

• 2:04:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:25Yasi Salek?

  Jimmy Miller, who had worked on the Rolling Stones.

• 2:04:27Speaker 04

  Let It Bleed, and stuff like that.

• 2:04:29Yasi Salek?

  Just some small Rolling Stones albums. This is what Bobby said about Andrew Weatherall. He goes off for like, a long time about how Weatherall and Patterson had dabbled in occult practices in their youth and understood the power of the will manifestation. And he says, it takes years of psychic training and spiritual work to arrive at this point. Not everyone has the stamina or strength or will to get there. Weatherall definitely channeled shamanic energies and understood magical transmissions. That's why he was such a good producer. This was last year that he said this, so this was not even like in the mix of drug. This was in his memoir.

• 2:05:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's like soberly, I can say this.

• 2:05:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, this man was a shaman.

• 2:05:09Speaker 04

  And he was in touch with like a higher power.

• 2:05:10Yasi Salek?

  He passed away, Andrew Weatherall, like, wait, 2020?

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  Beginning, like, pre, right, pre-COVID, basically.

• 2:05:16Yasi Salek?

  May your rest in peace. And then Jimmy Miller, who had worked on Let It Bleed, Beggars Banquet, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Go Ted Soup. But in the 90s, much like Jawwobble, he was available.

• 2:05:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:27Yasi Salek?

  Because people were not trying to hire him. This is the most duh statement, but I'll just say it because Bobby said it. If the first Primal Scream album was acid, the second one was speed, then the third one was ecstasy.

• 2:05:39Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:05:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:05:40Yasi Salek?

  What did you think he was gonna say?

• 2:05:41Speaker 04

  I thought you were referring to the subsequent one, which I would probably say is heroin.

• 2:05:44Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, for sure. No, but he's talking about this one. No, the speed one is the one, you kind of just keep forgetting about the first two. Primal Scream albums.

• 2:05:53Speaker 04

  I'm sorry.

• 2:05:53Yasi Salek?

  I know. Everyone keeps forgetting about them, but those, those exist.

• 2:05:56Speaker 04

  And they have their own drug bumper sticker.

• 2:05:59Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:06:00Speaker 04

  Well, that's cool for them because they rotate back around.

• 2:06:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, I mean, they do, but in like a spiral format, like, or over each other.

• 2:06:08Speaker 04

  It's like True Detective. They're getting to Carcosa somehow.

• 2:06:12Yasi Salek?

  This was mostly written on keyboards, this album. Do you feel like you can censor here?

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  That's the thing, is that like when you break the band away from even guitar line, guitar riff as like the central chord progression and the central melody making machine, like you can do all this different stuff.

• 2:06:29Yasi Salek?

  I just think it's incredible that Throb knew what a major seventh was.

• 2:06:35Speaker 04

  I know. It seems like... But that's also like that one of those things where like a guy, I don't know about Throb, I mean, I know about his biography, but like you'll meet guys who are like, "I know what a major seventh is, but I don't know how to sign my name in cursive."

• 2:06:51Yasi Salek?

  Right, sure.

• 2:06:52Speaker 04

  All the bank up here, it's filled with musical knowledge, but there's no other life skills involved.

• 2:06:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe he learned it, because weren't we saying before like none of them knew much except for Andrew and S. And then Martin Duffy is like some sort of musical prodigy genius. So anyways, major seventh, for those who don't know, including myself, I have no idea what I'm talking about, are Carole King-style bittersweet chords, according to Bobby.

• 2:07:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:07:17Yasi Salek?

  We called them sniff chords, like pure cocaine. There's no harshness or blues. It just softens the blow. Also, huge influence on Scream and Delca, the Beach Boys.

• 2:07:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:07:26Yasi Salek?

  He said, "We loved those unusual chord sequences Brian Wilson used with his heartbreaking melodicism. It hit you where it hurt."

• 2:07:34Speaker 04

  Another band that was trying to make teenage symphonies to God, right?

• 2:07:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think it maps on top. And then Nico. Bobby always really loved Nico.

• 2:07:43Speaker 04

  He tries to look like him, yeah. Kind of did.

• 2:07:48Yasi Salek?

  Kind of a spy versus spy.

• 2:07:50Speaker 04

  It's like Iggy, Nico, you know, it's like, it's just basically like he's trying to embody one uber cool person.

• 2:07:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. The final boss of all the coolest rock stars. Are we a Nico guy?

• 2:08:02Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:08:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Yasi Salek?

  Is it the cool Germanic?

• 2:08:06Speaker 04

  I just think that like she's one of those people that introduces you to like, "Oh, you don't have to do a lot to communicate a lot of feeling."

• 2:08:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  Like you don't have to over- Over emote to be emotional.

• 2:08:17Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:08:18Speaker 04

  And I didn't know that until probably the first Velvet Underground record and listening to that.

• 2:08:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Also, something kind of punk about that, right?

• 2:08:24Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:25Yasi Salek?

  Also, really arguably couldn't sing, actually.

• 2:08:27Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:08:28Yasi Salek?

  Bobby said about other influences, "I wanted to become a good songwriter, so I listened to the masters. Sixties and seventies soul songwriters, checking out the productions and song arrangements. I listened to a lot of country soul guys like Dan Penn. Dan Penn did Big Star."

• 2:08:42Speaker 04

  Dan Penn wrote "Dark End of the Street," I believe, with Spooner Holden.

• 2:08:46Yasi Salek?

  Donny Fritz and Kris Kristofferson. "Our early work was mostly songs of innocence. I wanted to write songs of experience." No, you too. "So I had to live some. It was clear the forthcoming record would not be a rock album. It was a singer-songwriter album." Bobby Gillespie thinks Screamedelica is a singer-songwriter album. It has a reputation of being a-

• 2:09:05Speaker 04

  He's right there, I was like, yeah, totally.

• 2:09:07Yasi Salek?

  Yes, totally. I'm right here behind you. It has a reputation of being a- You don't even sing on-

• 2:09:12Speaker 04

  Full ground you.

• 2:09:13Yasi Salek?

  You don't even sing on half the track. It is maybe a songwriter album.

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  That's the power of drugs, where you're just like, this is my singer-songwriter. It's like a record exclusively known for three mixes.

• 2:09:24Yasi Salek?

  So good. It's got a bit of everything. That part is true. This is how they got the name. "One night after we'd been out raving, probably at Kinky Disco, we crashed out at dawn. Sunday morning coming down, debris and party mess everywhere. That afternoon, we were just sitting around shooting the shit. Someone said, 'We need a name, something as good as Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove.' Someone said, 'Yeah, like Screamedelica.'"

• 2:09:48Yasi Salek?

  I don't know why that's so funny, because it's like so not profound. Like, someone just heard Funkadelic and is so hungover and was like, "Screamedelica." And someone was like, "Yeah, Screamedelica." And they were like, "Perfect. Stamp it." That's really good. They also wrote a song called Screamedelica. It's a 10-minute song that doesn't appear on this album. It comes on the EP that comes after this. I really do need to get into the cover, because obviously the cover is like one of the more iconic.

• 2:10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, you can see it from across a room.

• 2:10:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it became sort of like a print symbol interchangeable with the band. Here's the story behind that. So Bobby had seen the art on the Phobia single by the band Flowered Up. And so he'd asked Jeff Barrett, Fox had, whose label Heavenly had put that record out, who did the art, and he was like, oh, it's this guy Paul Canal. And Bobby was like, OK, listen, I want you to paint our singles cover, but I'm not gonna let you hear it. You just have the title. And the guy was like, OK. The title was Higher Than the Sun. So he makes this huge painting and they cut it up to make that single cover. So I put it in the doc and I guess I could post it.

• 2:11:01Yasi Salek?

  But that sun is in the corner of that original painting. And it's like a, actually a much kind of cooler colorway, in my opinion, like a mauve-colored sun with like a black-

• 2:11:10Speaker 04

  Okay, high beast colorway.

• 2:11:13Yasi Salek?

  I did come from streetwear, as you know. OK, you didn't have to say that like that. My checkered streetwear past. The painting is very cool in general. It's just sort of like an abstract, very colorful mix of different shapes and images. Bobby said, "I chose the images from Paul's painting, a junked-out acid house phantasmagoria full of images of melted minds and frightened tortured birds in flight. A visual representation of the assassination of imagination or the explosion of imagination enabled by psychotropic drugs. I asked Paul what his working methods were. He told me he would take magic mushrooms and shoot up smack to get himself in the mood for painting, much in the same way we would take amphetamines or cocaine to get us in the aggressive mindset to do battle on stage."

• 2:11:57Speaker 04

  Did you think Paul hit his deadlines?

• 2:11:59Yasi Salek?

  No, babe. I don't think. Do you think Paul sent invoices?

• 2:12:04Speaker 04

  He delivered bulls.

• 2:12:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Net 30. Paul Canal sadly OD'd on heroin in 2005. But, you know, he had his methodology and he made something really gorgeous. And they ended up, again, cutting up bits of it to use for a lot of things, but that sun came from that. And then before we kind of get into the bones of the album, I wanted to talk to you about the sequencing. It's pretty genius. One of the best sequenced albums, in my opinion.

• 2:12:32Speaker 04

  How often do you listen to Scream Adelica as an LP versus like the big takeout songs from it? Because I actually like almost associate it more as like a- Huge collection of important singles that I do like, let me listen to it front to back.

• 2:12:48Yasi Salek?

  Interesting. I don't know. I feel like I'll throw it on.

• 2:12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like it's like, um.

• 2:12:54Speaker 04

  It's a good Sunday.

• 2:12:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, cleaning. Yeah, yeah, totally. You know, just like a vibey. Yeah. But I do listen to the singles separate as well.

• 2:13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:04Speaker 04

  It's interesting.

• 2:13:05Yasi Salek?

  I guess this was a time before you could really pick and choose that way, though.

• 2:13:09Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think people would have like the 12 inches and stuff and maybe I, it's almost like where people experiencing this band primarily as something they heard out.

• 2:13:17Yasi Salek?

  Right, at the club.

• 2:13:17Speaker 04

  Or something that they listen to at home.

• 2:13:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:20Speaker 04

  And I think that a lot of the dialogue about the record, like especially like Simon Reynolds is writing about it and stuff like that.

• 2:13:28Speaker 04

  Almost shapes it into like an LP experience when I almost wonder whether it was more of a like you. It's something you would use to be out, you know, or get hyped up to go out or listen while you're out.

• 2:13:38Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

  Somebody would drop higher than the sun or whatever.

• 2:13:40Yasi Salek?

  That's like kind of just such like a more broad question of like, well, the higher you're supposed to take the piece of art. The piece of art was presented to you as like a whole, right? So it's like how it's experienced is kind of like the, the after effect of it. But I do wonder if people just put it on, like got home after the club, doing drugs, just put the whole thing on, you know, probably.

• 2:14:01Speaker 04

  They didn't have playlists, so.

• 2:14:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I don't think anyone was sitting there and be like, flip the seven inch, put the next seven inch on. It was like, god damn it, I just want to smoke a cigarette. But the sequencing is so cool. To me, I thought it was mirroring like a trip. But then there's this whole thing in Bobby's book where he talks about how Innis did the sequencing. And he said he did it so it could be the soundtrack to a kid going out on the whole weekend. And this is what he said. It's like a poem. Sorry. Strap in, sit down. The defiant rock and roll of moving on up, blasting on, blasting out whilst you get dressed up and ready to go out and face the world. Slip inside the house as you venture out into the night, the unknown before you, the thrill of adventure.

• 2:14:45Yasi Salek?

  Don't fight it plays in the club as you hit the dance floor and drop your E. So that it's higher than the sun as you come up peaking on the drug and everything. Everything becomes psychedelicized, followed by the dreamscape of inner flight as your spirit glides on the transcendent effects of psychotropic euphoria that morph into the ecstatic, drug-induced feelings of empathy, solidarity, and brotherly love that has come together. And you drop another E for the gonzo-y funk rock of Loaded, before sinking into the come-down crash and melancholy contemplation of damage. And I'm coming down. It's a bit literal. After you've stumbled home and are curled up in bed on your own in a gray, cold room, the bedsit blues, the glamour, clamor, color, and noise of the club, distant memory now,

• 2:15:29Yasi Salek?

  voices in the radiators, the guilt-ridden, self-loathing, paranoiac, ice-cold electronica of the Dub Symphony in two parts is a hell without end. Damn. Jaw wobble is there?

• 2:15:39Speaker 04

  Jumping straight in the tens from the higher end than the sun at 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday.

• 2:15:45Yasi Salek?

  The Dub Symphony in two parts version. Your head and heart full of dread and paranoid thoughts, body shivering, bones aching, panel beaters beating inside your skull as malevolent demons emerge from the subconscious, please stop, please stop, until redemption. The trip finally ends in light, your soul bathing in the sea shanty, womb-like warmth of shine-like stars. I wouldn't really have thought about that, babe.

• 2:16:09Speaker 04

  It's pretty accurate.

• 2:16:10Yasi Salek?

  I think so. I mean, if any, not us, who've never done drugs.

• 2:16:14Speaker 04

  But it's like a great description of like the ups and downs of a night out.

• 2:16:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, for a bunch of-

• 2:16:20Speaker 04

  Chasing that second E real quick after the first one, though.

• 2:16:23Yasi Salek?

  Also, like, again, not that I would know, but it's like, it doesn't work that way. It's like, unfortunately, it's a bit of a diminishing returns of psychedelics. But you, I get it, you would do it. But like, it is gonna not really so much work the same. That's the bummer of psychedelics. The first, the first high of the night is only, that's always the best one.

• 2:16:41Speaker 04

  What are some of your jams on this, outside of the singles that we talked about?

• 2:16:44Yasi Salek?

  I like "Don't Fight It, Feel It."

• 2:16:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:46Yasi Salek?

  It's a really good song.

• 2:16:53Speaker 04

  It's a pretty unimpeachable start, like basically homerun after homerun after homerun to start the record. Yeah. And "Moving On Up" is really good. It's really good. And then "Slip Inside This House" is like such a cool left turn.

• 2:17:06Yasi Salek?

  Oh yeah, we didn't talk about, I feel like we didn't talk about "Moving On" because I thought it was a single. "Moving On Up" is amazing.

• 2:17:11Speaker 04

  It's one of the great album opening tracks, I think, in history.

• 2:17:14Yasi Salek?

  Of all time.

• 2:17:16Speaker 04

  It's like this rocks off Rolling Stones. Like, there's like, I have a couple in my head, but like...

• 2:17:21Yasi Salek?

  It's so good. It's just really catchy.

• 2:17:34Yasi Salek?

  Bobby said "Moving On Up" is a song about struggle and redemption, just so you know.

• 2:17:38Speaker 04

  Seems like he loved this song because it's pretty much the framework for the next album, right? Like, this vibe.

• 2:17:46Yasi Salek?

  You mean thematic framework?

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  Sonically. Like, I feel like Bobby as rock singer, like, rock gospel guy is like the thing that they take in to give out, but don't give up.

• 2:17:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:59Speaker 04

  You disagree?

• 2:17:59Yasi Salek?

  No, no, yeah. I think that's definitely true. They, but they leave behind so much other stuff that they should have also changed a little bit.

• 2:18:07Speaker 04

  That's the thing.

• 2:18:08Yasi Salek?

  A little bit with them. God, it's, it is such a good song. He nailed it. He said it was written as a commercial pop gospel song, and it is a commercial pop. Like, it makes you feel so good.

• 2:18:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:18Yasi Salek?

  They're, they're preaching the, the good word of the Lord. The drug, the drug dealer of the Lord. The different Lord. "Slip Inside This House" is a cover, we should mention. It's a cover, a cover. The original song is nine minutes long and has 12 verses.

• 2:18:34Speaker 04

  That's 13th floor elevator.

• 2:18:35Yasi Salek?

  That's 13th floor, ever. They cut it down to two verses and, you know, made it a little more concise. Again, just a real quick, "We Used to Be a Proper Society" hours. This is from a compilation that was put together by Sire to raise money for Roki Erickson because he was in jail for stealing mail.

• 2:18:57Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:18:57Yasi Salek?

  He didn't open it, he just stole it. And the rest of the people on this compilation, just the Butthole Surfers, R.E.M., Jizz and Mary Chain, Angry Samoans, ZZ Top. What the hell?

• 2:19:11Yasi Salek?

  You could just do that back then. You could just be like, hey, guys. And ZZ Top and the Angry Simones would show up and record covers of 13th Floor Elevator Songs to get Rookie Erickson out of jail for stealing mail.

• 2:19:24Yasi Salek?

  Throb sings that song.

• 2:19:25Speaker 04

  Sings what song?

• 2:19:26Yasi Salek?

  Slip Inside the House.

• 2:19:27Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:28Yasi Salek?

  Because Bobby collapsed on the ground from his immune system failing from burning too much, and he couldn't, he passed out while he was singing. So Throb had to step in, but I think it's cool. Throb has a nice voice.

• 2:19:47Yasi Salek?

  Like you were saying, it really is back to back. Bobby loves Inner Flight. I guess he had become obsessed with Think from the Superfly soundtrack, and he had wanted to write an instrumental track in the same vein for the album. During Inner Flight, Bobby said he remembers Martin Duffy dropping acid and standing on a sofa in the control room shouting, "I'm pissing on this guy. I'm pissing on this guy." And he said that's all he remembers about the session of recording that song. It's perfect. I love Damaged.

• 2:20:18Speaker 04

  Me, too.

• 2:20:19Yasi Salek?

  Country ballad.

• 2:20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:21Yasi Salek?

  Again, like, the, all of the interests in DNA are here.

• 2:20:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:26Yasi Salek?

  It's just, you know, they just show up differently on every album, but they're all the same.

• 2:20:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can, I think, starting with this record.

• 2:20:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:35Speaker 04

  There is like a central primal screen that you can identify that rarely gets fully abandoned until vanishing point.

• 2:20:43Yasi Salek?

  I love it.

• 2:20:43Speaker 04

  We're gonna get to that. When they, that, they come back out of, like, this next album, like, after the hangover of that album.

• 2:20:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:52Speaker 04

  And then they kind of reinvent it themselves. But for five or six years here, like, they, they kind of have like a sound, you know? They have a thing that they're doing.

• 2:21:00Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that they have a sound?

• 2:21:01Speaker 04

  No, no. Okay, I think that they have things that they can fall back on.

• 2:21:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. I just, Damaged is like in do, do, do part is great. Martin Duffy in his, in his bag with those keys.

• 2:21:22Yasi Salek?

  Here's a fun fact, which actually I think made the song better, but the drums are so low in the mix because Toby sucks so bad.

• 2:21:31Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 2:21:31Yasi Salek?

  And so Jimmy, the producer, put the bass up in the mix to make it kind of percussive.

• 2:21:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:39Yasi Salek?

  And that like made it a kind of a better song, probably.

• 2:21:43Speaker 04

  Well, that's almost like the choir doing like, guys do the high parts. Like, it's just fun creativity there.

• 2:21:48Yasi Salek?

  We already know how you feel about Higher Than the Sun, a dub symphony in two parts featuring Jawel.

• 2:21:54Yasi Salek?

  And then Shine Like Stars, Bobby writing about Karen losing her inhibitions, the power of music.

• 2:22:02Speaker 04

  Does that mean Karen tried drugs?

• 2:22:04Yasi Salek?

  Karen and Bobby did ecstasy the first night together.

• 2:22:07Speaker 04

  Oh, awesome.

• 2:22:07Yasi Salek?

  From Sean Ryder's hand.

• 2:22:10Yasi Salek?

  I watch you dance, you look so happy, lost in the moment of abandon, you're set free. It's very sweet. Karen Parker was very influential on Bobby Gillespie. He is not afraid to be, I said, he's an ally. He's not afraid to be influenced by women. He's a feminist.

• 2:22:33Yasi Salek?

  Well, everyone loved this album.

• 2:22:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, critically adored.

• 2:22:37Yasi Salek?

  Critically adored. Smash Hits, nine out of 10. Simon Reynolds writing for Spin, which you think would have made it hit a little more in America, but.

• 2:22:46Speaker 04

  I think it was effective for like the rock criticism community, but like, it's just really, you cannot stress enough that America did not have its ecstasy revolution. So I think some of these bands just like barely missed. I think New Order is like precursor for this, where that they also like emerged out of like nightclubs.

• 2:23:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:08Speaker 04

  And like gay culture in nightclubs in New York City and like had like remixes and stuff like that. But this period where like everybody in England is off their heads, but everybody in America is just like, huh?

• 2:23:18Yasi Salek?

  No, yeah, we did get our ecstasy revolution. It just came with like such a worse soundtrack.

• 2:23:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:23:24Yasi Salek?

  It was like you had to be in the forest and there was some like DJ named like Huggy Bear Seven, you know?

• 2:23:31Speaker 04

  That you found on MySpace.

• 2:23:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that was like. That's not fair, you know, like, we should have had this. This is what we should have had.

• 2:23:38Speaker 04

  Well, we got a lot from them, so.

• 2:23:39Yasi Salek?

  You're right. They tried. They were like, hello, we're right here. And we were like, no, we want Tiesto in the forest with a candy rave necklace. It's so embarrassing. We do everything worse. They looked cooler. They didn't have to go to the forest. Simon Reynolds said this, Primal Scream has always been one of those groups whose musical identity is shaped by the current state of their record collection. But with Screama Delica, it's clear that singer main man Bobby Gillespie has absorbed so many influences and so many mind fizzling substances that what's coming out the other side is new, or at least so mangled, you can't work out where it comes from.

• 2:24:12Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 2:24:13Yasi Salek?

  It's like he short circuited himself. Then there's the part where he says, the bluesy ballad damage is very 1972, very exile on Main Street. Gillespie singing Stone in Love Wit You as part of his campaign to resurrect early 70s expressions like Get Your Rocks Off. Did he know?

• 2:24:32Speaker 04

  Foreshadow.

• 2:24:33Yasi Salek?

  Foreshadowing. Or maybe that's where Bobby got the idea. And then he gave it 10 out of 10. That's a real, we bet on this horse. I thought it was interesting that, again, America always gets a little confused. The Entertainment Weekly review of this by Bill Wyman, shout out Bill Wyman, a great Chicago music journalist. He did a three-way review of this with Blur's Leisure and Ned's Atomic Dustbins Godfather.

• 2:24:58Speaker 04

  Three things from England, yeah.

• 2:25:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, I thought it was an interesting thing how when we talk about what breaks in America and what doesn't, and we can talk about it later, too, when we get to Depeche Mode tour and stuff. But like, I think what's really interesting is like, what benefits acts in the UK has no water here, holds no water here.

• 2:25:23Speaker 04

  So give me an example of what you're talking about.

• 2:25:25Yasi Salek?

  Like Primal Scream being like working class.

• 2:25:30Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:25:31Yasi Salek?

  Like, cool, like, no, nobody cares about that, right? Here, it's just, the context doesn't make sense.

• 2:25:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't even know, I, I, I can't remember. But even something like Nirvana taking over for hair metal didn't feel like a class rebellion as much as like a stylistic rebellion.

• 2:25:48Yasi Salek?

  Right, yeah. I mean, and there was some class stuff baked in there, but like, we don't think about class that much in America.

• 2:25:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:56Yasi Salek?

  Traditionally.

• 2:25:56Speaker 04

  We think about materialism, but not class.

• 2:25:59Yasi Salek?

  And, and in the opposite way, like for Depeche Mode in, in the UK, they were kind of considered like ponce boy band. They weren't that, really considered that cool.

• 2:26:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:26:11Yasi Salek?

  But here.

• 2:26:11Speaker 04

  They're like ministers of darkness.

• 2:26:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, the coolest goth, you know? So it's like, that lack of context can work for or against you, right? I thought, I just thought that was interesting. I don't know how Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Honestly, my whole youth, I thought Ned's Atomic Dustbin was an American band, because that sounds like such an American band name.

• 2:26:30Speaker 04

  It's a college, like, it's such a college band name.

• 2:26:31Yasi Salek?

  Totally, like, that band is from Omaha, Nebraska, but they're not.

• 2:26:39Speaker 02

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 2:26:41Speaker 05

  It's me, the.

• 2:26:42Speaker 02

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 2:26:44Speaker 05

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 2:26:45Speaker 02

  What about a third time?

• 2:26:47Speaker 05

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  Seems like you just had it.

• 2:26:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 2:27:00Speaker 02

  Time to read the timeline.

• 2:27:02Speaker 05

  Fine, no one deals more deals than.

• 2:27:04Speaker 02

  Priceline.

• 2:27:05Speaker 05

  Please stop.

• 2:27:05Speaker 02

  Priceline.

• 2:27:06Speaker 05

  Touche.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  Priceline.

• 2:27:08Speaker 05

  Priceline.

• 2:27:10Yasi Salek?

  What happens in 1981? We're partying, babe. Scream and Delica tour is on, it's on the road, and we are partying. They have a DJ after their sets. They tried to get, or they, I think they did, secure licenses to have like special dispensation to have later night.

• 2:27:27Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:28Yasi Salek?

  Shows for all these shows, so they could have a DJ afterwards.

• 2:27:31Speaker 04

  So there's like an after-party?

• 2:27:32Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. They go. To Memphis in October to film a video for the song Scream of Elka, which again is not on, not on the album. And that's when they go to Arden Studios, just famously where Big Star recorded their albums. And they record Stone My Soul and a cover of the Dennis Wilson written song, Carry Me Home, that was like left off of a Beach Boys album for this Dixie Narco EP.

• 2:27:59Speaker 04

  Good name.

• 2:27:59Yasi Salek?

  Dixie Narco?

• 2:28:00Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's good. What do you make of this like weird collection of four songs that make up this Dixie Narco EP?

• 2:28:06Speaker 04

  It's basically like the point in the road where they have to choose left or right. Like they can make Scream of Elka again, but clearly are starting to move towards like in a more like classic American 60s, 70s sound, right?

• 2:28:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I mean, the Dixie Narco EP is cool. Moving On Up is on here, really good video.

• 2:28:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:28:26Yasi Salek?

  Really Douglas Hart, multi-talented man, choosing the Mary Chain. Made the video for that, Stone My Soul, Carry Me Home. It was from, sorry, it was off of Holland for the Beach Boys heads or was meant to be off of Holland. And then the 11-minute Scream of Elka. No matter what way I look at it, and this is not to say I think Give Out But Don't Give Up is a bad album. I cannot work out how they got there so quickly.

• 2:28:53Speaker 04

  They're so fast.

• 2:28:54Yasi Salek?

  How they were just like, how they were just like, we're done with that. We're gonna make this now.

• 2:29:00Speaker 04

  It's almost, I guess, closer to the way someone, like a band like Radiohead moved, where like they seemed to quickly like synthesize, expel, and then move on to the new thing, like before that album even came out. And this is almost what they're doing with this EP where they're like, we know that everybody is gonna be waiting for Scream of Elka 2.

• 2:29:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:23Speaker 04

  That they think that the dance club revolution is gonna continue. But like, we're in Memphis. Like this is where we psychologically and literally are.

• 2:29:30Yasi Salek?

  It's funny that you bring up Radiohead because I've been thinking the whole time I've been doing this research on Primal Scream, how much I want to compare them to Radiohead.

• 2:29:40Speaker 04

  Really?

• 2:29:41Yasi Salek?

  But again, then how much they're like punk house Radiohead? You know, how much they're like in many ways similar where they're like finger on the pulse, outside of the box thinkers, like reinventing stuff. But Radiohead is so regimented, so, I don't want to, talent, this is not the right word, but you know, like, classically trained.

• 2:30:02Speaker 04

  The music communicates like almost a repulsion at other people and like a fear of other people, whereas like Primal Scream is like, "I want to be part of a collective of humanity," kind of, you know?

• 2:30:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, and then very much even in the way that like you were saying that they make it, it's communal, right? The fluidity of who's in the band, what the band is. Radiohead is always those five guys and they are responsible for every sound that comes out of every one of those albums, whereas Primal Scream, you're like, "I don't know, some lady came and sang gospel, some person came and played the violin and the fiddle."

• 2:30:31Speaker 04

  I passed out, so this guy sang.

• 2:30:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. Whereas Radiohead is very much like, "We made this and we controlled every aspect of it."

• 2:30:37Speaker 04

  And it's a lot of the same, broadly the same genres, but it's like the autecra part of it versus the, you know, the like acid house part of it.

• 2:30:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but and what Radiohead puts out is just like overall more proficient, because they're proficient music makers. Yeah, but it is interesting, I thought about it a lot, because like even like OK Computer was like a little ahead of Exterminator, but like they're kind of giving the same energy.

• 2:31:03Speaker 04

  Very much so.

• 2:31:04Yasi Salek?

  Before we get to, give out, but don't give up. September 8th, 1992, first ever Mercury Prize ceremony. Primal Scream wins for Screamadelica. Here's who they're up against. Barry Adamson, Soul Murder, Jaw Wobbles, Invaders of the Heart, Rising Above Bedlam, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Honey's Dead, Becky Mslukku, Celebration, Saint Etienne, Fox Base Alpha, Simply Red Stars, U2, Octune Baby, John Taverner and Steven Isserlis, The Protecting Veil, and The Young Disciples, Road to Freedom.

• 2:31:38Speaker 04

  Do you prefer Screamadelica or Octune Baby?

• 2:31:40Yasi Salek?

  Why would you do that?

• 2:31:42Speaker 04

  It's just an interesting.

• 2:31:43Yasi Salek?

  That's really hard.

• 2:31:44Speaker 04

  It's a good social clip.

• 2:31:47Yasi Salek?

  You want the men to be mad at me.

• 2:31:49Speaker 04

  Are they? Would they be mad?

• 2:31:50Yasi Salek?

  I think it's a mood based thing. I don't know if I would prefer one or the other.

• 2:31:54Speaker 04

  I think one's mood and one's songs.

• 2:31:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I love Octum Baby.

• 2:31:57Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 2:31:58Yasi Salek?

  Octum Baby is a fucking fire album.

• 2:32:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32:01Yasi Salek?

  But so is Screamadelica.

• 2:32:02Speaker 04

  Sure. So is Honey's Dead.

• 2:32:03Yasi Salek?

  I saw that he's dead. Octum Baby might edge them out a little for me.

• 2:32:08Speaker 04

  I think Octum Baby has lived past its like moment where Screamadelica, to me, is still very much like a...

• 2:32:16Yasi Salek?

  I was gonna say the opposite.

• 2:32:17Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 2:32:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18Speaker 04

  Octum Baby is dated?

• 2:32:20Yasi Salek?

  No, I was gonna say Screamadelica's dated.

• 2:32:21Speaker 04

  That's what I...

• 2:32:22Yasi Salek?

  Is that what you were saying?

• 2:32:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. I was like, Octum Baby sounds like kinda timeless to me.

• 2:32:25Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it's lived past its moment, okay.

• 2:32:26Speaker 04

  Screamadelica is kind of like, hey, if you wanna understand like what happened to people when they took this drug, listen to this record.

• 2:32:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and, and because much like how psych music comes around every like 12 years or whatever, so does like acid house type rave music. And so like Screamadelica is legible right now in a way that I think maybe it wasn't seven, 10 years ago or whatever.

• 2:32:47Speaker 04

  Very well put.

• 2:32:48Yasi Salek?

  But it might fall back out of being legible, you know? But Octum Baby, man, who's gonna ride your wild horses, man? That's fucking so cruel.

• 2:32:58Speaker 04

  You're dangerous 'cause you're honest.

• 2:33:01Yasi Salek?

  He's just, he's a poet.

• 2:33:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:03Yasi Salek?

  My man Bono. This, I love this. So they hand the trophy and it's 25 grand in prize money to the band. Except for Bobby Gillespie, who had just come for a brief moment in his Davey Crockett hat and sunglasses before leaving the ceremony, being quickly interviewed by the BBC on his way out. They said, "How do you feel?" He said, "Fucked." They said, "How do you intend to spend the prize money?" He said, "We're gonna spend it all on drugs."

• 2:33:29Speaker 04

  He's perpetually doing the beginning of Loaded in these interviews.

• 2:33:33Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna, we wanna get loaded and have a good time. And then they get started working on the next album at Roundhouse Studios in London. Not a lot gets done because they're on too much drugs. We're gonna spend it all on drugs. We did. Bobby said, "Nothing really came of it. It was just all night jams and people getting far out, strung out and collapsing." As much as we... Tried to keep it together. We had a lot of internal problems. A lot of things happened to us. Near deaths, mental illness. We went from cocaine into a rather brown period, admits McGee. There were a few people who got too close to the edges of reality. Apparently, there was a crisis meeting for the Band around April of 93.

• 2:34:15Yasi Salek?

  And it was McGee, who at this point is still their manager. He stops being their manager when he himself has a breakdown, which was, I think, in 94.

• 2:34:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:34:23Yasi Salek?

  And Alex Nightingale, who was the son of Annie Nightingale, the big Radio 1 DJ. And she, or he was unspecified.

• 2:34:33Speaker 04

  Supervisor of them?

• 2:34:34Yasi Salek?

  Something of them, who later becomes their manager.

• 2:34:36Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:34:37Yasi Salek?

  But they're basically like, you guys need to get your fucking shit together. This is based, I guess it was 47 grand, according to Alan McGee, worth of cover versions is what he called it.

• 2:34:50Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:34:50Yasi Salek?

  And so, he says, the bottom line is, we had a meeting and we went to Memphis in the summer.

• 2:34:55Speaker 04

  That's an amazing, like, solve for what was going on in the band.

• 2:34:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, I think it is really interesting because I think a lot of the narrative of this album is like, they loved Memphis music so much. And it's like, no, they had to go somewhere where their drug dealers couldn't find them. There's drug dealers in Memphis.

• 2:35:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's probably cleaner places in the country than.

• 2:35:17Yasi Salek?

  But, you know, okay.

• 2:35:18Speaker 04

  Salt Lake City.

• 2:35:19Yasi Salek?

  Sure, exactly. Salt Lake City is a great idea. That's such a, I'm sure there's some, like, really good parts of Pennsylvania where the Amish live.

• 2:35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, Lancaster.

• 2:35:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So they hit up Tom Dowd, who was a veteran soul producer, who had produced Ray Charles, The Drifters, The Coasters, The Spinners. Crazy. Ornette Coleman? Philomenous monk. And they sent him four new demos, plus Screamadelica, and he was like, yes. They head off to Arden. All right, let's talk about Give Out But Don't Give Up, which comes out March 28th, 1994 on Creation.

• 2:35:52Speaker 04

  First thing, obviously, I heard off of this was Rocks.

• 2:35:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Where do you land on Rocks now, today?

• 2:35:57Speaker 04

  So Rocks is like, kind of objectively good song?

• 2:36:01Yasi Salek?

  Cannot deny it. It's a banger.

• 2:36:03Speaker 04

  It's really weird because sometimes I'll be listening to it and it's like feels slow. Like, I don't know how well played this record is.

• 2:36:11Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:36:12Speaker 04

  But as a kind of homage to all the Jimmy Miller Stones records and R and B from the 60s from Memphis and Stax and stuff like that, and with obviously their own twist on it. It's like a pretty good record.

• 2:36:34Speaker 04

  I can't even fathom I was really into Screamadelica.

• 2:36:38Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:36:38Speaker 04

  This is probably my first experience with the band, by the way.

• 2:36:40Yasi Salek?

  Was hearing Rocks.

• 2:36:41Speaker 04

  Was hearing Rocks. And it was like, oh, are these guys trying to make like a Black Crows jump into America and be like a, like a classic revival band? I had no idea about like Screamadelica, drugs, dance culture, any of that stuff.

• 2:36:58Yasi Salek?

  Acid House, the Happy Mind.

• 2:36:59Speaker 04

  So this was like cool, but I think I probably thought the Black Crows were better at doing the same thing. And I might still think that.

• 2:37:05Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's like being like the French people are better at making French food than, you know.

• 2:37:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:12Yasi Salek?

  McDonald's or whatever. Yes, of course. That's a bad metaphor. We don't have to use. That's a terrible metaphor. George Draculius is credited on this album.

• 2:37:21Speaker 04

  He's a big Black Crows collaborator.

• 2:37:22Yasi Salek?

  Big Black Crows collaborator. This album was made in a really bizarre way, so I want to talk about it a little. I think to this day, the Bobby Glaspie is like very like closed about, maybe because it hurt so bad, how negative the feedback was.

• 2:37:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:41Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. I don't want to like, whatever. It's my job to write fanfic. I wonder, is this the album they actually wanted to make?

• 2:37:48Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, obviously like they're coming into a, in a pretty rough mental headspace.

• 2:37:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:54Speaker 04

  And the names of the people who collaborate with them, some of whom have worked with before, like, like Jim Miller or whatever, but like, they're not all going to be Andrew Weatherall.

• 2:38:03Yasi Salek?

  And he's not here.

• 2:38:04Speaker 04

  And, and they're not all going to be like, I understand the Saturn waves that you're trying to find here. Now that maybe they're trying to be. A little bit more of a buttoned up rock band here.

• 2:38:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:16Speaker 04

  And I have nothing but the utmost respect for a band who basically has like the world at their feet.

• 2:38:22Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:38:23Speaker 04

  Because of a certain kind of thing that they're doing and they're like, fuck that. We're gonna do something completely different.

• 2:38:28Yasi Salek?

  Like Noel Gallagher said, Afghan, what did he say? Afghani?

• 2:38:31Speaker 04

  Reggae.

• 2:38:31Yasi Salek?

  Polk, Afghani reggae, yeah.

• 2:38:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:38:34Yasi Salek?

  So they go, they go to just make this album with Tom Dowd as the main producer, right? As Simon Reynolds said sort of meanly in Mellymaker, Gillespie needs someone to counteract, not collude with his fanish tendencies. And that means a Weatherall, not a Dowd.

• 2:38:49Speaker 04

  That's a great point.

• 2:38:50Yasi Salek?

  It is, but it's kind of rude. The engineer in the documentary, Jim Powell, there's a little documentary about the making of this album. It's a BBC one, I can't remember the name of it. He said that the band knew Memphis music better than him and he was embarrassed because he's from here.

• 2:39:05Yasi Salek?

  Which is like, it's kind of sweet, yeah. And Jim Dickinson, hero, who produced Big Star, he played keys on some of the album. He also played piano on a little song called Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones. It's not a big deal. Memphis horns play on it. I mean, they made it legit in so many ways, right? This is, this came up in another episode that we did together.

• 2:39:24Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. This is my favorite part of this entire pod.

• 2:39:26Yasi Salek?

  So good. That our beloved Afghan Wings were also at Arden, overlapping at some point, making.

• 2:39:35Speaker 04

  Gentlemen?

• 2:39:35Yasi Salek?

  Gentlemen.

• 2:39:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:39:37Yasi Salek?

  Incredible.

• 2:39:38Speaker 04

  And will eventually go on a very similar arc to Primal Scream. Where they're like, we're gonna go die in this other city and make a record, but then like.

• 2:39:46Yasi Salek?

  That album is better than this album.

• 2:39:47Speaker 04

  Uh, Gentleman's one of the most perfect rock records.

• 2:39:50Yasi Salek?

  Well, no, but.

• 2:39:51Speaker 04

  Oh, Black Love.

• 2:39:52Yasi Salek?

  Black Love, yeah. Yeah, Gentlemen is, um, untouchable. I also love that they're like, we're gonna go to Memphis, get away from drugs. And they're like, oh, hello. Greg Dooley.

• 2:40:02Yasi Salek?

  I was not familiar with your game, Greg Dooley. So, yeah, they went out partying together. I could not even imagine. Memphis had not seen that coming, fucking Greg Dooley.

• 2:40:11Speaker 04

  Do you think Alan McGee's like, hmm?

• 2:40:14Yasi Salek?

  This may have been a mistake to send the boys to Memphis. No, Alan McGee was five minutes away from having a full collapse. Like, he is absolutely not the voice of reason to anyone's understanding. So, they make the album. They have all their songs, but they're not happy with the mix. They don't like Tom Dadd's mix. Also, sometime between them finishing the album and them mixing the album, Martin Duffy gets stabbed in New York City at a party, but does not notice the whole time until he looks down and he's bleeding from his back. Oh, God. And he's like, "Did I sit on something?" And they're like, "No, this is a stab wound." And then he has to go back to England to heal. So that's what's going on in the levels of partying and primal scream. Anyway, while at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles,

• 2:40:59Yasi Salek?

  Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Inez had met George Draculius, and they invited him to beef up the harder tracks they felt lacked the required kick. So he, to no one's surprise, mixed rocks, which is why it sounds so Black Crowzy, and also Jailbird. And those are the first two singles.

• 2:41:24Yasi Salek?

  How did George Clinton get into the mix? Literally, I liked my joke there. Bobby said, "We had this song." Well, it wasn't a song. It was just an instrumental with no title. A kind of jam that we would do where Martin would play this clavinet riff through a wall wall. I would just shout things like, "Give out, but don't give up." Throb would play these funky bluesy lines. And we... The man who had worked with Ornette Coleman, I just want to just picture him sitting there while

• 2:41:50Yasi Salek?

  Martin's playing a clavinet riff through a wall wall, and Bobby's just shouting words. "Anyways, we realized it had the feel of early Funkadelic. Not the later, more structured stuff, but things like "Maggot Brain" and "Free Your Mind." So when it came to mixing it, we knew who had to do it. That's how they get George Clinton.

• 2:42:15Yasi Salek?

  George Clinton said, "The first one they sent me was Funky Jam, and I didn't send it back, and they sent me two more. I think they were surprised they did it so quickly. They sent me a ballad. I ain't never mixed a ballad before." "The reason we did that," interrupts Gillespie, "was because we thought of 'Free' as such a lonesome lovely song. Now everyone thinks of Funkadelica as this wild funky stuff, but you had these beautiful songs like everyone's gonna make it this time." Anyways, this is how George Clinton gets in. He works on the album.

• 2:42:42Speaker 04

  It's a nice swing.

• 2:42:43Yasi Salek?

  It's a nice swing.

• 2:42:43Speaker 04

  They made, they made some big swings.

• 2:42:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:45Speaker 04

  George T. Coolis, like, does his, like, shiny radio rock thing.

• 2:42:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:49Speaker 04

  That video for Rocks is cool enough. Everybody was like, "Yeah, Rocks, alright." But I think that they alienated their, sort of like, diehard screedadelica Sadder to Homies and didn't rock hard enough to crack American Black Crowes fans' rotation in a big way.

• 2:43:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, no.

• 2:43:09Speaker 04

  And so then you find yourself, like, kinda stuck in between.

• 2:43:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and I'm also like, I can't speak for them because I was 12 and I wasn't an American Black Crowes fanbase person, but like, I'm sure they weren't checking for, like, a super skinny Scottish guy coming, you know, to deliver the goods to them.

• 2:43:27Speaker 04

  Who can't really sing that much, yeah.

• 2:43:30Yasi Salek?

  And while Rocks is undeniably a good song, it also, they didn't have the language for this back then, just cannot shake the feel of being an Apple commercial song also. Did you notice? It's just Apple commercials. It's too perfect.

• 2:43:46Speaker 04

  It sounds like a lot of these great Primal Scream albums and their best songs are so in love with the source material that it, like we've talked about, kinda comes out the other end feeling, like Simon Reynolds said it, like, it comes out the other side feeling new. This just feels like I put Exile on Main Street on in a jukebox at like a bar.

• 2:44:07Yasi Salek?

  We have Exile on Main Street at home. Yeah, because there's two different versions. We talk about it on the show a lot, where there's like, versions of songs that you hear where you're like, "I know someone wrote that before." Like, "There She Goes" by The Laws, you know? But that doesn't mean that it sounds like something else. It's just so, like, timely. I mean, Oasis did it, right? This is not that. This is, "We have Exile on Main Street at home."

• 2:44:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:44:29Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's talk about the cover real quick before we get into the song by song. It's not the cover anymore.

• 2:44:36Speaker 04

  No longer.

• 2:44:36Yasi Salek?

  No longer.

• 2:44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:44:37Yasi Salek?

  But it was a cropped version of a photo called Troubled Waters by William Eggleston.

• 2:44:43Speaker 04

  The god.

• 2:44:43Yasi Salek?

  The god, American photographer, also a close confidant of Big Star. It is of a neon light up Confederate flag.

• 2:44:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:44:52Yasi Salek?

  That's bad.

• 2:44:53Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 2:44:54Yasi Salek?

  Is it?

• 2:44:54Speaker 04

  I don't think, even at the time, anybody was like, clearly, these guys wish for the return of the Confederacy.

• 2:45:00Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 2:45:00Speaker 04

  But iconography is, you know, not yours to own, moves through its context.

• 2:45:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I don't know how long it took for them to change it. I think that's a much later thing. But I don't imagine it benefited their American breakthrough. Here's what Bobby said in ID at the time. "We used that image because it was a beautiful picture and our album was recorded in the South and a lot of the musicians who influenced us were born there. Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Lee Dorsey, Jerry Lee Lewis. One thing I would really balk at would be using the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes as imagery. To me, that's racist."

• 2:45:36Yasi Salek?

  I get.

• 2:45:36Speaker 04

  It's quite a zag.

• 2:45:38Yasi Salek?

  I get what he's saying.

• 2:45:39Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah. I'm sure it made sense at the time.

• 2:45:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:45:42Yasi Salek?

  It's also kind of probably an interesting swipe at, it's 94, so Britpop is now like.

• 2:45:47Speaker 04

  And they're like, fuck this.

• 2:45:48Yasi Salek?

  Fully being framed with the Union Jack and stuff, so.

• 2:45:51Speaker 04

  But this is, the one unintentionally genius thing to come out of this record is Primal Scream completely decouples from that.

• 2:45:59Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:45:59Speaker 04

  So they don't have to do.

• 2:46:01Yasi Salek?

  They're not, they're not lumped in at all.

• 2:46:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Blur self-titled record where they're like, okay, like, we swear we're not English. Like, I mean, they're Scottish anyway, but my point being, they fucked their careers up early enough that they can rebuild it while everybody is still listening to this stuff.

• 2:46:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good point. They've since changed it to a band photo, actually, one of the coolest band photos of all time, that I think, I don't remember the photographer, but it was taken at the very end of one of their, like, gigs that went to like 6:00 in the morning and it's like the band leaving the show and that's why they look so fucked up. Because they were so fucked up. Such a great photo. There was also, I guess, on the back of the album was the picture of Eddie Hazel, who was the Funkadelic guitarist who had died that year. This album hit number two on the UK albums chart.

• 2:46:50Speaker 04

  I mean, I think they still had a huge, huge mind share there.

• 2:46:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it peaked at number 22 on the US Billboard Heat Seekers chart.

• 2:46:57Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46:58Yasi Salek?

  I guess rocks. Carried it?

• 2:47:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, Rocks, Rocks was like a big, like, I thought of it as a one-hit wonder.

• 2:47:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:47:05Speaker 04

  When I was a kid.

• 2:47:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:47:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:47:06Yasi Salek?

  Critical reception, though, not great, Ben. Melody Maker called it Screamadelica.

• 2:47:11Speaker 04

  Like dull.

• 2:47:11Yasi Salek?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:47:14Yasi Salek?

  That's pretty funny.

• 2:47:16Yasi Salek?

  He said, "Screamadelica didn't test my love one bit, mainly because it was an exceptional foray into house, avant-pop, and dub territories. This, however, is going to challenge the faith of the fiercest devotees. It grieves me to say it, but Give Out but Don't Give Up, the second most feverishly anticipated record of the last three years, is absolutely fucking dreadful." Okay, I think that's a bit harsh. "Don't expect any expansionist moves towards a gleaming, polycultural future à la Screamadelica here, nor any dazzling collisions of dance and rock. Bobby Gillespie may have a staggeringly diverse record collection, but Give Out is dismally one-dimensional, and it's one dimension called Sticky Fingers." Jab it.

• 2:47:54Speaker 04

  In case you didn't know what the dimension was.

• 2:47:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Sticky Fingers. I feel like people were overly harsh on this album. What do you think?

• 2:48:02Speaker 04

  No, not really.

• 2:48:03Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 2:48:04Speaker 04

  Not in comparison to What's to Come.

• 2:48:06Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:48:06Speaker 04

  Like-

• 2:48:06Yasi Salek?

  Or What Was Before.

• 2:48:07Speaker 04

  What Was Before and What's to Come is like a band operating at like the peak of popular music in the decade, and then this record's like, okay. It has a couple of good songs.

• 2:48:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:16Speaker 04

  And he doesn't like it either.

• 2:48:17Yasi Salek?

  I was trying so hard to-

• 2:48:19Speaker 04

  You don't have to defend something that he's like, "This album is overproduced."

• 2:48:23Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 2:48:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, see, it's about to get so good, though.

• 2:48:25Yasi Salek?

  I know, you're right, you're right. I just, I just love them so much, I want, I want, I want them to be happy. And this is not it. I did like that Rocks, and Rocks made enemy, called them dance traders. George Clinton wisely pointed out, though, that Rocks, he was like, "I know that song, I know that groove from 1958, that's Little Richard." And then Bobby was super excited, he was like, "No, that's right, people say it's The Rolling Stones, but they don't get it, it's Little Richard." He's like, "I'm not ripping off The Rolling Stones, I'm ripping off Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis."

• 2:49:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, you should tell that to the horn section that comes in, it sounds exactly like The Rolling Stones.

• 2:49:18Yasi Salek?

  Around like maybe 95,

• 2:49:24Yasi Salek?

  the Rolling Stones started using Rocks as a song they would play before their own shows.

• 2:49:30Speaker 04

  Like to take the piss?

• 2:49:31Yasi Salek?

  I don't know why. It was, it was just one.

• 2:49:35Speaker 04

  Keith was probably like, "Good tune."

• 2:49:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. That sounds great. Love that. Love that guy. Who's that guy? There was a tossed off line in the Chris Needs book, but I was like, "That's very funny."

• 2:49:43Speaker 04

  That's cool.

• 2:49:44Yasi Salek?

  Okay, just, just because I love to be a fan. I love Free. I think Free is a wonderful and beautiful song. I'm glad it was made.

• 2:49:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49:53Yasi Salek?

  I think Denise Johnson has a beautiful voice.

• 2:49:54Speaker 04

  She does.

• 2:49:55Yasi Salek?

  I think it's a great song.

• 2:50:05Yasi Salek?

  I don't know what's happening on Big Jet Plane. That, that Memphis Horns, it's giving yacht rock, it's giving easy listening. I don't know what's happening there. I'm so sorry.

• 2:50:20Yasi Salek?

  I like Strutton. I wrote in my notes.

• 2:50:22Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:50:22Yasi Salek?

  I wrote, "Sorry, but this rocks." Is it eight minutes long? Yeah. Are there vocals? No.

• 2:50:30Yasi Salek?

  Still kind of fun.

• 2:50:32Speaker 04

  What's wild is that at this moment with this record,

• 2:50:37Speaker 04

  you just are like, it's unbelievable, the, the two subsequent records that they make based on this record. You would never, ever in a million years think that they would come up with this.

• 2:50:46Yasi Salek?

  It's such a weird anomaly in the like, four album discography, that you're just like, "What?"

• 2:50:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:50:53Yasi Salek?

  That's why I, I want more information. I want to understand. Do you think if Andrew Weatherall had been invited to this party, we'd have a different thing to talk about right now?

• 2:51:03Speaker 04

  I don't know, because their records don't feel like collections of songs that they were like, written and then shaped. They feel like vibe conductors.

• 2:51:12Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:51:13Speaker 04

  And so this was the vibe. They were in Memphis.

• 2:51:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:16Speaker 04

  They've, they've like, are testing all these guys who have made these records by being like, "Actually, that record was on Sun like in 1959, not 1958." And they're like, okay, cool. Like, you wanna try another take of Rocks, man? You know, like?

• 2:51:29Yasi Salek?

  The best is like, they clearly were like, fuck, we need to make it weirder.

• 2:51:34Speaker 04

  It needed to be weirder.

• 2:51:35Yasi Salek?

  And they called George Clinton, and even George Clinton cannot make it weirder.

• 2:51:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:51:41Yasi Salek?

  He does his best, but it's just, it doesn't do it.

• 2:51:44Speaker 04

  I'm sure that's why he, Gillespie winds up having such like a kind of rotten taste in his mouth about it. It was because he's like, this is the most basic record we ever made.

• 2:51:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, this is where they wanted to break in America, was this album.

• 2:51:56Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:51:57Yasi Salek?

  It didn't happen, but they did agree, because they were trying to break in America, to go on tour opening for Depeche Mode on the second leg of their American tour for their album Songs of Faith and Devotion. This is what Jeff Barrett said. They'd had Depeche Mode on the phone for years, wanting Primal Scream's association. And the decision was made to do this tour, which was fucking bollocks. They were like, what the fuck is this all about? It did them a lot of damage, a real lot of damage. There was a lot of traveling and they were playing these huge amphitheaters, people eating picnics. It wasn't Scream World at all. And it did them into a point when they really weren't even sure they wanted to make music again. Actually, Chris Neid said it really funny in his book. He was like, "Primal Scream means dark nights, blaring lights in their own crowd,

• 2:52:39Yasi Salek?

  not playing half their normal set in a stadium on a sunny afternoon with hordes of American rock fans wolfing down hot dogs and swigging Budweiser while waiting for the star attraction."

• 2:52:51Speaker 04

  To this day, I will not watch live Primal Scream videos that take place during daytime.

• 2:52:55Yasi Salek?

  Because of this.

• 2:52:56Speaker 04

  Just because of like, it's not this band.

• 2:52:58Yasi Salek?

  It's not right.

• 2:52:59Speaker 04

  They are not a festival shed band.

• 2:53:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:02Speaker 04

  They can play Glastonbury at night, and I will watch.

• 2:53:04Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 2:53:05Speaker 04

  But they cannot be like, hey, it's noon at Primavera.

• 2:53:08Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:53:09Speaker 04

  And we're here playing Kowalski.

• 2:53:12Yasi Salek?

  Can you imagine what it must have been like for them to, how demoralizing?

• 2:53:17Speaker 04

  And you're going to Depeche Mode and you brought a bottle of wine.

• 2:53:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:20Speaker 04

  And it's like Bobby Gillespie's up there, wrapped in a Confederate flag.

• 2:53:26Yasi Salek?

  So it's a it was a rough scene.

• 2:53:28Speaker 04

  Michelle, I took Gillespie for fucking hating Depeche Mode throughout this process and just being like, fuck Depeche Mode.

• 2:53:33Yasi Salek?

  Well, you know, people got really mad at me when I did this in the Depeche Mode episode because Dave Gahan was like so

• 2:53:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:53:42Yasi Salek?

  seriously addicted to drugs during this.

• 2:53:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought into Primal Scream.

• 2:53:45Yasi Salek?

  No, that too, like obsessed with them, of course. Yeah, because Depeche Mode, again, like I said, is not as cool as Primal Scream. I love Depeche Mode. And in American context, I think they're considered very cool. But like, Primal Scream was so much cooler. But he was like so crazy addicted to drugs. I mean, this is like, I think there's a suicide attempt on the like, this is like very bad, like a near OD, like this is like death's door, Dave Gahan.

• 2:54:06Speaker 04

  There's a lot of these tours in the 90s where like, these bands go out and you're like, whose idea was this?

• 2:54:13Yasi Salek?

  Whose idea?

• 2:54:13Speaker 04

  Whose idea was it that any of these guys could have handled this?

• 2:54:16Yasi Salek?

  To be together.

• 2:54:17Speaker 04

  Why are they opening for these people?

• 2:54:18Yasi Salek?

  Well, Dave Gahan was like.

• 2:54:20Speaker 04

  At 12:30 PM.

• 2:54:22Yasi Salek?

  I literally picked Primal Scream on purpose because I wanted to do drugs.

• 2:54:25Speaker 04

  But somebody needed to be like, hey, I don't know if these guys are in the headspace to do this.

• 2:54:29Yasi Salek?

  But the funniest part for me, again, is what people got mad about. So it's like, the whole thing was like, oh, my God, and Dave Gahan was like so fucked up. And then they add Primal Scream to the mix and it nearly kills him. And Bobby was like, no, it was dead boring. I've never seen so few drugs in my life. That Weegeezer, the singer? He had some, but the rest of them didn't. So we just got drunk all the time. So this tour that nearly kills Dave Gahan is like the most boring tour in the world to Bobby.

• 2:54:54Speaker 04

  Primal Scream's like where, where's the party at?

• 2:54:56Yasi Salek?

  So mid, I don't, there was no drugs. Actually, what Bobby said, we were just playing to middle class goth girls who loved Depeche Mode and it was the wrong audience and venues for us. It was good. Anyways, they do a ton more touring after that. Things are bad. The vibes are bad, babe. It's 1995. The band is not psyched. Britpop is kind of in full swing back at home.

• 2:55:19Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:55:20Yasi Salek?

  Right? Wasn't it 94, 95? It's all, it's all happening. So Creation is now on the like upswing of Oasis. Bobby Gillespie confirmed that they were like, really like, we might quit the band.

• 2:55:31Speaker 04

  It's like all of a sudden, they go from being in the cutting edge of all music to being like left behind after having made a record that sounds like it was from 1972.

• 2:55:39Yasi Salek?

  The thing is like, yes.

• 2:55:41Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm being purposely antagonistic, but I can't imagine what that would do to your psyche if you were like, I was the motherfucking man in high school and now like all of a sudden, like all these other bands are on my old mate's record label, blowing up globally.

• 2:55:57Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:55:58Speaker 04

  And I'm out here with the Wee Gees are from Depeche Mode.

• 2:56:00Yasi Salek?

  Wee Gees are, it's short, I guess.

• 2:56:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:03Yasi Salek?

  No, but I was gonna agree with you, of course, but I, I almost wonder if arguably it might have been worse if they made Screamadelica again, because that also would have been out of time and out of season.

• 2:56:13Speaker 04

  It all worked out.

• 2:56:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you know, so it's like, ultimately, although this is not a great album by any Primal Scream standards, I think it's cooler that they made this than they tried to make another acid house album. Because that would have been honestly more embarrassing. And by 94, no one also gave a fuck about acid house and that kind of music anymore. People had fully moved on. You know, unless you were going like full, you know, more chiba or whatever.

• 2:56:40Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:56:41Yasi Salek?

  But yes, it all worked out. And it is kind of funny that Oasis was arguably succeeding with their version of We Have The Beatles At Home. You know, like, whereas like their-

• 2:56:51Speaker 04

  I wonder, I mean, you've done the episodes, but like, I'm sure Noel noted some ways in which Bobby got press. You know, like the way that like you just are like, I'll make headlines anytime I want. You know, I think that's a little bit of Bobby influence.

• 2:57:07Yasi Salek?

  There's such a great bit of Noel Gallagher when they're like, they brought us to the Creation Warehouse and they signed us and they said we could take whatever we want. And they were like, we already have Screamadelica. The rest of this shit sucks.

• 2:57:20Yasi Salek?

  But Primal Scream was like the crown jewel of, you know, Creation, Creation before Oasis came along. All right. So they're about to quit music. The vibes are bad. Everything sucks. They pop their head out to record a cover of Understanding for a Small Faces tribute album. Bobby doesn't sing on it. It has vocals by the 60s soul singer, P P Arnold. And then more notably to our interests, in 1996, they pop their head out again to record the song, Trainspotting.

• 2:57:47Speaker 04

  This is where I joined the train, so to speak.

• 2:57:50Yasi Salek?

  So to speak.

• 2:57:50Speaker 04

  Because Trainspotting hit my life, completely changed it. I didn't know anything about any of like the subculture of drugs in youth culture in Scotland, but like Irvine Welsh like absolutely dropped like a ton of bricks. This movie was seminal for me.

• 2:58:05Yasi Salek?

  You read the book before you watched the movie?

• 2:58:07Speaker 04

  I read the book when I got out of, uh, when I got out of high school. So like, it was like, but I think it was already like a drumbeat that like Irvine Welsh had written like Catcher in the Rye for the-

• 2:58:17Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:58:18Speaker 04

  For like the, the world again.

• 2:58:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:21Speaker 04

  So I believe I read the book first to the extent that I could understand because it's written largely in like colloquial Scottish slang and stuff.

• 2:58:28Yasi Salek?

  Denay, yeah. I denay understand.

• 2:58:30Speaker 04

  And by 96, when this comes out, I can't remember if there was much of a delay between the US release of it or the-

• 2:58:38Yasi Salek?

  There was.

• 2:58:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like, there was hype.

• 2:58:40Yasi Salek?

  July, I believe, is when it came out in the UK, but it's-

• 2:58:43Speaker 04

  And then it's like end of summer, beginning of fall.

• 2:58:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:46Speaker 04

  Uh, 96. And this was just so mind blowing and the fact that like, they waited long enough to, for like everything to come back around and then they had like this new worldview, but used a lot of the same tools that they used on Screamadelica and the song Trainspotting, which they put on the, on this soundtrack is unbelievable.

• 2:59:05Yasi Salek?

  The instrumental.

• 2:59:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:59:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Great, great.

• 2:59:08Speaker 04

  But that's like, to me, that's primal scream. Like I got introduced to them as like, these guys are like, this is can, this is like modern can.

• 2:59:25Yasi Salek?

  So I was gonna ask you, so your my, young mind made no connection between Trainspotting song and Rocks?

• 2:59:31Speaker 04

  If anything, I think I probably like skipped Trainspotting, the song, a couple of times because I was like-

• 2:59:37Yasi Salek?

  You're like, oh, it's that Rocks bit.

• 2:59:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I was, I was like, oh, I'm here for Underworld or whatever.

• 2:59:42Yasi Salek?

  Born Slippy.

• 2:59:42Speaker 04

  But this, this song and then just like the whole thing and knowing like Irvine Welsh and Bobby Galips, you were like, basically like admiring cause like peers.

• 2:59:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:54Speaker 04

  And that, that, this is when I got really into like the Scottish literature stuff and-

• 2:59:58Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 2:59:58Speaker 04

  And the music.

• 2:59:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's a big CR moment.

• 3:00:02Speaker 04

  And there's an incredible vibe shift right here where like this is when like pre-millennium tension comes out and- The first couple Bjork records come out, Portishead's out, and Massive Attack's out, and it feels like a completely new music is being made.

• 3:00:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we have like two years of that and then everything ends. Really, didn't it really, it felt good for a second.

• 3:00:23Speaker 04

  It felt awesome.

• 3:00:24Yasi Salek?

  We had a couple of years where it really was like a drug trip. It feels really good for a couple of seconds and then like the millennium comes around and you're like, god damn it. Fan Spotting is an incredible song, I completely agree. I wonder if it, because it's never really addressed, but like, I imagine it must have been the rejection of 1972 version of Primal Scream that had them return to Weatherall. Or maybe Irvine Welsh specifically was like, I want that version of Primal Scream.

• 3:00:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have to leave to come home, right?

• 3:00:57Yasi Salek?

  It's a drug album, or whatever, it's a drug movie, yeah. They also, sorry, pertinent perhaps to your interests as a soccer fan.

• 3:01:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:01:05Yasi Salek?

  They put out a weird, cool one-off single called "The Big Man and the Scream Team Meet the Barmy Army Uptown", in a collaboration with Irvine Welsh and On You Sound.

• 3:01:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:01:17Yasi Salek?

  Which caused controversy due to offensive lyrics about Rangers Football Club and their fanbase.

• 3:01:23Speaker 04

  Because these guys are Celtic fans.

• 3:01:25Yasi Salek?

  Bobby Gillespie himself had nothing to do with the record, but it says, "In every hick town in Caledonia across the pseudo-nation, you can see the most fucked up scum that was shat into creation, where a McEwen's Lager top equals no imagination." I don't know what any of that means.

• 3:01:43Speaker 04

  Rangers is, I think, the preferred team of the Protestant community in Glasgow.

• 3:01:49Yasi Salek?

  Okay, and the Catholics like the Celtics, that makes sense, and...

• 3:01:55Speaker 04

  Who is it you're pointing to? Pope Francis up there?

• 3:01:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And McEwen's Lager is...

• 3:02:01Speaker 04

  I think it's the sponsor of Rangers football kit.

• 3:02:03Yasi Salek?

  Got it.

• 3:02:04Speaker 04

  At the time.

• 3:02:05Yasi Salek?

  Amazing, easy to make people mad over there in the UK when it comes to soccer.

• 3:02:13Yasi Salek?

  They offered it apparently to the Scottish Football Association. They said, no, we're gonna go ahead and take Rod Stewart's Purple Heather. All right, now an amazing thing happens that I'm gonna put to you, I believe, saved Primal Scream.

• 3:02:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:02:27Yasi Salek?

  There would be no Primal Scream. We would have, would not have been having this conversation, probably, if the Stone Roses didn't break up.

• 3:02:34Speaker 04

  The second coming, the last outing.

• 3:02:36Yasi Salek?

  The last outing, because it freed up one Gary Manny Moonfeld.

• 3:02:41Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:02:42Yasi Salek?

  Who was the basis for the Stone Roses, to join Primal Scream. What a great, fucking, cool thing.

• 3:02:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Also, like, there's only 13 bands in England, so he's like, "Yeah, I'll join another one."

• 3:02:55Yasi Salek?

  But like, yes and no. Like, it just shows what kind of, like, down, cool guy he was. He was like, "I wanna keep playing music."

• 3:03:02Speaker 04

  I'm not being flippant at all. This is one of the coolest things that's ever happened. The bass player from Stone Roses is like, "I'll just join Primal Scream at their lowest ebb."

• 3:03:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like, "Yo, you guys need me? I can't stay here." During Second Coming, he got so bored, he start, he got a job flipping burgers in a burger truck. That's real. He was like, "I don't know, John Squire was doing cocaine all day and writing. We had nothing to do." Like, we literally, he wouldn't let us do anything, and he was just holed up, being a genius, and he was like, "I, I needed human attention." So great. He's like, "I wanna party," and he comes and parties. And they also get a new drummer. The drummer of Primal Scream seems to never matter, respectfully.

• 3:03:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:03:41Yasi Salek?

  Like, it changes all the time.

• 3:03:42Speaker 04

  Spinal, tight vibes.

• 3:03:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Nobody, except poor Tam McGurk, who we know from Couldn't Keep Time Within One B, I can barely remember any of their names.

• 3:03:49Speaker 04

  In some ways, Andrew Weatherall was the drummer.

• 3:03:51Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly. Whatever. So Paul Mulroney comes in, though, and now they're going into the new album. Here's what the vibes were. Terrible. They're gonna quit. He hated, Bobby Gillespie was like, "What the fuck? This sucks. Everyone's on a lot of drugs." Bobby said, "I saw some pictures of me toward the end, last time. Tisk. I just didn't give a fuck. I let myself go. Clothes, hair, personal hygiene. I just didn't give a fuck." There's a great little moment in this article where now he's wearing a cool, white Stussy jacket. He got it together. He said, "I didn't get depressed until, about it, the album, until six months after it came out. You know, it was sounding great live, but six months later, I realized it wasn't what it should have been.

• 3:04:31Yasi Salek?

  I was thinking seriously of splitting the band up, because if we couldn't be as good as I knew we could be, if we were only gonna be alright, instead of Primal Scream, I couldn't see any point in carrying on. One day, you wake up and look in the mirror, and your hair is down to your ass, and you look like a goddamn hippie. And that's when you think, 'Oh, fuck, let's review the situation.'"

• 3:04:50Yasi Salek?

  And then they ask him, what did you think was wrong with the record with Give Out, but don't give up? It was overproduced, too clean. It should have sounded late night, mournful, but still uplifting, dirtier and darker. I'm gonna cry myself blind, rocks, they're good, but some of the other stuff, when we wrote the album, we were kind of fucked. But the album never reflected that, unfortunately. We were bruised and broken, but that album never captured it.

• 3:05:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, like they were trying to be something that they weren't at the moment.

• 3:05:15Yasi Salek?

  That's what I kind of meant, where it's like, I really feel like there's a version of that album that's like Afghan Wigs-y.

• 3:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there is no lost version of that record, right? Like, there isn't the like, actually, this is a version of it, but then Tom, you know, like George Dracula's fixed it all. It's like, no.

• 3:05:30Yasi Salek?

  No, you know, I'm in an alternate reality where they were. He said, "Our next single is called Star, and on the B-side, there's this track called Jesus. When you hear that, you'll know what was wrong with the last album. Jesus is dark, fractured, and ragged, but still kind of redemptive, and that's what the last album should have been like."

• 3:05:53Yasi Salek?

  Getting right into the next album, 1997.

• 3:05:55Speaker 04

  This fucking rules. I'm so fight, I'm just so fired up for this.

• 3:05:59Yasi Salek?

  It's so good. It's also, again, it's so interesting, because now they have like, Screamadelica was like, well, you could, you could argue also Velocity Girl, because they kind of accidentally touched on the C86 scene, you know? And then Screamadelica, they were kind of at the exact right place at the right time of like, the peak of sort of the mix of dance and rock, the acid house. Now they just diverge from what's happening in the world of popular music.

• 3:06:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:06:27Yasi Salek?

  Right?

• 3:06:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:06:27Yasi Salek?

  Would you agree?

• 3:06:28Speaker 04

  But when I look back at the big records from 97, they, it fits in.

• 3:06:33Yasi Salek?

  It is OK Computer.

• 3:06:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:06:35Yasi Salek?

  The Prodigy.

• 3:06:36Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:06:36Yasi Salek?

  Fat of the Land, Oasis, Be Here Now, the end of 1997, famously, the, the end of Britpop.

• 3:06:42Speaker 04

  Blur, obviously, pulling the, like, the window shades down and doing soft titles.

• 3:06:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:48Speaker 04

  Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole.

• 3:06:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:51Speaker 04

  Bjork, Homogenic.

• 3:06:52Yasi Salek?

  Great friends of, of the Primals. All right, it's May 5th, 1997. Guess what? Kowalski, boom, bitch, we're back.

• 3:07:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07:02Yasi Salek?

  Rocks never happened.

• 3:07:03Speaker 04

  Feels very much like a... The end, other end of the bookshelf from Loaded. So like Loaded is got like this great sample from a, an exploitation movie of American cinema. And it then turns into this like church service and it's so uplifting. And Kowalski is like, we're going to hell.

• 3:07:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:31Yasi Salek?

  Damn, 1991 to 1997, fucking a lot changed.

• 3:07:35Speaker 04

  What a journey.

• 3:07:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. You're again, a known cinephile. Richard Seraphians, 1971, post Easy Rider road movie Vanishing Point. You've seen it.

• 3:07:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's like a couple of movies right around this, like, kind of this zone, this area code. What like Vanishing Point, Tulane Blacktop, Cisco Pike, which are these nominally B movies, but also like existential dude poems. That have really fun exploitation grindhouse elements, but also are just like Cars Are Cool. And also the American man will only truly discover himself behind the wheel of a car.

• 3:08:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 3:08:16Speaker 04

  And then they just like grab that and put it on top of like one of the most churning, awesome Manny playing like distorted dub tracks.

• 3:08:25Yasi Salek?

  Why can't men be like that again? I don't know if this is sort of a broader question.

• 3:08:29Speaker 04

  I don't know if they would be as emotionally available as they're expected to be anymore, no?

• 3:08:33Yasi Salek?

  They're not. It's also not, if you're already just not gonna do, like, don't just watch it and log it on Letterboxd, babe, live it, bro. You know what I'm saying?

• 3:08:43Speaker 04

  I know what you're saying, okay.

• 3:08:44Yasi Salek?

  Also, if anyone wants to hire me and Chris Ryan to present a, the Cinema of Primal Scream evening, I think that would be very popular. Yeah, this song fucking rips, dude. It's so fucking good. Bobby said, that's why we wrote Kowalski, because the soundtrack we felt didn't suit the feel of the movie. We thought we'd try and make the right music. That was the challenge. Something that captures the feel, the paranoia, the amphetamine, the claustrophobia, the way the guy's focused and locked in. You mentioned Manny and like the incredible bass addition here. This is the only song on this album that he has a writing credit on.

• 3:09:18Speaker 04

  Okay, that's basically his bassline.

• 3:09:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:26Yasi Salek?

  The video of this also, bye.

• 3:09:29Speaker 04

  Just give me the, give me the credits here.

• 3:09:31Yasi Salek?

  Scripted by Irvine Walsh.

• 3:09:32Speaker 04

  Well, how does Irvine Walsh script a music video? It doesn't matter.

• 3:09:34Yasi Salek?

  It doesn't matter. Directed by Douglas Hart, starring Kate Moss and Devon Aoki.

• 3:09:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:09:40Yasi Salek?

  Bye. So sick. And then Kate Moss and Devon Aoki just driving around, beating the shit out of fucking these guys and then killing them in the end.

• 3:09:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:09:49Yasi Salek?

  So good. Things are going well. Kowalski's great. Manny's in the band. They're about to release Star as a second single. Strange second single, but we'll get into that. But then, all their tour dates are postponed and rumors start circulating that people are leaving the band. First they think it's Duffy, then Manny, then Throb. And then Jeff Barrett runs a statement that says, "Primal Scream have been forced to reschedule their forthcoming shows due to health reasons. It's not a drugs thing and it's not a nervous breakdown." Their press officer at the time, Robin Turner, told the NME the cancellation was due to an unspecified member of the band having his hemorrhoids done, and they didn't want their private parts dragged through the public eye.

• 3:10:27Speaker 04

  I feel like respectfully to Robin Turner, I don't know if that's the, the sort of misdirect that you thought it was, like... So now, instead of being like, "These guys are so cool, and they're always on drugs, and they're always having nervous breakdowns," it's like, no, they have hemorrhoids.

• 3:10:42Yasi Salek?

  They have hemorrhoids?

• 3:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:43Yasi Salek?

  From stress. Anyways, they put off the start of the tour to August due to the hemorrhoid surgery. And then they put out Star.

• 3:10:50Speaker 04

  Star's pretty.

• 3:10:51Yasi Salek?

  It's a pretty song, yeah. Let's talk about Vanishing Point.

• 3:10:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:10:54Yasi Salek?

  Let's fucking go.

• 3:10:56Speaker 04

  Another incredible three-track run to start the record. So Burning Wheel is just a really good album starter, sets like the vibe. Also an incredible Manny bassline.

• 3:11:13Yasi Salek?

  And the Chemical Brothers remix of Burning Wheel is...

• 3:11:16Speaker 04

  And then Get Duffy, almost feels like I've heard it a billion times, like in, like it feels very David Holmes soundtrack.

• 3:11:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:25Speaker 04

  It feels like something you would see like in Out of Sight when George Cludt and, you know, Jennifer Lopez. It's just like a quintessentially cool come-down track.

• 3:11:40Speaker 04

  And then Kowalski, and then they just, they do star, which is like, cool. And then they end like with hit after hit after hit. Including a song that basically is a testament to your vision of Give Out But Don't Give Up with Medication.

• 3:11:55Yasi Salek?

  Medication, people say is a weaker track on here, but I quite like it.

• 3:11:58Speaker 04

  But that's what I think you're talking about.

• 3:12:00Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly what it could have been.

• 3:12:02Speaker 04

  A dirty fucked up version of that is Medication.

• 3:12:04Yasi Salek?

  Totally, but within Vanishing Point, it is one of the weaker moments.

• 3:12:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:12:16Speaker 04

  What else do you love on this record?

• 3:12:18Yasi Salek?

  I love Stuka, bye, bye. It's so sad. It's so beautifully self-aware. If you're gonna play with fire, you're gonna get burnt. Some of my friends are gonna die real young.

• 3:12:36Yasi Salek?

  I just love that song. Although I read in an article that Manny said that when he was recording Second Coming, he buried 14 of his friends in one year.

• 3:12:43Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, that's a lot of Trainspotting is about that.

• 3:12:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, from methadone overdoses. I didn't know that methadone had so many overdoses.

• 3:12:50Speaker 04

  Me neither. If They Move, Kill 'Em, incredible.

• 3:12:53Yasi Salek?

  If They Move, Kill 'Em, and then obviously, as a cinephile, you love that that's from The Wild Bunch.

• 3:12:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:12:59Yasi Salek?

  This can be part of our primal scream film festival.

• 3:13:02Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 3:13:02Yasi Salek?

  There's so many.

• 3:13:03Speaker 04

  Wild Bunch and Vanishing Point would be a great night at like the New Beverly. One of my favorite songs on this record that doesn't get enough props is Long Life.

• 3:13:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Long Life is really good because they actually often, in my opinion, have really strong ending tracks because they are kind of come down tracks, but it's a really good song.

• 3:13:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:13:30Yasi Salek?

  I just, it's incredible that this band was like, okay, oh, you didn't like that? Here's this.

• 3:13:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:13:38Yasi Salek?

  Get fucked.

• 3:13:39Speaker 04

  Right. And reclaimed their cool spot. They got their perch back, you know?

• 3:13:45Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:13:45Speaker 04

  Like, everybody is basically like, say, like, they may or may not be big in America ever, or like, set the world on fire again, but this is unimpeachably, like, an incredibly cool band.

• 3:13:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and they're like, it reminds me like, when you like, date a guy, and you change your personality, you're ashamed, and then you break up, and then you're like, full of yourself again, you know? And you're like, I'm me again, bitch, fuck you.

• 3:14:10Speaker 04

  I'm that bitch.

• 3:14:11Yasi Salek?

  I'm that bitch. I feel like Bobby Gillespie was dating Memphis.

• 3:14:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:14:15Yasi Salek?

  And he really just lost his personality there for a second into 1972, and he came right back and he was like, no, I remembered who I was. I'm that bitch. It is interesting because they brought in an American guy to do production on this album.

• 3:14:29Speaker 04

  Brendan Lynch, right?

• 3:14:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, along with Andrew Weatherall.

• 3:14:31Speaker 04

  Sounds good. Sounds great.

• 3:14:32Yasi Salek?

  Did a great job. Fucking knocked it out of the park. Andrew Ines said, "The thing with this album is I call it a drum and bass record, because normally the hardest thing to do is get the drum and bass right, and this time we got it right. So we didn't want our drums and bass taken off the record." I feel like that's, that's pretty on point.

• 3:14:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:14:49Yasi Salek?

  And the vibes were good. They had their own studio.

• 3:14:51Speaker 04

  I guess I just would reiterate how mind blowing it was to have this, the reference points, but the, and the iconography and the mythology of this record, and to be confronted with that, because it's like, at this moment, I was also getting into like, the other Alex Cox movies besides Repo Man, and watching lots of different stuff, and to have, and you're first starting to go to like, the cool art house video stores that have videos that don't have their covers anymore, or the cover's been Xerox, because it's kind of a bootleg copy of Vanishing Point, or a bootleg copy of Tulane Blacktop, but like, the guy behind the counter is like, you should check this out. And that feeling of discovery, but also having this band make a soundtrack to an imaginary movie in their head of the

• 3:15:35Speaker 04

  cool movies that they like. So awesome. Made you all feel this way once.

• 3:15:41Yasi Salek?

  How did you find this album? It was just because you found-

• 3:15:44Speaker 04

  I think I was starting to read music press at this time.

• 3:15:45Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 3:15:46Speaker 04

  By 97, I'd started to read Spin pretty religiously, but also NME and Melody Maker. I would drive- When I was still in Philly, I would drive to the Rosemont Borders books.

• 3:15:56Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 3:15:57Speaker 04

  And I would get Melody Maker and NME and go up to the cafe, so I didn't have to pay for them.

• 3:16:01Yasi Salek?

  You guys don't remember what it used to be.

• 3:16:03Speaker 04

  And I would bring a notebook to write down the records that got good reviews, and then I would go to Repo Records next door, thus saving the money on foreign newspapers-

• 3:16:12Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 3:16:12Speaker 04

  -to pay for foreign CDs.

• 3:16:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:15Speaker 04

  That's tariffs. That's how we built this country.

• 3:16:18Yasi Salek?

  So-

• 3:16:19Speaker 04

  It's girl math.

• 3:16:19Yasi Salek?

  That's girl math, babe.

• 3:16:21Speaker 04

  I actually still have $9, because I didn't buy NME and Melody-

• 3:16:25Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 3:16:26Speaker 04

  And then I would just write down every record Bobby Gillespie mentioned.

• 3:16:29Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:16:30Speaker 04

  And try and find it.

• 3:16:31Yasi Salek?

  This was the- this was literally the way you found music. I mean, I've said it on this podcast a million times, like, every album I found at 12 years old came from one book called Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana by Gina Arnold. Because she just said them. I wrote them on a piece of paper, and I would save my money and go to the record store and buy them.

• 3:16:50Speaker 04

  Do you have this?

• 3:16:51Yasi Salek?

  Do you have this?

• 3:16:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:16:52Yasi Salek?

  That was 12 years old. They're like, "You want a Replacements album?" And I was like, "Yes, do you have Feelies?" They'd be like, "Yeah."

• 3:16:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:16:58Yasi Salek?

  Actually, Feelies was a tape in the 99s, I'm been-

• 3:17:00Speaker 04

  I started making a playlist on the Spotify streaming music platform-

• 3:17:04Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 3:17:05Speaker 04

  That basically was all the bands that I feel like they were talking about around the time of this album and the next album.

• 3:17:12Yasi Salek?

  You mean, like, in press and stuff?

• 3:17:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:17:14Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 3:17:14Speaker 04

  Silver Apples, The Sonics, Bomb the Bass, Suicide, The Gun Club, The Upsetters, A Certain Ratio, The Pop Group-

• 3:17:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:24Speaker 04

  The Mekons. Like, it's- you could do a lot worse than just listening to those bands.

• 3:17:30Yasi Salek?

  Actually, it's very interesting, because early on, and I never mentioned this, Suicide is such a good- Input to talk about.

• 3:17:38Speaker 04

  It's kind of, it's kind of the cheat code.

• 3:17:40Yasi Salek?

  I know, it's kind of the cheat code. And Bobby Gillespie saw them open for The Clash and they, it was like mind blown.

• 3:17:47Speaker 04

  I'm taking that whole fucking thing.

• 3:17:48Yasi Salek?

  What you're doing here, I'm just putting right here for later. But it's really, and the pop group, like so cool and a certain ratio I've never been able to actually get into, but.

• 3:17:59Speaker 04

  I think they're an okay thing. Like for me, it's like track by track.

• 3:18:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. But like, people have a lot of respect for them.

• 3:18:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:18:04Yasi Salek?

  Except for the film 24 Hour Party People, which shits on them.

• 3:18:08Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 3:18:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:09Speaker 04

  I forgot about that. In any case, I think I, I think I was reminded of that. But yeah, like that's how you like build a musical education in 1997.

• 3:18:18Yasi Salek?

  Bobby said about this, I think this album is better than Screamadelica, much better. I love Screamadelica, but I think Vanishing Point is a pure primal scream album.

• 3:18:26Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 3:18:26Yasi Salek?

  We really, truly found our voice.

• 3:18:28Speaker 04

  I listened to Vanishing Point way more than Screamadelica.

• 3:18:30Yasi Salek?

  Vanishing Point might, it might be my favorite.

• 3:18:33Speaker 04

  I think it's my second favorite.

• 3:18:34Yasi Salek?

  After Exterminator. Exterminator is just like, it's so good, but sometimes it's a bit of a tough hang for me.

• 3:18:39Speaker 04

  It's got out of its mind. I mean, whether, whether it went into the recording of the record, it does feel like there are bugs in your skin when you're listening to that record.

• 3:18:47Yasi Salek?

  I don't even, it's like messed up. Like, it's like so harsh. Here's something that Bobby said about it that I was just like, this is kind of what I was getting at about the 90s and I want to hear what you think. So he said, Vanishing Point is like a junkyard breaking down. It's punk rock for 1997. I think songs on Vanishing Point are about life in Britain at the end of the 90s in much the same way as Metalbox, the Public Image Limited album, caught the mood of the country at the end of the 70s. That damp, dark, alienated feeling. To put an even finer point on this, this is what this other writer said. For the first time since Screamadelica, the band were reflecting on the spirit of the age. But while the beautified grooves of Screamadelica had reflected the loved up hedonism of those ecstasy years,

• 3:19:29Yasi Salek?

  Vanishing Point was indicative of life on the brink of the millennium, strung out, paranoid, alienated. It was the stark come down of the Screamadelica generation.

• 3:19:39Speaker 04

  This is one of the coolest things to watch happen in music is how different albums and sometimes by the same artists can reflect these moments, like within like the flowering of the hippie generation to the come down after like Altamont from this going like from ecstasy and then the exporting of like rural Britannia, Britpop to

• 3:20:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:02Speaker 04

  Okay, now we have a lot of friends dead.

• 3:20:05Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:20:06Speaker 04

  And we're gonna make music about like the millennium ending and feeling like we're like worse than we ever were.

• 3:20:10Yasi Salek?

  It's also really crazy because it's almost like a bit, they spoke a bit too soon because it's like, oh, wait till you hear Exterminator because that's the real end of this shit, you know?

• 3:20:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:20:19Yasi Salek?

  But I just, I really like, that blew me away, the like, that you could be there for the beginning of it and, and capture it so beautifully and then also capture, god, it's almost, again, another microcosm for a trip, right? Like, it was so beautiful on the come up and now it's the come down.

• 3:20:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:20:38Yasi Salek?

  It's good. Hit number two on the UK album charts. They're back, babe. Fourth best album of 1997, according to NME.

• 3:20:45Speaker 04

  And people really, like, the critics generally really liked it, right?

• 3:20:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Nine out of 10 NME, Entertainment Weekly given A, a lot of the British press. Robert Criscow, who before this was like primal scream, who cares?

• 3:20:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:20:59Yasi Salek?

  Screaming Elka, leave it at home. He was like, as someone who saw the title film stoned in 1971 and loved it, I agree that this is one of the few putatively psychedelic albums ever to evoke the distractable ecstasy of actual psychedelic experience, flitting from detail to fascinating, ultimately meaningless detail. Crucially, the moods in reference that flash past are anchored by tunes and sounds so simple a zonked zombie can relate to them. But as someone not altogether dismissive of the co-feature Panic in Needle Park, Charles Theatre on Avenue B, you could look it up.

• 3:21:30Speaker 04

  Humble brag.

• 3:21:32Yasi Salek?

  I must also note that pace the highly opposite stones rip that takes the trip back to earth. Medication has never killed a hole that didn't come back gaping the next morning. A corny truth that renders this an achievement best admired from a sane distance. B+.

• 3:21:46Speaker 04

  Bob, the dean, keeping it at arm's length, you know? Can't feel it entirely, but still likes it.

• 3:21:52Yasi Salek?

  No, yeah, I mean, he did often have trouble with things that got too weird.

• 3:21:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:21:56Yasi Salek?

  But he got it a little bit here. Also, you got motherfucking Augustus Pablo on here. I mean, it might not be the strongest fucking Again, I think it is interesting because-

• 3:22:06Speaker 04

  Just look at all the names that you mentioned on, in your doc of people who are either contributing to-

• 3:22:12Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:22:12Speaker 04

  They are covering, they're pulling into it. Augustus Pablo, Glenn Matlock, Manny, Sam Peckinpah, Lee Perry, King Tubby, Devin Aoki.

• 3:22:25Yasi Salek?

  Fucking Devin Aoki. I like "Star" for one reason. I actually do think it's a pretty song, but also it's the last bit before we do "Kill the Hippie Within," right? This is a hippie. For apple screen, we're kinda hippies, you know, like you love the 13th floor fucking elevators, you know? Like you were taking acid and saying, "Come together," and like the hymn of the gospel of the truth of drugs. And then now we're killing all hippies, you know? But this was the last bit of it.

• 3:22:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:22:52Yasi Salek?

  That was living and breathing. We lose it. We lose it forever.

• 3:23:05Yasi Salek?

  I did just wanna point out one thing where Americans just truly do seem to get it wrong at each turn. Rolling Stone called this "the odle of its time." Do you agree, Chris Ryan, that this is-

• 3:23:17Speaker 04

  I get what they're doing.

• 3:23:18Yasi Salek?

  That scremadelica was the odle of its time?

• 3:23:19Speaker 04

  I get it. I get their point.

• 3:23:20Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 3:23:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:23:22Yasi Salek?

  No. Respectfully to Beck. Just cuz you got the Dust Brothers to some stuff on here.

• 3:23:30Yasi Salek?

  It's not, you did not make scremadelica.

• 3:23:36Speaker 05

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the-

• 3:23:40Speaker 05

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 3:24:07Yasi Salek?

  Okay, we're flying high.

• 3:24:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:24:10Yasi Salek?

  Things are great. We're back, bitch. The drummer leaves. It's fine. They use a drum machine.

• 3:24:15Speaker 04

  My guy Darren Mooney joins.

• 3:24:17Yasi Salek?

  Your guy Darren Mooney joins, but not for a while. For several months, they use a drum machine.

• 3:24:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:24:22Yasi Salek?

  And on the first night of their tour in Glasgow, a man jabs at least 14 audience members with a hypodermic needle.

• 3:24:29Speaker 04

  Keeping it dangerous.

• 3:24:30Yasi Salek?

  Keeping it Primal Scream. Here's where Chris Ryan's about to really come alive, you guys. It's February of 1998, and they released the single of If They Move, Kill 'Em.

• 3:24:41Speaker 04

  And they could have taken a break. They could have been like, you know what? We made our statement. We're gonna take our foot off the gas. Instead, they put out the best piece of music ever made, which is the Kevin Shields, "My Bloody Valentine Orchestra" remix of If They Move, Kill 'Em, which I defy you to name a better piece of music. You can't. You can't.

• 3:25:00Yasi Salek?

  Have you heard...

• 3:25:01Speaker 04

  You're gonna say "Piano Concerto" by Mozart?

• 3:25:03Yasi Salek?

  Have you heard "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls?

• 3:25:06Speaker 04

  This is a fucking face-melting piece of music. And it's so fucking cool.

• 3:25:12Yasi Salek?

  Did you... Did Phoebe allow you to play this at your wedding?

• 3:25:14Speaker 04

  No.

• 3:25:16Yasi Salek?

  This is what you walk down the aisle to?

• 3:25:17Speaker 04

  Civil tear. Just Beverly Hills Courthouse. We did not put "If They Move, Kill 'Em" on. Protect the judges.

• 3:25:26Yasi Salek?

  It is absolutely incredible that this even exists.

• 3:25:28Speaker 04

  You can listen to it like, once every two years, because it's too intense.

• 3:25:31Yasi Salek?

  It is. It's really too intense. Kevin Shields, man. That man needs to be studied for science.

• 3:25:37Speaker 04

  This guy was like, in the fucking cabin. Like, no one knew what happened to this dude.

• 3:25:40Yasi Salek?

  Full Unabomber.

• 3:25:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I... He may have just been like, at a bookstore, but like, it was... He was gone. He was off the map. And the last we had heard...

• 3:25:48Yasi Salek?

  He was like, "I'm bankrupt, dude, creation. Bye. I gotta go."

• 3:25:52Speaker 04

  He fucking was made loveless, and it's like, this is gorgeous. This is shoegaze, in a nutshell. And then he comes back out of... Off the bench to just be like, "I can mix the JB's with Goldie, with John Cage, with Primal Scream, with Ken, with like, a dance floor anthem."

• 3:26:12Yasi Salek?

  I've never heard such a thing in my life.

• 3:26:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:26:14Yasi Salek?

  It's really... It's really nuts.

• 3:26:25Yasi Salek?

  You say you're gonna listen to it two times a year, is that what you said?

• 3:26:27Speaker 04

  I just don't like, it's not like I'm like, taking a walk and I'm like, oh, I could listen to the Bill Simmons podcast.

• 3:26:32Yasi Salek?

  I'm thinking-

• 3:26:32Speaker 04

  Or if they move to-

• 3:26:33Yasi Salek?

  In your Viori pants that are very comfortable for walks. Um, I think back to during my days that, dad earmuffs, that I was partial to doing a lot of ecstasy myself.

• 3:26:44Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:26:44Yasi Salek?

  I did put this on quite a bit.

• 3:26:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I listened to Spiritualized a lot when I would do it.

• 3:26:50Yasi Salek?

  It's great, it's just a great, it's a great tune for that kind of jam. But yeah, Kevin, again, Kevin, they don't make, they don't make them like that anymore, or ever.

• 3:26:59Speaker 04

  I would, I would honestly have quit music if I had heard this. If I was like, an aspiring musician and this came out, I would just be like, fuck it, I'm not, I'm not ready for primetime.

• 3:27:06Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if this was primetime, there was only a play that I don't know, the radio.

• 3:27:09Speaker 04

  This is also like, I think I spent like, 1999, you get this EP in a thin case, you know?

• 3:27:15Yasi Salek?

  But it is very like, 1998, like, people were into getting weird.

• 3:27:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:27:19Yasi Salek?

  Like, it's prime getting weird hours.

• 3:27:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:27:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:22Speaker 04

  The culture had met primal scream at their, all these genres talk to each other moment.

• 3:27:26Yasi Salek?

  And again, I can't overstate, OK Computer was a big deal. 1997's OK Computer did change also the way like, even normal swabs of people, I think, interacted with music and, you know-

• 3:27:39Speaker 04

  Put our heads inside of the fishbowl.

• 3:27:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Alright, they close the chapter on Vanishing Point, July 1998. The Jesus and Mary Chain support at this show at the Glasgow Barrow Lounge. Fucking Kevin Shields is playing a noise guitar for 20 minute version of Loaded. This is probably the best night of Bobby Glaspys' life.

• 3:27:58Speaker 04

  This, this show?

• 3:27:59Yasi Salek?

  I'm just saying, you know, it all clicked. You put out this fucking killer album, you got fucking Kevin Shields on stage playing a 20 minute version of your first hit single. You're wearing your fucking best silver shirt, you have your maracas.

• 3:28:12Speaker 04

  It's unbelievable.

• 3:28:13Yasi Salek?

  Did you see the Monstery, did you see them?

• 3:28:15Speaker 04

  I didn't see them until 2000.

• 3:28:17Yasi Salek?

  So, in 2000, which is, you know, the turn of the millennium. Y2K.

• 3:28:26Yasi Salek?

  Things happen, things change, but not in primal scream land.

• 3:28:30Speaker 04

  They just get fucking angrier and better.

• 3:28:32Yasi Salek?

  Yep. And they put out January 31st, the top of the year. Y2K plus 31 days exterminator with no vowels.

• 3:28:43Speaker 04

  This was a record that it existed in my head before I heard it. Like all the shit that's on this record. Peter Hook basslines and noise guitar and Chemical Brothers techno beats and Royal Trucks and MC5 and Dub and also like crazy sloganeering. That's like basically like Nation of Ulysses or something. I was like, this is the fucking music that's in my head that I can't get out. And then they made that record like when I first heard Accelerator, obviously it's just a Royal Trucks repuff, but it's fucking incredible. When I first heard Shoot Speed Kill Light, I was like, I can't believe. You literally hear it and you're like, I feel like I'm trying to touch God here.

• 3:29:24Yasi Salek?

  I think I literally wrote that. I wrote, this is me spinning in the field, babe. This is the good kind of drugs. This is me talking to God.

• 3:29:33Yasi Salek?

  That's a song that was on a lot of Max's playlist.

• 3:29:44Speaker 04

  It's like everything from the top to the bottom, from the color palette of the album cover and like the military, like the flight helmets and the military font. It feels like steel and blood. And then that's what the record sounds like. It just feels like you're, you're having a bloody nose after doing cocaine for three days. It is unbelievable.

• 3:30:05Yasi Salek?

  It feels strangely like, just like so early for what it was and kind of.

• 3:30:13Speaker 04

  It was like the big bang destroyed the universe. Like nothing ever came out after this where I was like, oh yeah, that sounds a lot like Exterminator.

• 3:30:20Yasi Salek?

  No, no. But I do feel there were like things where you were like, oh, and then Dan the Automator went into the gorillas. You know what I mean? There's like little like offshoots where you were like. But this was the fucking thing, you know? I wrote, "This is my Avengers endgame." Where I don't know what that means, but it feels right.

• 3:30:37Speaker 04

  The union of all your heroes.

• 3:30:38Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly. So this is the first album where Manny has credit on all the songs. Manny's put in, babe, he's put in, he's put in the game.

• 3:30:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:30:45Yasi Salek?

  Kevin Shields is now a semi-permanent member of Primal Scream. Whatever the fuck that means. He's like, "Oh, My Blood and Valentine? I don't do that anymore. I'm busy being a semi-permanent member of Primal Scream."

• 3:30:57Speaker 04

  That's like when Grohl was gonna join Tom Petty. Remember?

• 3:31:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, very similar.

• 3:31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:31:03Yasi Salek?

  Super similar. Known genius, Dave Grohl. Then they're like, "Oh, the Chemical Brothers are up in here." Bernard Sumner, we got him to fucking play on a song because we love Joy Division. Dan the Automator, again, who I'm such a big fan of. I don't know what exactly he did. I just know he put his sauce on a couple of these songs.

• 3:31:22Speaker 04

  I'm sure he did.

• 3:31:22Yasi Salek?

  He's like a record, he's, he's a mixing engineer on two of the songs. But you know Dan the Automator. He's incredible, he's incredible, he's a genius. It is interesting to know Andrew Weatherall here.

• 3:31:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:31:34Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 3:31:35Speaker 04

  He's there in spirit.

• 3:31:35Yasi Salek?

  He's there in spirit, for sure. Like, the DNA that he helped create for this band.

• 3:31:40Speaker 04

  I don't think there are any bad songs on this record.

• 3:31:42Yasi Salek?

  No. Someone in an interview, I think, brought up Radiohead and Bobby got really mad. And he said, "This isn't some fucking art wank. It's music for the people."

• 3:31:50Speaker 04

  So I talked to them right around when this came out, because it's Spin's website. We were doing our own top 20 list and we made this number two, I think.

• 3:31:58Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:31:59Speaker 04

  Behind Stan Conia.

• 3:32:00Yasi Salek?

  Do we need to read that? Should we read it?

• 3:32:01Speaker 04

  You don't need to read it, but I remember asking them, basically, about like, what was going into this record. I can't remember like, what my question was, but Bobby like, sort of politely, but also like, pointedly disagreed with me and was just like, "This record is about dancing. The point of this record is to get people to get up and dance. And if we do that, then that's enough." Because I think I was like, "Is it an angry record? Is it a rebellion record or whatever?" And they're like, "It's a dance record."

• 3:32:25Yasi Salek?

  They lied to you?

• 3:32:26Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:32:28Yasi Salek?

  Well, I mean, maybe they didn't lie, but they said a bunch of different things other times.

• 3:32:33Speaker 04

  Are you telling me they weren't consistent in their messaging?

• 3:32:36Yasi Salek?

  Just, just saying that maybe not-

• 3:32:39Speaker 04

  It's not some fucking art wake.

• 3:32:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he was, well, he also called it a rebel record. Here's a tid from the profile and select that they did around the album release. Bobby Gillespie enters the room newly clad in a vintage Russian army uniform given to him by the cult's Ian Asbury, complete with commie insignia and knee-length boots. And he goes, "There's only two good armies, the Red Army and Wehrmacht. They fought for an ideology. The Americans just fight for multinational corporations because they're told to." Gillespie calls exterminator a rebel record. The fact that he showed up to the fucking interview wearing a full Russian army uniform with knee-high boots.

• 3:33:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and shouting out the Wehrmacht.

• 3:33:23Yasi Salek?

  "We wanted it to sound like what it's like to live in Britain at this point. It's a more violent, desperate place now. We're at a point where there's no real left-wing opposition. Working class is being shadowed all the time, you know?" I guess it's probably helpful to point out, which we've talked about in several other episodes in this very long and unending UK season, the whole Tony Blair thing. Right? Where it's like, you defeat Thatcherism, then you're like, no, we're gonna, we got the good one, you know? Noel Gallagher was a 10 Downing. We've, we love Tony Blair.

• 3:33:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, this guy's cool, yeah.

• 3:33:56Yasi Salek?

  And then he just turned around and was a fucking asshole and shit on the working class just like everybody else and, you know, destroyed the dreams. And the mood is bad. The vibes are bad.

• 3:34:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:34:07Yasi Salek?

  And I, and this, I feel like, is the world into which this album is coming.

• 3:34:13Speaker 04

  Yes, and the increasing creeping specter of like the digitization of our lives.

• 3:34:18Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:34:19Speaker 04

  Which we don't quite have like in our hands yet, like as like I'm constantly on my phone. But you are expected to be in front of a computer most of your life.

• 3:34:28Yasi Salek?

  Your review of this album has your email address attached to it.

• 3:34:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:34:32Yasi Salek?

  You know, it feels like another reason this album is so vital. I think you used that word actually in your piece. It's almost like Bobby Gillespie like hit that point of his life where like his true self was almost reawakened, which is who he's been since day one, which is a political person.

• 3:34:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:34:56Yasi Salek?

  Who really cares about this kind of stuff, you know?

• 3:34:59Speaker 04

  Maybe that was part of the problem with Give Out is that they didn't, almost didn't know how to interface with like, quote unquote, good times.

• 3:35:05Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, it's, it's also cosplay, you know, like you are a rocker, but you're not a Memphis guy. You know, you're a Scottish guy, like you're a guy raised by socialist, you know? I don't know. It's like really coming into his own here in a way that you can feel it.

• 3:35:24Speaker 04

  Well, their influences are so disparate and their skillset and their talent is not specifically songwriting.

• 3:35:32Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 3:35:33Speaker 04

  Noel Gallagher like heard John Lennon and was like, that's it. That is the only music I ever need to hear.

• 3:35:38Yasi Salek?

  Right. God whispered in his ear and he wrote Supersonic.

• 3:35:41Speaker 04

  Here's some other stuff, but for the most part.

• 3:35:43Yasi Salek?

  He actually loved Kris Kristoff or something.

• 3:35:45Speaker 04

  I'm sure he has a variety of interests, but like, it seems to me like what he's really good at is writing chord progressions and then having his brothers sing pretty good words. And Bobby Gillespie's not that. He's like a DJ more than he is an artist.

• 3:36:01Yasi Salek?

  A conductor.

• 3:36:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:36:03Yasi Salek?

  Like a conductor, a collageist, a, yeah, he's a collaborator, an incredible collaborator.

• 3:36:10Speaker 04

  Yes. As this, as the lineup for this. And also like, you have to imagine, if you're Kevin Shields, like you'd have to really like the way a band works to join another band. If you're in My Bloody Valentine and you're like five mil in the hole on the next record.

• 3:36:24Yasi Salek?

  Do you think Kevin Shields was also, well, A, yeah, maybe not wanting to deal with his real life problems, but maybe seeking like something harder?

• 3:36:32Speaker 04

  Well, I went to the Exterminator show. I think I'm still living in Boston, so I drove down. I remember going to the show in May of 2000. One of the loudest shows I've ever seen in my life. He was on stage, but I also think this particular set of songs must have been so fucking fun.

• 3:36:51Yasi Salek?

  That's what I'm thinking, like it's so like after Loveless.

• 3:36:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:36:55Yasi Salek?

  You know, which Incredible Beautiful Perfect. Seminal album, but like you must have just been like, let me just fuck.

• 3:37:02Speaker 04

  It's cool to play Swastikas.

• 3:37:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Extremator is really my jam, I have to say. That's my, that's my fucking song.

• 3:37:08Speaker 04

  I think that the ecstasy, the highest high of this record, even though it is essentially like an homage to another band is Accelerator.

• 3:37:16Yasi Salek?

  Railtrucks is so good.

• 3:37:17Speaker 04

  Like the overdrive that they hit towards the end of that song is like, if you, if you want to give yourself hearing damage, like listen to it as loud as possible.

• 3:37:33Yasi Salek?

  Incredible opener, Kill All Hippies. All the samples on this song are from Out of the Blue, the Dennis Hopper, in 1988 Dennis Hopper film. Linda Mans, who plays Gorgeous.

• 3:37:52Yasi Salek?

  And Out of the Blue, I didn't know this was taken from the Neil Young song.

• 3:37:55Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 3:37:56Yasi Salek?

  Hey.

• 3:37:57Speaker 04

  Out of the Blue into the Black.

• 3:37:58Yasi Salek?

  Swastikas.

• 3:37:59Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:38:00Yasi Salek?

  It's about American international terrorism.

• 3:38:05Speaker 04

  The Chemical Brothers beat on this, on the remix, goes so incredibly hard, but is also, it's like that, that way that they push it past being like danceable, like I don't really know how you would dance to this unless you were a cartoon character running a million miles per hour.

• 3:38:20Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:38:20Speaker 04

  You know? And it's like, kind of like that, it's supposed to make you anxious as much as it's supposed to make you move.

• 3:38:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he was like, it's a disco song, it's quite jolly, people could dance to it. I'm like, this isn't pulp, babe.

• 3:38:31Speaker 04

  Pitch it down, bro.

• 3:38:31Yasi Salek?

  This isn't, this isn't, you know, it's very funny.

• 3:38:41Yasi Salek?

  Okay, what about Pills, babe? We're rapping.

• 3:38:43Speaker 04

  I know.

• 3:38:43Yasi Salek?

  Were you expecting that?

• 3:38:45Speaker 04

  I just thought, like, Pills is actually like the tune to me.

• 3:38:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:49Speaker 04

  Like, it's like a beautiful song.

• 3:38:51Yasi Salek?

  It's a, uh, Bob, just ending with fuck, fuck sake, fuck, fuck sake, fuck, fuck sake is so sick.

• 3:38:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:39:05Yasi Salek?

  Bobby said it's about a guy cracking up. It's a hangover song. He's got a fractured head. He's schizophrenic. I walked into the studio feeling fucked up from the night before and just started singing and that's what came out. It's like a self-hate song, but it's a quite funny song, really.

• 3:39:18Speaker 04

  It's hooky, though.

• 3:39:19Yasi Salek?

  It's totally hooky.

• 3:39:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:39:20Yasi Salek?

  He's not a bad rapper.

• 3:39:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:39:22Yasi Salek?

  Or, you know, whatever it is he's doing, vocal spoken wording or whatever. I just really love the way he says prostitute on, on Exterminator. It's very good.

• 3:39:40Yasi Salek?

  Blood Money is an instrumental which Adrian Sherwood worked on. We forgot to mention Adrian Sherwood worked on this album.

• 3:39:45Speaker 04

  Dope, dope song, too.

• 3:39:47Yasi Salek?

  Keep Your Dreams. Can I just say, there's something about that twinkly, pinging, tinkle minkle that makes up the song that is just so the year 2000 to me. I just hear the, it's just that year. Do you, you know what I'm saying?

• 3:40:02Speaker 04

  Of course, yeah.

• 3:40:02Yasi Salek?

  It's like, I don't want to say postal service-y, but like, there's something of that that like feels very of that exact time.

• 3:40:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:40:17Yasi Salek?

  Bobby said it's a love song, not towards any particular person. It's important to be a dreamer. I'm a dreamer. Working class people are just discarded, really, as human beings. Basically, this whole song is an anti-heroin song, but it takes him a second in this interview to get to it because he doesn't want to say I'm anti-drugs. He finally says, "I'm not lecturing anybody. We're just singing about what we see. Nobody talks about it because they think it's uncool, but when you see some of your best mates destroyed or sectioned by 10 years of hardcore heroin abuse, it's not fucking." Funny. Don't say it's a primal scream anti-drugs interview because it is nay.

• 3:40:57Yasi Salek?

  That's what he said. Simply quoting the man. And he said, what can I do? It's just a stage that people go through and they come out of it. I'm not saying don't take drugs for fuck's sake. Do what you fucking like. I'm a libertarian. I'm just saying it's like, I'm a drug addict. I've had psychosis from extreme drug addiction. I'm not preaching. You've got to understand that.

• 3:41:13Speaker 04

  It's also like, they're still young enough to have the swagger, but old enough to have the perspective.

• 3:41:19Yasi Salek?

  They're not that young.

• 3:41:21Speaker 04

  They feel young.

• 3:41:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:22Speaker 04

  Are they in their 40s?

• 3:41:23Yasi Salek?

  I think so.

• 3:41:24Speaker 04

  So they still go out.

• 3:41:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Yeah. Not I.

• 3:41:29Yasi Salek?

  Not me being probably around the same age as Bobby Gillespie is during this time.

• 3:41:31Speaker 04

  Bobby Gillespie now have your kind of like, I like to get up at five in the morning and journal and like, meditate and take a strenuous walk?

• 3:41:40Yasi Salek?

  Maybe. I mean, he's probably 60. He says, should I be proud that I have the same lifestyle as a six-year-old Scottish man?

• 3:41:47Speaker 04

  Who's rewired his brain chemistry eight times.

• 3:41:50Yasi Salek?

  He probably knows, he's probably still at the pub right now, having a fucking pint. It's just non-stop. This pummels you. And then ends with a cover of I'm Five Years Out of My Time by the 60s GarageBand, Third Bardot.

• 3:42:01Speaker 04

  Kind of an awesome like mixtape style sequencing where it's like, we end with a cover, there's like three remixes. Bobby's not on a couple of songs, you know?

• 3:42:12Speaker 04

  I don't know if we ever said like by this point, like Throb's not in the band anymore, really.

• 3:42:16Yasi Salek?

  Okay, yeah. So what I forgot to, I'm sorry, I forgot to say it. Throb is technically involved in Vanishing Point, but according to Bobby, he was like completely absent. Like he just wasn't there. He got pretty tied up in his, you know, proclivities.

• 3:42:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:42:33Yasi Salek?

  With drugs and, and stuff. Also, Inez is very much involved, but refused to be in any photos or do any interviews for like years.

• 3:42:42Speaker 04

  Respect.

• 3:42:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was Bobby and Manny were like basically the faces of the band.

• 3:42:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Here's actually Gillespie listening.

• 3:42:49Yasi Salek?

  The influences on the new album are Joy Division, late 60s, early 70s period, James Brown and Miles Davis from the same time. 13th Floor Elevators, Moby Grape, Alexander Skip Spence, Screaming Trees, Fred Sonic Smith, Royal Trucks, I See a Darkness by Bonnie Prince Billy.

• 3:43:06Speaker 04

  Shout out.

• 3:43:07Yasi Salek?

  I just got the new makeup album today, you mentioned Nation of Ulysses, and I love that.

• 3:43:12Speaker 04

  That's Ian, Sabonis.

• 3:43:13Yasi Salek?

  It's just so emotional. Besides that, I don't hear anything new that I like. I can't say much about us being an influence, maybe on Death in Vegas and the Chemical Brothers. I don't know.

• 3:43:23Speaker 04

  I think he sings on a Death in Vegas song, right around then.

• 3:43:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds right.

• 3:43:28Speaker 04

  They had one album that I was obsessed with.

• 3:43:29Yasi Salek?

  Really? Because they were influenced by promiscuity.

• 3:43:31Speaker 04

  And Beth Givens was on it, too. But two of my faves.

• 3:43:34Yasi Salek?

  When was the last time rock music was exciting, they ask Bobby Gillespie? He says, for me, The Jesus and Mary Chain.

• 3:43:41Speaker 04

  That's kind of a stock answer for him.

• 3:43:42Yasi Salek?

  But it's so sweet.

• 3:43:43Speaker 04

  It's his homies, yeah.

• 3:43:44Yasi Salek?

  I think he kind of means it. I think that time started and stopped for him with The Jesus and Mary Chain. But then he goes, I know it sounds obvious, but they were one of the last great rock and roll bands. Nirvana, too. I loved Kurt Cobain. I had a lot of interest in that guy. I think rock and roll has disappeared from the world since he died, in the same way that jazz disappeared from the world when Miles Davis and John Coltrane died. You know what? Me, too, Bobby Gillespie. I'm right there with you, babe.

• 3:44:08Speaker 04

  Right around this time, or a year or two after, I think, when I was first writing pieces in New York, I did a piece about DFA for Time Out magazine. And I'm like, basically Miss Moran, I can't remember exactly the quote, so I don't want to be too prescriptive, but if I remember correctly, Tim Goldsworthy was kind of like, eye roll about this.

• 3:44:29Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 3:44:30Speaker 04

  I do think it had its detractors from the uber, uber cool, like, I've moved past your influences to cooler influences, or you guys are cosplaying as Red Army colonels who listen to Bonnie Prince Billy.

• 3:44:45Yasi Salek?

  Right, okay, fair.

• 3:44:46Speaker 04

  I just thought I would throw that out there.

• 3:44:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 3:44:48Speaker 04

  And Tim Goldsworthy, if I misquote you, I'm sorry. He also did a remix for them, so. The DFA remix Blood Money.

• 3:44:55Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I guess like if I was in DFA and these like 40 year olds came out with their like knee high boots, you know, maybe I would also be like,

• 3:45:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:45:05Yasi Salek?

  Whatever.

• 3:45:05Speaker 04

  Take it down a thousand.

• 3:45:06Yasi Salek?

  It's so good. So this is the final ever album put out by Creation Records. Which,

• 3:45:12Speaker 04

  Fitting.

• 3:45:13Yasi Salek?

  Fitting and also fucked up for Primal Scream because in the sense that like it was literally the last album, like the office was shut down like a week after it came out. There was no marketing team. There was no press team. No one was supporting it. And Bobby was like, I made my best fucking record and they shut the fucking office down.

• 3:45:32Speaker 04

  I tried to pitch this around town, both as like something to write about, but also as like just to friends. And they were just like, dude, like, I can't even, like, either I can't find this record or nobody is like,

• 3:45:42Yasi Salek?

  They really,

• 3:45:43Speaker 04

  I never got like a press release about this record.

• 3:45:45Yasi Salek?

  They got fucked.

• 3:45:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:45:45Yasi Salek?

  And Bobby talks about it in the Creation Records documentary and he's like, we just got totally fucking shocked. Like, I really, I did my best work. And it was just like, office's lights are off. I mean, it's fitting and poetic that it was the last and Bobby Gillespie obviously is, you know, in many ways, a huge cornerstone of Creation Records. But like, what a bummer. It peaked at number three on the UK albums chart. But yeah, it might've been able to do more, although I don't know in what sense. It's not like it would have been like, okay, computer.

• 3:46:14Speaker 04

  There's no boogeyman on this. You know what I mean?

• 3:46:15Yasi Salek?

  Not computer, it's Kid A breaking through in America.

• 3:46:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:46:18Yasi Salek?

  They're playing, you know. And then, because this is not going to be a 700 hour long podcast, we'll just touch on what comes after, which they put out Evil Heat two years later.

• 3:46:32Speaker 04

  Why isn't this on streaming?

• 3:46:33Yasi Salek?

  It might be because Creation ceased to exist and so it's like lost in like Columbia and Epic.

• 3:46:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:46:40Yasi Salek?

  So maybe it's lost in some like sea of ownership and red tape. I have no idea. Then, because the next album is also largely missing from,

• 3:46:48Speaker 04

  Is that Riot City Blues?

• 3:46:49Yasi Salek?

  That is Riot City Blues. Yeah. I really don't know why. It's on YouTube. I listened on the way over here just to like refresh and I was like, it's like if Vanishing Point in exter- Terminator, but like, again, going through a little bit of emotions. It's not bad.

• 3:47:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think it's hard to make two records that are about the world ending and then the world doesn't end. And you're like, here's a third record.

• 3:47:12Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:47:13Speaker 04

  That's also suggesting the world might end, but perhaps is aware that it isn't. Like, there's like a step down in urgency and energy in it. There's some good songs on it, though.

• 3:47:21Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Detroit, I think, is a song that I like. A couple of good songs on here.

• 3:47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Miss Lucifer.

• 3:47:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:28Speaker 04

  I like Autobahn a lot.

• 3:47:29Yasi Salek?

  Autobahn is really good.

• 3:47:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:47:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I liked Autobahn a lot, too.

• 3:47:39Yasi Salek?

  This is the first place Kate Moss sang professionally.

• 3:47:44Yasi Salek?

  Shout out. Sing professionally on the Some Velvet Morning cover.

• 3:47:55Yasi Salek?

  Can't you just be happy to be one of the most beautiful women that's ever existed?

• 3:48:01Speaker 04

  I think she's just starting to live her life. It's cool that she's like on a Primal Scream record.

• 3:48:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's true. It was really, I remember when it came out, I thought it was so cool.

• 3:48:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:48:09Yasi Salek?

  I was like, fuck, that's cool. Is it good? No, but it's so cool. Also, we should mention just briefly, Robert Plant plays harmonica on a song on this album. Just 'cause, why not? They play Glastonbury in June of 2005 and apparently, allegedly, possibly was Bobby Gillespie was perceived as doing some Nazi salutes during swastikas.

• 3:48:33Speaker 04

  I think he was playing with a lot of imagery at this time.

• 3:48:35Yasi Salek?

  Yes, the people did not like that.

• 3:48:37Speaker 04

  And then they also talked about the September 11th bombings.

• 3:48:42Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I didn't, that I didn't see. What did they say about them?

• 3:48:47Speaker 04

  Well, they, they originally were gonna-

• 3:48:48Yasi Salek?

  They expressed their support.

• 3:48:49Speaker 04

  They were gonna call a song Bomb the Pentagon.

• 3:48:52Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, that was-

• 3:48:52Speaker 04

  Or is that just bad timing on their part?

• 3:48:54Yasi Salek?

  I think that was just bad timing on their part, yeah. Well, actually, I don't know, it doesn't say. It doesn't say when that was planned, but they changed the name to Rise. After that happened.

• 3:49:03Speaker 04

  It's also, you know, for as much as the way that culture shifts benefited Primal Scream, it probably also hurt it, you know, so they were able to be so many different bands over the course of their like 15 to 20 year prime.

• 3:49:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:17Speaker 04

  But also weirdly by O2, people had moved on to the Strokes and the White Stripes.

• 3:49:23Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:49:23Speaker 04

  And like Primal Scream's like cocaine techno bro thing, maybe it was like a little bit behind the times. I don't know.

• 3:49:30Yasi Salek?

  It feels like they should have just seamlessly been able to like then be like, we're also like the Faint or whatever, or we're also like, you know, like I.

• 3:49:38Speaker 04

  There's something about this band that I don't know that they have like their pure songwriting chops to be like, well, we'll just apply this to this now.

• 3:49:48Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:49:48Speaker 04

  Like it almost has to be a moment. It has to be a collection of people and it has to be a political and social moment that calls for it.

• 3:49:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:56Speaker 04

  And also like bands are like, as they talk about in Trainspotting, it's like you have it for a while and then you lose it.

• 3:50:02Yasi Salek?

  Imperial face, but no band can have that long of an imperial face. There's, there's like very few examples where like you pull a fucking In Rainbows out of your ass, you know, like, but and thank God, you don't need a band to be cool forever.

• 3:50:14Speaker 04

  How is that possible?

• 3:50:15Yasi Salek?

  It's exhausting. And they, Primal Scream have been cool forever. It's not like they ever came out with something and people were like.

• 3:50:20Speaker 04

  He's still cool. Yeah.

• 3:50:21Yasi Salek?

  Coolest. To this day, if you, I'll go see Primal Scream right now.

• 3:50:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:50:26Yasi Salek?

  So, so yeah, they've put out several other albums and actually I put on the last album.

• 3:50:31Speaker 04

  Come ahead. It's good.

• 3:50:31Yasi Salek?

  It's good.

• 3:50:32Speaker 04

  It's very Bobby focused.

• 3:50:34Yasi Salek?

  It's very Bobby focused, which like we said, is not traditionally the Primal Scream way. And also to me, it's like the best example of what a cool band can do in their later years, which is like this, like sort of sophisticated, still drawing on all of the DNA and like loves that they have, but not trying to be contemporary or cool. I, I think it's great.

• 3:50:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:51:06Speaker 04

  Any closing thoughts?

• 3:51:07Yasi Salek?

  I just want to take my hat off to Bobby Gillespie for always being such a real one. He really put his money where his mouth was and left it there for multiple decades. What about you, Chris Ryan?

• 3:51:22Speaker 04

  Thanks to them for teaching me about so much music that I love and making records that I love.

• 3:51:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:26Speaker 04

  I hope evil heat heads listening don't feel shortchanged.

• 3:51:30Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure we're gonna get some.

• 3:51:30Speaker 04

  We really gave you guys a lot with Exterminator, Invading Point, and Screaming Delico.

• 3:51:34Yasi Salek?

  I think we really brought it for our people.

• 3:51:37Speaker 04

  I do too.

• 3:51:37Yasi Salek?

  For the CR me and for the whatever my fan, Small But Mighty Fanbase is called.

• 3:51:43Speaker 04

  Yas Queens.

• 3:51:45Yasi Salek?

  So bad, we have to go now. Thanks for listening. Come back next week.

• 3:51:58Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was the inimical Christopher Ryan. Listen to his show The Watch on Spotify. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Delvac and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, Producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Venessy, Michael Hardman, Casey Simonson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Myerson, Jessica Hopper, and the television program Leverage.

• 3:52:41Yasi Salek?

  Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 3:52:52Yasi Salek?

  And the pop group was not this.

• 3:52:55Speaker 04

  Not Bobby Gillespie calling.

• 3:52:56Yasi Salek?

  Not Bobby Gillespie calling to correct me.