![]() This soulful acoustic lament was a rare moment of respite in that album’s orgy of ill-judgment. The sense of studied cool that had served the band so well temporarily left them. As well as heroin addictions (a US tour with Depeche Mode would nearly result in the death of members of both bands), Primal Scream had developed an unwise obsession with US classic rock, funk and blues. That much would be true even if it hadn’t followed an era-defining classic. ![]() To borrow a dictum from another bunch of psychedelic warriors of the age: it’s the sound of young men taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.ĭespite yielding Primal Scream’s biggest radio hit of their career in the big-riffing and overplayed Rocks, 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up was a dog’s dinner of an album by pretty much any measure. An ethereal, swirling, reverberant concoction of heavenly drones, dubby bass, synth squelches, burps and burbles, and sloping beats fit not so much for dancing as for gently swaying in a semi-jellied state, Higher Than the Sun still feels visionary, even futuristic. “I live just for today, I don’t care ’bout tomorrow / What I got in my head you can’t buy, steal or borrow.” Primal Scream were deep in their moment. “I’m beautiful, I wasn’t born to follow,” he drawls. “It’s like a massive jump on to another planet,” said Gillespie of this sonic approximation of a hallucinogenic experience, upon its release as a single in June 1991. Perhaps no song, and certainly no title, sums up Screamadelica-era Primal Scream better than Higher Than the Sun. But once the funky breakbeat drops, the gospel backing vocals, organs and strings are layered on and the whole composition spreads its arms skywards, the shared sensibilities of the musical styles it unites – rock’n’roll, blues, soul, house – become joyously clear, all of them celebratory, euphoric, ecstatic, fired by a similar yearning for transcendence. The Stonesy guitar and piano chords of Movin’ on Up (the track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who had overseen Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed) should feel incongruously retro, when opening such a fiercely modern record. ![]() Hailed as an instant classic on its release in 1991, it won the inaugural Mercury prize, framed the zeitgeist and enshrined rock’s enslavement to the beat. In a cauldron of pills, crossover experimentation and all-night raving, Screamadelica was cooked. Having relocated from London to Manchester for a year in 1989 to be at the epicentre of one of the biggest youth culture phenomena Britain had witnessed since punk, he began preaching the gospel of E to his old Glasgow school pal Gillespie. Movin’ on UpĪlan McGee, the boss of Primal Scream’s label Creation, was instrumental in the band’s baptism in acid house. It was included in longer form on Screamadelica, 18 months later. Loaded was released as a single in February 1990, giving Primal Scream their first Top 20 chart success – and their first, very awkward Top of the Pops appearance. ![]() ![]() The song’s uncomplicated raison d’être, and that of the acid house scene as a whole, is written into its sampled opening lines: “We’re gonna have a good time … we’re gonna have a party.” I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have was reborn as Loaded, and Britain had its first great indie-dance record, a sonic totem for a generation seeking to reconcile its burgeoning fascination with house music, club culture, repetitive beats and ecstasy with its love of good old-fashioned greasy guitar music. In his first experience in a proper recording studio, Weatherall produced a Frankenstein fusion of bluesy miscellanea and trippy good vibes, splicing together source materials as diverse as an audio sample of Peter Fonda from the film The Wild Angels, a vocal sample from The Emotions’ I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love and a bongotastic drum loop from an Italian bootleg remix of Edie Brickell’s What I Am. Neither record marked the group out as anything particularly special, and they might easily have faded into obscurity, were it not for a remix of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, from the second album, by Windsor bricklayer turned acid house DJ Andrew Weatherall. Two Primal Scream albums preceded the epochal 1991 classic Screamadelica: their 1987 debut Sonic Flower Groove and its self-titled 1989 follow-up. The die was cast for one of the great reinventions of the past 30 years of British music. Gillespie denounced the C86 scene (“They can’t play their instruments and they can’t write songs” – a reputation for diplomacy would never exactly precede this son of a Mount Florida trade unionist) and Primal Scream would soon renounce their softcore beginnings and morph into whacked-out Rolling Stones-channelling rock’n’rollers. But the twee associations would become an albatross for the band in their early days. ![]()
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