06 March 2016 Sunday 17:26 - The Independent.co.uk (independent.co.uk), Kevin EG Perry Interview:
Bobby Gillespie on Jeremy Corbyn, drug culture, the death of rock, and new album Chaosmosis. As Primal Scream return, Kevin EG Perry talks to the ever-opinionated frontman. If you only listen to one album named after a book by the radical French psychiatrist Félix Guattari this year, make it Primal Scream’s Chaosmosis. Bobby Gillespie, the band’s indefatigable leader, may once have been known as one of rock’n’roll’s great hedonists but these days, at 53 and almost eight years sober, he’s never happier than when discussing critical theory.
When I meet him for lunch in north-west London, he tells me he actually lifted the portmanteau from the Italian Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s 2015 book Heroes, which references Guattari’s work, who uses it to explain how we each absorb the mass of disconnected information the contemporary world throws at us. “It’s impossible to decipher all the information that’s coming at you in modern life,” he says. “As an artist the only way of making any sense of it is to try to make an artwork, something that can be used to inspire yourself and other people in the face of this onslaught of negativity. We can apply that to what we’re doing. I’ve always said that our music is like a shield and a sword.”
Primal Scream have long been known as rabble-rousers, with Gillespie a frontman never shy to offer a political opinion. The son of a Marxist trade unionist, also called Bob, he says today he thinks Jeremy Corbyn is a “good guy” he’d be happy to vote for, although he is doubtful about his ability to enact real change. “I don’t think decency and fairness get you anywhere when it comes to politics, because I think you’re involved in a war, a class war. The system is so much bigger.” But on first listen, this eleventh album seems like a departure. Lyrically, it’s a more intimate record than the provocative agit-rock of 2013’s More Light, on which Gillespie sang: “Thatcher’s children make the millions pay… how long will this shit last?” However, when I mention this, Gillespie points out that Primal Scream have always sought to balance the political with the deeply personal – as on 2000’s aggressive, punk-ish XTRMNTR. “Everyone thinks that it’s a political record because we had a song called ‘Swastika Eyes’ on there,” he says. “Really, we were writing about the effects of the drug culture on myself and my friends. We were all neutralising ourselves. "At the beginning of the 90s that guy was gonna be a writer, this guy was making films, this guy was gonna be guitar player. What happened by the end of the 90s? They all had heavy addictions. We were buying into the idea of taking drugs as rebellion, when really we were suckers who bought a gimmick.” He catches himself and laughs: “Of course, I’m not anti-people doing drugs. It was great!”. However he does believe that recreational drug use may inadvertently help to prop up the status quo.
We discuss the FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO, which flooded American ghettos with heroin in the late 60s to counteract Black radicalism. “It sounds like conspiracy,” he says, “but I’m sure at a certain level it’s tolerated, especially when you get huge unemployment. They know now there’s going to be long-term joblessness due to deindustrialisation and outsourcing. Maybe it’s kind of tolerated to keep the population passive.”
He describes the new record as “ecstatic, depressive realism”. “I’m laughing when I say that but I’m serious as well,” he says. “Tracks like ‘100% or Nothing’ are ecstatic, but the lyrics are depressive realist.” There’s humour in lyrics like: “The anti-depressants don’t anti-depress”.
The album filters these harsh truths through streamlined, modern pop; there are collaborations with young stars Sky Ferreira and Haim. I tell him the method reminds me of a line written by another Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, that: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusion without becoming disillusioned.” Gramsci writing about the future sounds like punk rock: destroy, destroy, destroy,” agrees Gillespie. “My friend Douglas Hart, who directed the video for our new single ‘Where The Light Gets In’, was saying that Gramsci argued there won’t be a revolution unless the working class have their own culture, and it is their culture.”
Which brings us on to the state of rock music: much has been made of its takeover by the middle and upper classes in the last decade, and it’s been argued that this has contributed to it becoming politically defanged. However, when I put this to Gillespie he argues for a more nuanced view. “I think the working class can be apolitical as well,” he argues. “I don’t actually think it’s a class thing. I don’t think a band like Happy Mondays were raving lefties. People like Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and the early anarchists were aristocrats. I think maybe rock just has nothing to say. It’s been so absorbed culturally into the system. It’s an old form that’s past it.”
Gillespie and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Innes, who have been collaborating in Primal Scream since 1986, wrote most of this new record using synthesisers and downloaded “virtual keyboards”. I ask if he thinks the traditional garage band format has been played out. “Yeah. I really do,” he says. “I love high-energy, balls-to-the-wall rock’n’roll, It’s so much a part of me and so much a part of Andrew and our whole aesthetic, but I want to do other things. I want to make music that’s more layered and with a sense of otherness.”
In their earlier years, Primal Scream benefitted from the bankrolling of old schoolfriend Alan McGee’s Creation Records. However Gillespie believes record labels’ present-day conservatism means we’re unlikely to again witness the commercial peaks that alternative bands reached in the Nineties. “Pulp, Suede, Blur, Oasis and the millions of bands who came after them were all getting in the fucking charts. Ocean Colour Scene sold a million albums. That’s gone. How many alternative bands get in the charts now? They play Shepherd’s Bush Empire if they’re lucky. "Nobody’s coming through from the underground and breaking through to the mainstream. Why is that? Is it because we’re living in such conservative times that people don’t want anything that’s even slightly weird or strange? It’s part of the neoliberal capitalist thing. "It’s about keeping the shareholders happy. Record labels want instant returns on the investment, instant profit. They’re not going to take a chance investing in someone for four albums.”
Still, whatever the difficulties, Primal Scream are still going strong, thanks to a desire to innovate that Gillespie attributes to his youthful exposure to David Bowie. “I was really affected by his death,” he says. “The whole point about us changing, from things like Screamadelica to Vanishing Point, came from what I loved about Bowie and the fact he kept changing. As an artist I have the utmost admiration and respect for him, never mind the fact that he made all these records that I love and that mean a lot to me.”
As for the current spate of 90s revivalism, Primal Scream have avoided becoming too caught up in it, perhaps because unlike peers Ride and Slowdive they never split up or went away. Like his heroes The Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop, Gillespie believes in keeping his music out there through constant touring – and there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him following their lead by continuing beyond his pension age. He’s still whippet thin, thanks to a “fast metabolism”, and sobriety seems to be suiting him. Surprisingly for someone whose youth was marked by such prodigious drug use, he’s never even been a smoker.
“I think when I was about eight or something I tried. I picked one up in the street and it was covered in saliva and made me feel so sick,” he laughs. “It’s funny. Now I know loads of people who are trying to give up. They’re getting to that age.” Gillespie’s musical shield and sword have protected him thus far. Does he think Primal Scream can keep on keeping on? “I hope so,” he says. “Only if we can keep making records as good as this. I think there’s no excuse now not to. We’ve got loads of ideas, and loads of things that we want to do. "I don’t want to be one of those bands that takes seven, eight or nine years between albums. Putting out a record every couple of years is a good way to make art. Sometimes you’re going to fail, but that’s all right.”

13 March 2016 Sunday 11.00 GMT The Observer, Guardian, Sean O'Hagan Interview: Me and the muse - Bobby Gillespie Interview. Me and the muse: Bobby Gillespie on his inspirations. In the week that Primal Scream release their new album, Chaosmosis, their frontman looks back at the tracks and times that shaped him. Bobby Gillespie, 53, is lead singer of Primal Scream, whose 11th album, Chaosmosis, is out on 18 March; the first single, Where the Light Gets In, features US singer, model and actor Sky Ferreira. The group have been together in various formations since 1982, with Gillespie and guitarist Andrew Innes the constant core members. Their breakthrough album, Screamadelica (1991), won the first Mercury prize and remains a landmark for its blend of rave, rock, gospel and dub reggae.
There was music in the air when I was a kid. My dad ran a folk club [in Glasgow] in the 60s and booked people like Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. He taped the folk singers who played there and we’d listen to these crackly recordings. My dad loved Ray Charles, and he had his greatest hits album on the Stateside label – Busted, Take these Chains from My Heart, The Cincinatti Kid. Classic songs.
My mum loved the Supremes and Elvis. I remember staring at the picture sleeve of Suspicious Minds – just the beauty of his face. My brother and me used to listen to A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash and laugh at the lyrics, and then we’d play the B-side, San Quentin, and sing along – “San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell”. That was definitely a formative influence. I was a child of Top 40 pop radio – Sweet, Slade, Bolan, Bowie, Mott the Hoople. Great glam rock. The first single I bought was Hell Raiser by Sweet. I moved to a new school and this guy stood up for me in a fight. I went back to his house and he had Electric Warrior by T Rex. Big moment. Another kid brought [David Bowie’s] Aladdin Sane to school and said: “Listen to this.” It was Time [sings], “Time – he flexes like a whore/ Falls wanking to the floor/ His trick is you and me, boy.” Another big moment. Blew my mind.
Punk was year zero for me. My brother and I listened to the John Peel radio show because we heard he was going to play God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols. No one else would play it, and he did. I’d read about them and sensed something was going on but that was the epiphany. I went to see the Clash play with Richard Hell at the Glasgow Apollo, and that was another one. I was possessed and I couldn’t express what it meant to anyone who understood until Alan McGee [Creation Records boss] came along. It seemed like we were on a mission from that moment.
I approach making music as a job. Me and Andrew go to the rehearsal studio five days a week, midday to six. Some days nothing happens and we watch YouTube, or I go for a walk and he messes around on the drum machine. Some days it all comes together and you’re in the zone. A song can start from a fragment. It might start with a chorus or even a single line or a riff. Sometimes Andrew plays something and I write a whole song there and then. Other times a line comes to you on the bus or walking down the street. I think you need to have your consciousness switched on all the time, even when you’re relaxing. We’ve always been open to bringing people on board to help create what we hear in our heads.
With Country Girl, the riff was there and the song came out of that and was hanging around half finished for a while. Then Youth [producer Martin Glover] came in and he immediately said: “That’s great but it’s a song in search of a chorus.” That’s why it’s good to bring people in – like-minded souls like Youth, David Holmes, Andrew Weatherall, Kevin Shields.
Bobby Gillespie’s top inspirations.
The Sex Pistols – God Save the Queen: It made me feel alive in a way I’ve never felt since. It was an energy hit that awakened something inside of you that you didn’t even know was there. It articulated my rage as a working-class kid on a council estate. It started me on the path, and I am eternally grateful to the Pistols for that.
Public Image Ltd – Metal Box: It’s just otherworldy but oddly it also described the damp, grey, repressive, depressive state of Britain in the late 1970s better than any other record. And that’s before you even get to the lyrics. It’s an incredibly important statement that shows how so-called non-musicians can create unearthly music. It echoes still.
Sly and the Family Stone – There’s a Riot Goin’ On/Miles Davis – On the Corner: I can’t separate these two records. We listened to them endlessly in 1986 when we were touring: one on each side of a cassette. Riot is just dark, urban, paranoid, insular funk – death-funk almost insofar as it’s not moving forward, it’s all about stasis. On the Corner has some of that but I find it oddly meditative, at least I did when I was speeding. [Laughs] It’s about cut-up and collage and the producer, Teo Macero, is a master of that approach. Unreal music, really.
Peter Tosh – Equal Rights: My favourite Wailer. Bob [Marley] was the poet, Bunny [Wailer] was the mystic, but Tosh was the radical. It’s militant music with no compromise, born out of struggle but filled with empathy for the oppressed. Tosh was a wounded boy who knew injustice and his music transforms that personal experience into something universal. And it says, fight back!
Curtis Mayfield – There’s no Place Like America Today: It could be any Curtis Mayfield record, really. When I hear his voice, it just lifts me up. His music puts me in the space to create. It’s quite rare, that mix of fragility and toughness. It’s there from day one with a song like It’s Alright by the Impressions, and it’s there on his late music too, this incredible ability to sweeten the message with beautiful melodies. He’s a complete inspiration as a songwriter, musician and arranger. Curtis lives!

24 March 2016 18.01 GMT Thursday - The Observer, Guardian Dave Simpson Interview: Primal Scream - Interview : 'People started punching the air': how Primal Scream, Ministry, the Cult and Misty Miller reinvented their sound. Bobby Gillespie, Ian Astbury, Al Jourgensen and Misty Miller recall the key moments when their bands changed direction.
Primal Scream - Old direction: Slightly fey, jangling, Byrds soundalikes beloved of the indiepop crowd.
New direction: Flying V guitars, leather jackets and raucous rock’n’roll in the style of the MC5. And from there to indie-dance pioneers.
Bobby Gillespie (vocals): “Primal Scream Mk1 were based around Jim Beattie’s 12-string guitar, and we played melodic, psychedelic pop songs, such as Gentle Tuesday. All the bands we loved – Ramones, Pistols, Love, Stooges – had made classic first albums, so our manifesto was: ‘Make a classic or kill yourself’. When Sonic Flower Groove wasn’t a classic, we were devastated. Then we moved from Glasgow to Brighton, and Jim didn’t wanna come with us, so we consciously did something different – high energy rock’n’roll like the MC5 or Stooges. Dirtier and debauched. “We’d line up across the stage, six of us, like Dexys Midnight Runners, speeding like fucking Lemmy. The idea was to threaten the audience. We played an amazing gig at Leicester’s Princess Charlotte, full of kids, a proper rock’n’roll show. These bastards were spitting at me so I whipped two of them in the face with the mic, and whipped it back so I could carry on singing. I loved that period of the band. We didn’t have many fans, but we were shit-hot.
“It was completely unfashionable to be rock’n’roll at that point. Most reviewers pasted us. Then Boys Own magazine asked Andrew Weatherall to name his favourite records and he wrote: ‘The ballads on the second Primal Scream album.’ He particularly liked I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, which I thought was the first great song we’d written. He was the hippest DJ in the hippest scene in the country, acid house, nothing to do with rock music. Perfect for us, because it was like, ‘Fuck you.’ We had to meet this guy. We did a gig with him and he played house music before we came on, and girls in Wonderstuff T-shirts were pleading with us, ‘Please, ask this man to stop playing this terrible music.’”
Andrew Innes (guitar): “Alan McGee gave Weatherall – who’d never made a record – £1,000 to remix I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, initially for a B-side. At first, he made a nice version, because it was his first remix and he didn’t want to ruin the song. But that’s what we wanted, so we phoned him and basically said, ‘Just fuckin’ destroy it.’ That became Loaded. Even while we’d been recording that second LP, there had been fights in the band over acid house: ‘I don’t want to be in a band with people who listen to that shite.’ But when the Roses and Mondays were on Top of the Pops, it was obvious something was changing. Then we had this track.
The first time I heard Loaded in a club, Weatherall played it as the last record in Subterranea [in west London] – 500 people started punching the air, and going ‘whoo whoo’, like in Sympathy For The Devil. I’d never seen any of our songs get a reaction like that, and then Martin Fry from ABC came up and said, ‘Is this your new record? It’s fucking great.’ I phoned Bobby and got him out of bed at about four in the morning. I just said, ‘Bobby. I think we’ve got a hit.’”

May - June 2016 - Under The Radar Interview, 27 April 2016 by John Everhart:
“I just think of the record as ecstatic depressive realism, but I’m kind of laughing when I’m saying that but I’m also being fucking truthful,” says Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie of the band’s twelfth album, Chaosmosis . “It’s dark but it’s honest. It’s just the way I fucking see things. Other people maybe don’t care to see things in that way, but it’s just how I see them.” And indeed, Chaosmosis goes to some somber places and exorcises some demons. But it also covers a wide swath of emotions, accomplished via rhythms and textures that accentuate Gillespie’s innate ear for melody, and some big name guest stars, namely HAIM and Sky Ferreira.
While a cynic may view these guests as a crass grasp at relevance, Gillespie fervently disagrees, and listening to the finished product, it’s hard to disagree with him. “We wouldn’t ask to work with Sky or HAIM unless we felt as though there was a connection,” he says. “We knew that we could make great music with those girls. We had a connection and friendship with HAIM, and we’d worked with Sky on her music and from that came the idea to sing on ‘Where the Light Gets In,’ and we just knew instinctively that it was gonna work.”
On “Trippin’ on Your Love” and “100% or Nothing,” the Haim sisters (Este, Danielle, and Alana) lend the tracks a subtle blue-eyed soul component that doesn’t overwhelm the trademark Primal Scream beats and melodic signifiers. “Well, if we were movie producers, you’d have to choose the right actor for the role. And that’s kind of what we’re doing here,” explains Gillespie. “We’re not trying to jump on anyone’s bandwagon for their fame or trying to connect with young people. We’re conscious artists and musicians and we’re recognizing other souls we can make music with. I’m saying it as a production choice. We want to direct the sound and image of our songs as a production choice and making a beautiful record. And the Haim sisters singing on ‘100% or Nothing’ is the California sunshine gospel pop sound, and they’re the best at that.”
“Where the Light Gets In” features Ferreira’s keening vocals bleeding together with Gillespie’s dark intonation, combining to create an unlikely, ebullient yet wounded anthem. “With Sky, you can sense hurt in her voice, even as a pop artist,” says Gillespie. “I knew she could sing that part perfectly as the duet. I knew she could play that role and sing that song sincerely. That it would be real. And we were right. Her performance was fantastic.”
Since entering the public’s consciousness on NME’ seminal C86 compilation in 1986 with the fey number “Velocity Girl,” Gillespie knew even then that his band could accomplish remarkable things musically. “We knew rock ’n’ roll was a dark, powerful force. It was a malevolent force, and not in a nostalgic way, but I knew we had it in us to show people how great rock and roll could be. It sounds arrogant, but it’s not meant to be,” he says. “Primal Scream and The [Jesus and] Mary Chain were a reaction to the awful music of the ’80s. We just took the whole fucking thing seriously. It was an experiment, but I knew if we took it far enough we’d get somewhere. We had the spirit of rock and roll in us, and it sounds a bit wanky and arrogant, so I apologize for that, but we had a drive to keep going until we’d made a great record. And Screamadelica , Vanishing Point , XTRMNTR , and the last couple, I think we’ve made some great ones. I don’t want to sound arrogant at all, but I know that we’ve won the respect of a lot of our peers and young bands and even older artists as well have told us they’ve dug the band. It’s nice to get that.”

04 November 2018 10.00 GMT Sunday - The Observer, Guardian Bobby Gillespie interview by Kathryn Bromwich:
Bobby Gillespie, On my radar: Bobby Gillespie’s cultural highlights. The Primal Scream singer on the massacre at Ballymurphy, being inspired by Bob Dylan, and the black power salute. Kathryn Bromwich @kathryn42.
The singer and musician Bobby Gillespie was born in Glasgow in 1962. He played drums in the Jesus and Mary Chain before forming his own band, Primal Scream, in 1982. Primal Scream have released 11 studio albums, including 1991’s Screamadelica, which won the inaugural Mercury prize. For their following album, they moved from acid house and psychedelia to blues and classic rock. The outtakes from those sessions, Give Out But Don’t Give Up: The Original Memphis Recordings, are out now on Sony.
1. TV: Massacre at Ballymurphy, Channel 4. I never really watch television, but I was alerted to this by my friend. It’s a documentary about the killings of 11 working-class Catholics in Belfast in August 1971, by the 1st battalion, Parachute Regiment, who were involved in Bloody Sunday five months later. And it was covered up. They put out a communique saying that the paratroopers had fought a two-hour gun battle with 20 IRA activists, but there was no battle. It was fascinating TV, especially now with the whole issue of the Irish border.
2. Music: Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series Vol 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981. These are live performances gathered from Bob Dylan’s gospel tours from the late 70s and early 80s when he converted to Christianity. At the time it was very controversial that this countercultural, anti-establishment hero had converted to Christianity; people were completely thrown by it. I find this period of Bob Dylan very inspiring – he was always surprising people, nobody could ever catch up with the guy. There are two tracks on there that I can’t stop listening to – Gotta Serve Somebody and Slow Train. They’re incredible – kind of apocalyptic gospel, existential blues.
3. Book: History of Violence by Édouard Louis. The French author Édouard Louis. Photograph: John Foley/Opale/Leemage. I came across Édouard Louis through his first book, The End of Eddy, a memoir about growing up in the north of France in real poverty. It sounded like the 1930s: you just don’t imagine that people are living like this in France now. In this new book he describes his rape, on Christmas Eve, by the son of an Algerian immigrant. It discusses race, class, gender, anger, violence, sexuality, racism, inequality. In the world of literature it’s unusual to hear working-class voices, just as it is in theatre and music these days, so it’s really important to have this voice.
4. Film: Black Power Salute (2008). This is the story of the 1968 Olympics, when two black Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won gold and bronze medals and did the black power salute on the podium. It’s about why they decided to do this and the repercussions on their lives and careers. My father had that photograph in our living room in Glasgow: I asked him about it and he explained racism in America to me. It was on at the BFI this month and it rings true today, with the NFL players going down on their knee to protest against Trump and his racist ideology. Fifty years, nothing has changed.
5. Talk: Here and Now: A Creative Vision for Europe. I was invited to speak at this event organised by the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, a group of people who want to unite progressive thinkers throughout Europe. You have the rise of populism, fascism, so the idea is to try to cross borders using cultural means and ideas. Yanis Varoufakis [the former Greek finance minister] – who is one of my heroes – also took part, as well as Srećko Horvat, Rosemary Bechler and Danae Stratou. There’s a culture war under way between those who use culture to divide by class, by race, by nation, and those who use it to connect. It was cool to have been involved in that.
6. Exhibition: The Lost Moment, Gallery of Photography, Dublin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go for the opening, but I’m going to travel to Dublin for this exhibition. It’s about street protest and resistance in Northern Ireland during 1968, and the history of the civil rights movement. It’s been curated by Sean O’Hagan and there will be photographs, posters, banners, some audio and film. It was an anti-colonialist struggle: Catholic people in Northern Ireland didn’t have equal rights and that’s what the civil rights movement was about. I’d like to learn more about this – to know the roots of the struggle.

11 May 2019 14.00 BST Saturday - The Observer, Guardian, Interview Bobby Gillespie by Nick McGrath: This much I know. Life and style, Interview Bobby Gillespie: ‘I wanted to change music culture’, Nick McGrath. The Primal Scream frontman, 56, on growing up Glaswegian, loving the spotlight and the threat of Brexit. Working-class Glasgow was a very violent place to grow up. I saw violence on the streets. I saw it at football matches and I saw it at school. I had to be careful as the minute I stepped out on to the street anything could happen. If you walked through certain areas and people didn’t know your face you could be in trouble. It was tribalism. You just stuck to your part of the jungle.
I’m a Glaswegian before I’m a Scot. I’ve always been proud of the city and think the city is proud of us and it’s a city with a long tradition. It’s a radical city. It’s an artistic city. It’s got a lot of soul. Making music was a form of expression . Going to the local comprehensive, we were just factory fodder at best, unemployed at worst. Nobody thought we could be artists. There was a class bias against us.
The success of Screamadelica in 1991 was what I’d always dreamed of. Suddenly we were earning a living as working musicians and I loved the attention it brought. I wanted to be on the cover of the music papers. I wanted to change the culture for the better and I wanted to be centre of the culture. Things got dark pretty quickly. We started off with speed, which was my drug of choice, then it was ecstasy then coke and pretty quickly we moved on to heroin. But by the end of 1992 we had to make a decision whether to be artists or drug addicts. I gave up drugs 11 years ago.
Nigel Farage is selling a delusional dream, which is that if we leave the EU everything’s going to be fine. It’s not going to be fine except for his cronies who will run the pound, invest and destroy companies then completely deregulate the whole United Kingdom. Environmental and worker’s rights will be thrown out the window. That’s what hard Brexit is all about. It’s about finishing the Thatcher revolution.
I went to Elton John’s wedding and it was fun. He’s a Primal Scream fan. Every time I’ve met him he’s been amazing. He’s always very friendly and happy to see me. There were probably 2,000 people there including Elvis Costello and Paul Simonon from the Clash. I went with my wife [stylist Katy England], but I don’t remember that much about it.
I’ve got two teenage sons, but I’m not worried about them reading about what I got up to. They’re kids that have grown up in 21st-century London and they can see and read way more shocking things on their phones than reading the paper. They could be watching an Isis execution video in seconds. Rock’n’roll doesn’t really compare.

23 February 2020 09.30 GMT Sunday - The Observer, Guardian, Bobby Gillespie Interview by Sean O’Hagan: Primal Scream’s frontman pays tribute to his friend, the producer who helped make Screamadelica into a pivotal album. Interview by Sean O’Hagan.
I first heard of Andrew Weatherall back in the summer of 1989, when he wrote about his favourite tracks of the time in the Boy’s Own fanzine. To our surprise, he said that he loved all the ballads on our second album. No one cared about that record apart from diehard fans, but he really dug it.
My memories are vague, when it comes to that summer, but I do recall a bunch of us driving around the countryside near Brighton for hours trying to find an acid house party where he was DJing. We eventually met up with him at about five in the morning in a field in Sussex. All of us off our heads on E. We just got on right away.
I remember the NME asked him to review a Primal Scream gig and he came to see us play at Exeter University. He turned up in leather trousers with really long hair – he could have been in the band! (Weatherall wrote an enthusiastic review of the gig under the pen name, Audrey Witherspoon.) After that, we’d go and see him whenever he was DJing in London.
We’d already become good mates, when someone suggested that he should mix I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have. He said OK, but his remix was a bit low-key. He loved the song and maybe he thought we’d be offended if he really went to town on it. It was Innes [Andrew Innes, Primal Scream’s guitarist], who told him to do it again and “just fucking destroy it”. That’s how Loaded came into being, basically. We gave him free rein and he went for it. The thing about Andrew was that he was a non-musician - Loaded was only his second time in a recording studio. Because he wasn’t aware of the rules, he broke them. He wasn’t trying to make hit records. That never entered his mind. He just wanted to make interesting tracks that worked on the dancefloor. And, of course, he was the first person to play Loaded in a club. I think the reaction completely took him by surprise. It certainly took us by surprise! I remember Innes went to see him DJ at Subterania in west London. Afterwards, he called me in the early hours and said: “Bobby, it was insane. Weatherall played Loaded and the whole place went ballistic.” He told me that Mick Jones (from the Clash) and Kevin Rowland (from Dexys Midnight Runners) had come up to him afterwards and shook his hand.
He was a kindred spirit and true to himself. He changed my life, he really did Loaded just exploded on dance floors across the country. Looking back, it definitely caught something of the time. That was down to Andrew. All I can say is that the experience of standing in a club and seeing people go wild to it was something else. Kids would come up and hug you afterwards.
Then it really took off and suddenly we were on Top of the Pops. It was wild for us, because I think we’d been written off a bit, but not by Andrew Weatherall. He heard something in the songs. He was a rocker at heart and he initially connected with those songs on that level. Basically, he took a bluesy Primal Scream ballad and turned it into something ecstatic. The ecstatic blues.
His remix of Come Together was another track that was gigantic in the clubs. It became one of those songs that DJs ended their sets with as the sun was coming up. Liam Gallagher still goes on to me about hearing it at a massive rave in Scotland; thousands of kids going mental to it.
By autumn 1990, we had a little studio in Hackney near the Creation offices. For Screamadelica, we gave him tracks and tracks of melodies and songs, loads of stuff that he put together somehow. His skill at arranging was off the scale. No one else would have thought of constructing tracks like he did, arranging our melodies and music into abstract pop songs. I have to mention Hugo Nicholson here, too, because I think maybe his best work was done with Hugo. They were a team. Andrew had the vision and Hugo Nicholson had the studio skills needed to realise his ideas. They just killed it every time.
I remember Andrew came on the road with us soon afterwards, when we did a short British tour. The Orb would go on first, then we’d play a short set, and afterwards we’d do a few Es, and get on the dance floor with the kids for Weatherall’s set. Great days. He loved the madness, the chaos of rock’n’roll, but he also saw the absurdity of it all, which is rare. I think he was an outsider artist in a way; he preferred being on the margins doing his own thing. He could be more free out there. Music was a portal for him to escape the straight life. He made music and he loved music – rockabilly, garage rock, reggae. He was into spreading the word. He was inclusive, such a generous guy. I think of him as a true bohemian; he made etchings, he wrote, he read a lot. Andrew always had a book on the go, maybe two. I remember he gave me his copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun when I told him I hadn’t read it. There was this other side to him that was deep, curious, well-read. I guess he was a classic autodidact, hungry for knowledge.
It’s hard for me to talk about him. He was a good friend and it’s so raw. I’m still in shock, to be honest. I never saw it coming. At all. What can I say? I’m going to miss his wit, the glint that he had in his eye when he was up to some mischief. He was a kindred spirit and he was true to himself above all else. I have nothing but good memories of Andrew Weatherall. He changed my life, he really did.

08 May 2021 09.30 BST Saturday - The Observer, Guardian - The Q&A, Life and style Bobby Gillespie Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet: Bobby Gillespie: ‘I am a lead singer, I love myself’ The musician on his Raquel Welch wallpaper, crying when Maradona died and breaking his back in four places.
Born in Glasgow, Bobby Gillespie, 58, founded Primal Scream in 1982. The band’s third album, Screamadelica, won the 1992 Mercury music prize. Utopian Ashes, Gillespie’s album with Jehnny Beth, is released on 2 July; their single, Remember We Were Lovers, is out now. He lives in London with his wife, fashion stylist Katy England, and two sons.
When were you happiest? Standing on stage in between Robert Young and Andrew Innes, blasting away.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Emotional masochism.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? Cruelty.
What is your most treasured possession? My health.
What is your wallpaper? The Terry O’Neill photograph of Raquel Welch being crucified in the fur bikini she wore in One Million Years BC.
What would your superpower be? To destroy the class system in the United Kingdom.
What do you most dislike about your appearance? I am a lead singer, I love myself – at least on the outside.
If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose? Rock’n’roll.
Who would play you in the film of your life? Monica Bellucci.
What was the best kiss of your life? The first one I received from my wife, at a party in New York City in October 2000. It was unexpected and it was the start of a torrid, crazy romance.
What is your most unappealing habit? Picking my nose.
What is your favourite smell? It used to be amphetamine sulphate but now it’s my two dogs, especially the staffordshire bull terrier puppy, Ivy.
What is top of your bucket list? Wipe out the fucking Tory party.
What is your guiltiest pleasure? There is no pleasure for the guilty.
What or who is the greatest love of your life? Noel Gallagher once said to me: “Women come and women go, but your football team is for ever.” So it has to be Celtic FC.
What has been your biggest disappointment? Corbyn losing the 2019 election.
When did you last cry, and why? When Maradona died, I cried for three days.
How often do you have sex? I don’t think enough.
What is the closest you’ve come to death? In 2016, I fell off stage in Switzerland and broke my back in four places.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life? I have a nice life but if everybody else had a better quality of life, too, Britain would be a nicer place.
What song would you like played at your funeral? Feel Like Going Home by Charlie Rich.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you? Enjoy every sandwich – that’s a quote from songwriter Warren Zevon, when he was asked the same question on a chatshow. He had cancer and had eight months to live.

July 2021 - Uncut Magazine/Website
20 May 2021 - “Where does this rage come from, this suspicious nature , this anger , this cynicism ?”
MOST days during lockdown, Bobby Gillespie left his home in north London and walked two miles to the studio owned by his wife, the fashion stylist Katy England. There, he wrote. As a musician who has spent almost 40 years in bands – first as drummer with The Jesus And Mary Chain and then with Primal Scream – these sessions proved to be an unusually solitary, not to say quiet, creative experience. For the most part, Gillespie was working on Tenement Kid – a memoir that follows him from childhood in Glasgow up to the release of the Screamdelica album in 1991. “I want to give a good account of myself and my life,” Gillespie explains. “I didn’t know what it took to write a book. I’ve just written rock’n’roll songs – three, four or maybe five verses, which is a very condensed, disciplined way of writing. So it’s a different way of expressing myself – which I enjoyed, I have to say.”
Reflection has never been Gillespie’s preferred state. Primal Scream’s career has been characterised by a unique and impressive sense of restlessness – whatever the outcome. “We always wanted to keep ploughing ahead. Sometimes you go sideways, sometimes you sink, but you always want to do the next thing and see where it ends up,” he explains. “We were self-righteous speed freaks! The speed just accelerated the intensity of my point of view. But the point of view was already there. I guess there comes a time when you realise it’s OK… It’s like being embarrassed at old photographs of yourself. When you get older you look at them and think, ‘Aw, that’s all right.’”
Such ruminations have led in other, surprising directions, too. Just as Gillespie has carried out some stocktaking on the first half of his life for Tenement Kid, he has also conducted a managerial audit of Primal Scream. This process of recalibration has been ongoing for a few years now, beginning with the release of the original, long-lost recordings made for 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up album and continuing with the Maximum Rock’n’Roll greatest-hits album and tour, an expanded edition of 2006’s Riot City Blues for this year’s Record Store Day and a proposed deluxe edition of the band’s 1987 debut, Sonic Flower Groove. Gillespie has looked back on the band’s strengths – and, perhaps, also their weaknesses – and hit reset.
The first fruits of this are Utopian Ashes – a striking duets album recorded with Savages’ Jehnny Beth. The album’s musical touchstones include Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris and George Jones and Tammy Wynette; the subject matter, meanwhile, is the fathomless psychological drama of a marriage in crisis. “I thought it was a very adult record and it should be presented as an adult record,” says Gillespie. “Maybe people expect a certain thing from Primal Scream and by presenting it in the way that we have they maybe have to consider it differently. If we did a hardcore, electro-punk record then I couldn’t write about these subjects in a tender, humanistic, empathetic way. You know [mimics electronic sound] – it’s too paranoid and claustrophobic. That was me, 20 years ago. I’m a different person now.”
This interrogation of what Primal Scream means in 2021 is at the heart of a wide-ranging conversation that takes in fallen comrades, the recent Alan McGee film and the levelling qualities of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Meeting on Zoom, Gillespie looks well and happy, sporting the kind of open-neck shirt also favoured by Nick Cave. As with Cave, Gillespie has survived numerous creative shifts and close shaves, arriving now in his late fifties with an artistic career behind him that seems to have developed intuitively. “I’ve got no complaints,” he confirms. “I’ve got my wife, my kids, my dogs, I’m very happy.” A smile spreads across his face. “Who’d have thought?”
Was Utopian Ashes always going to be a Bobby Gillespie, Jehnny Beth album and not a Primal Scream album?
To begin with, we weren’t sure what it was going to be. Andrew Innes and I began to demo songs in a little studio we had in Soho through, I think, 2017, early 2018. It was Andrew Innes’ idea to make this music with Jehnny. But as I worked more on the songs at home and began writing lyrics and working on song structures, then demoing them with Andrew, it became apparent to me it should be a duets record.
What’s the appeal of a duets record? I’ve always had an interest in the dynamic of a male and a female singing together. It is a great way of telling human stories, the male and the female perspective. It gives you a lot wider narrative scope. When we first met Jehnny, it became apparent that her voice and my voice really sounded like they belonged together. When we were recording the album, Jehnny said to me, “What is this? Is this a Bobby solo, is it Primal Scream?” I said, “I think it’s Bobby and Jehnny record and that’s how we should present it.”
You have a long history of collaborations – from Andrew Weatherall onwards. What made this one different? I wanted people to take notice of this record and hear it, because I really believe it’s a strong record and I’m very proud of what I’ve managed to say in this record and the way that I’ve said it. I’ve really worked hard on my songwriting and my lyric-writing. I think the musical arrangements allowed me the space to write about the subject matter that I wanted to write about, you know. So I think if we had released this as a Primal Scream record – or even Primal Scream Featuring Jehnny Beth - people could dismiss it and say, “Oh, we’ve heard so many Primal Scream records, we know what that’s going to be about,” before they’d even listened to it.
What do you think people expect from a Primal Scream record? I actually don’t know any more… We’ve made 11 studio albums, but I think we’re known for the ’90s stuff, from Screamadelica to Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR. It’s hard, because we’ve been going for so long. Maybe we’re overfamiliar? But I do know this – we’re one of those bands that always play seven or eight new songs on a tour and we would discount the past, full stop. If you came to see us on the Give Out But Don’t Give Up tour, we’d only play like two or three songs from Screamadelica; if we did a Vanishing Point tour we would just mostly play Vanishing Point and then XTRMNTR. We wouldn’t play the big songs like “Loaded” and “Come Together”, because we were excited to play the new stuff. We always did that because we felt that’s what you should do. But two years ago we did the Maximum Rock’n’Roll tour and we just decided to play singles.
What changed, then? I think we put two ballads in the middle – “(I’m Gonna) Cry Myself Blind” and “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have” – but otherwise it was a high-energy rock’n’roll set and people loved it. People don’t really want a seven-minute waltz about internalised pain or an eight-minute song about domestic violence. I love those songs, like “River Of Pain” and “Tenement Kid”, but when people come to hear from Primal Scream, they want a good night out. They want us to take their heads off. But I don’t know if that’s the kind of music I want to keep on making. That’s why Utopian Ashes is an important record for me.
So do two parallel versions of Primal Scream now exist: the live band, who play the hits, and the studio version, who allow themselves greater freedom to experiment? Exactly. But I guess fans expect different things from bands. A new album is for new songs, but a tour is a more communal celebration of a body of work. That’s it! When people go and see the Stones live, they don’t want self-reflective doubt – they want cocksure, high-energy, humanistic rock’n’roll. I remember seeing Iggy 20 years ago, when Avenue B came out. He was writing about being a middle-aged guy on his own. He would open his live show sitting on the floor cross-legged, bare-chested, long hair, acoustic guitar and he’d sing “Nazi Girlfriend” and “Avenue B”. The audience would be quite disengaged. Then the band went into “Sixteen”, Iggy starts throwing himself off the PA stacks and the crowd are suddenly interested. I remember thinking, ‘God, this is how he’s got to earn his living, but really his soul was somewhere else.’ People want fun, they want nihilistic delirium, they want “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. They don’t want to know what he feels like as a 45-year-old guy. It’s a hard thing to navigate. You can either make a choice to be an entertainer or an artist, and it’s very hard to mix both of them.
You’ve been taking stock over the last couple of years – with The Original Memphis Recordings, the Maximum Rock’n’Roll compilation and now this deeper, reflective consideration of the band’s place. What’s prompted this?
When we made Chaosmosis, Innes had discovered these digital plug-ins. I was writing songs round these blocks of dense, electronic sound – it was great, but by the time the album was released I wasn’t so sure. Then Innes found the Memphis tapes and I was blown away by the musicianship in the band playing with the Muscle Shoals guys. So that was the beginning of me thinking, ‘This is what we should be doing, this is what we’re good at. We’ve become disconnected from who we are. We’re trying to second guess ourselves and always do something we’ve never done before – but at what cost?’
How did this feed into Utopian Ashes? The Memphis record really reconnected me with something in me and in the band. The sensitivity which Darrin [Mooney; drums] plays, [Martin] Duffy [keyboards] plays and Andrew plays, the feel that we have for ballads and country, soul music – you guys call it Americana. I wanted to get back to writing traditional songs and trying to write narrative storytelling in my own way, and I felt that if we make another album it has to be recorded live, like we did in Memphis, because we can do it now. We’re older, I know that these guys can play like this, because it’s in their soul. This is more grown up, more serious.
How much of you is in lines like: “I put myself in some dangerous situations/Suffered black dog years of degradation” or “Sometimes I feel like love is a disease/Like addiction/That ecstatic taste that we chase to oblivion”? That’s me, that’s completely me. The songs are written from experience and also empathy. I know that, as a songwriter, I’m able to take life experience and mix it with the fictional and create a song. But those lines are very much me. I’m at the age now, late fifties, I’ve lived a life. Hopefully, I’ve managed to put those experiences into songs that other people can identify with. That’s what I’m hoping for, that communication really. Emotional inarticulacy is at the crux of this record. Something that I noticed, especially in the last 12 years or so since I’ve got clean from drugs and alcohol, is how inarticulate we are emotionally.
Do you have an example? When I used to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, I noticed that when people tried to talk about their experiences, they didn’t know how to express themselves, so they would use found language that they’d heard other people using to describe the experience of addiction. You would get guys in there that were maybe like food critics for the fucking Sunday Times or toilet cleaners or guys that work in the City of London and everybody in between. They’d all share this emotional inarticulacy and you think there’s no wonder these relationships are failing, never mind the addiction to drugs and alcohol or whatever. It’s not a rehab record, by the way. Really, addiction is only one part of a wider struggle. I was just trying to write about how some things are worth fighting for. I think a marriage is worth fighting for.
How does the memoir fit into this more general period of reflection? I’m not sure. The book runs from when I was born in the ’60s up to 1991. It’s really about a young, working-class person’s journey and the things that happened to me and inspired me along the way – both good and bad. I think the book is joyous and not too serious either, you know? I think I’m a person with a sense of wonder, and hopefully that comes across in the book. I really surprised myself in parts. I sent Lee Brackstone, my editor at White Rabbit, 240,000 words and he wanted to get down to 160,000. I wrote all the way up to 1998, 1999. I kept thinking, ‘Well, when does it fucking end?’ Lee was of the opinion from the very beginning that it should be two books. So, we’ll see. I don’t know.
What makes a good rock book? I’ve read a lot. I love Rhythm Oil by Stanley Booth, and his True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones. John Phillips’ Papa John – that’s just fucking nuts, I don’t think the lawyers got anywhere near that fucking book. Dylan’s Chronicles. But the best one is Hellfire by Nick Tosches, the Jerry Lee Lewis book.
It’s a work of fiction – but Jerry Lee’s life is partly true and partly fiction, he’s a mythological giant. But because I’d read so many rock biographies, I was aware of what I didn’t want my book to be. I knew I wanted to write about working-class Glasgow, education – or lack of it – the effects of family. If you have a troubled home life as a kid, what are the effects that has on you as a person and how that feeds into your work as an artist. Where does this rage come from, this suspicious nature, this anger, this cynicism?
What did you find out? You’ll see there were things I did that led up to joining The Jesus And Mary Chain and on to forming the Scream. I was around some interesting people when I was a teenager, I experienced some really great things. I lived a bit of a life before anyone knew anything about me. It all helped form my creative mind. I didn’t just arrive in the Mary Chain fully formed, there had been some years of development before that.
You used to have a scorched-earth policy to Sonic Flower Groove. Has revisiting the album for the book made you reappraise it? Yes, definitely, definitely. I wrote a lot about that record and the experience of recording it – we recorded it twice – and our inexperience. I relistened to the record a lot and had a new respect for it.
We’re maybe going to reissue it. We’ll add two songs – there’s “Black Star Carnival”, which was a B-side, and also this unreleased track called “Tomorrow Ends Today”. It sounds like it could’ve been on the first Stone Roses record. I’m going to re-sequence the album and do a new record sleeve. At that point, everyone had the ’80s drum sound – the Bunnymen, The Smiths, everybody. So, it would be good if we take the ’80s drum sound off it and maybe we could add some harmonies, because when I listen to it now, I think, ‘Why didn’t we do harmonies there?’ So, we might tinker with it, maybe we won’t. But “Tomorrow Ends Today” sounds like a single. Why did we leave it off the album? What were you thinking? It’s so good! The first side just runs like a dream – bang, bang, bang, bang. For some reason, we fucked it up…
There are several members of the Primal Scream family who are no longer with us: producer Andrew Weatherall, guitarist Robert Young, vocalist Denise Johnson and Screamadelica artist Paul Cannell. How much does the book highlight their contributions? It does very much, very much. All of them are spoken of with great respect and admiration, all of them. Robert – Throb – features heavily in the book, he’s like a hero in the book. He left an impression on everybody who met him. He was some man, you know? I hope I do him justice in the book. If there is a second book, things will get a bit darker. He kind of symbolises the descent into the darkness, like a Danny Whitten character. That kind of level of talent and a sensitivity and romanticism. But there’s not so much darkness in this book. Throb was really into melody. Carole King, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson – he loved those major 7ths. Very Californian. I write about everybody in the book – Weatherall and Cannell and Denise. But especially Robert, because I grew up with Robert.
Have you seen the Alan McGee film, by the way? I watched it twice. The first time it’s weird to see yourself portrayed by an actor. I felt a bit like, ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t have worn that jacket!’ Second time I understood it’s more of a comedy. I was pleased Irvine [Welsh] picked up that McGee’s this innocent and enthusiastic guy. I think that’s why people were attracted to him. He wasn’t like these other people in the music business who are more cynical. He was a good guy. You can see that he was making it up as he went along – that was half the fucking fun. No-one knew what they were doing. Nobody, not us, not McGee, not Kevin Shields. Maybe Oasis, because their manager was a lot more focused. We didn’t have a manager and neither did Shields. McGee was supposed to be our manager.
So what’s next? Another album? Another book? I’m not sure if I’ll write a second book, I need to think what is it going to be about.
Difficult second book syndrome, Bob? Well, yeah! There’s a lot, there’s a story there, but I need to really develop that idea further. I need to wait until I feel I’m ready to tell that story…

10 October 2021 12.00 BST Sunday - The Observer, Guardian Newspaper Bobby Gillespie Interview by Barbara Ellen: The Observer Bobby Gillespie Interview. Bobby Gillespie: ‘For the first 10 years of my life, I lived in a Glasgow tenement … that stuff stays with you’. On the eve of the publication of his memoir, the Primal Scream frontman talks to friend and author Irvine Welsh about his working-class upbringing, beating drugs and losing creative partners. Barbara Ellen listens in.
Bobby Gillespie’s memoir, Tenement Kid, starts by documenting Gillespie’s Glaswegian working-class background and ends in 1991, as Primal Scream prepare to release their Mercury prize-winning album, Screamadelica. As Gillespie’s final line in the book has it: “Some say this is where the 1990s began.” Last month, he and old friend, author and fellow Scot Irvine Welsh, got together to discuss some of the book’s themes. Gillespie, 60, explained that he was first asked to write his life story a decade ago, and had only just agreed to do it when lockdown struck. Tenement Kid charts Gillespie’s personal and creative journey, via the prism of punk, rock’n’roll, acid house and drug-fuelled hedonism. It also delivers a vivid portrait of Gillespie’s early working-class life, at times permeated with strong anti-Tory sentiment: “Of course,” says Gillespie, “I’m from Glasgow, there’s got to be.”
Gillespie’s family lived in one room, sharing a bathroom with other families, later moving to a “room and kitchen” in the same tenement, with the then-family of four sharing a bedroom. For Gillespie, school was a washout, and he was put into a remedial class. Transfixed and transformed by punk, he joined the Wake and then alternative rock band the Jesus and Mary Chain, before focusing solely on Primal Scream. Earlier this year, Gillespie released Utopian Ashes, an album of duets with Savages singer Jehnny Beth.
Edinburgh-born novelist, screenwriter and playwright Irvine Welsh, 63, abandoned a TV repair apprenticeship when he suffered an electric shock and was taken to hospital, but also because he heard Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols: “As soon as I heard that, I jacked it in. I thought, my days are numbered here.” Welsh published his era-defining novel, Trainspotting, in 1993: “I didn’t know how to write a novel, I just started writing.” Trainspotting followed the lives of heroin-addicted youths (Welsh was himself addicted to heroin for a while). Among his screenplays is Creation Stories, the 2021 biopic of Alan McGee, Gillespie’s lifelong friend, and cofounder of Creation Records, Primal Scream’s first label.
Gillespie and Welsh met in the mid-1990s, and have a dense circuitry of connections, and much in common, including their Scottish working-class backgrounds and their cultural immersion in punk and acid house. I listened in as they talked. Irvine Welsh: It’s an incredible achievement to write about working-class life in this way. For anybody who’s ever – horrible term – “made it”, there’s a tendency to either amp up how nasty it was, or to sentimentalise it as the good old days. You avoid that completely: no sentimentality, but total respect as well. It’s a fine piece of writing. My question is: how the fuck do you remember all that?
Bobby Gillespie: I just did a splurge. No diaries. I did a timeline from when I was born up until Screamadelica, and I wrote themes to discuss: class, my parents, my lack of schooling. For the first 10 years of my life, I lived in a Glasgow tenement: me, my brother and my parents, sharing the same bedroom, that stuff stays with you. Kids like me were judged to be stupid because the educational structures designated us as such. We were set up to be labourers, or unemployed, on the scrapheap. I wanted to learn, but I wasn’t given anything to learn, and I didn’t know how to ask. I remember feeling like a failure at that age.
I wanted to include stuff in the book that was outside rock’n’roll, but that helped shape me. For me, the late 70s/early 80s were a cultural revolution. Sex Pistols, the Clash… my cultural education came from reading music papers of that time. Malcolm McLaren talking about the Situationists. Tony Wilson, Factory Records – there’d be a Factory band called the Durutti Column, and you’d find out that it referenced a Spanish anarchist who fought against Franco. All these cultural markers.
IW: For me, it started with Bowie, because what he did as an artist was quite rare. Normally, people are coy about their references, everybody wants to appear highly original. Bowie was incredibly generous and shared all his sources. He was working-class art school, basically. Through him, you got into Lou Reed, Kraftwerk, electronic music, Burroughs, the Beat writers… He just threw it all out there for everyone to have a rummage around.
I saw the Clash, I never saw the Sex Pistols. I bought the original black cover of Anarchy in the UK and played it incessantly, driving people nuts. Punk validated you being a little cunt basically. I was very unruly and non-academic, so, it was, wow, great, these are my people and they’re making records. All these fucking misfits everywhere.

BG: Punk was more of a state of mind than a dress code. Before Primal Scream, I was around people like Siouxsie and the Banshees and New Order, seeing how they treated either bands I was in, like the Wake, or my friends’ band, Altered Images. Just watching them work, it was heaven. We worshipped these people, truly.
You read interviews with Siouxsie and you were scared of her: this cold, austere ice queen. Siouxsie, Poly Styrene, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, the Slits, these women were not pushovers. What was important was that they were songwriters, it was their band. Whereas before, chances were, a guy wrote the songs. Women weren’t given more power, they demanded more power. They didn’t dress to please men or sing sexually suggestive songs. They told their own stories. To me, that was one of the important breaks from the past of punk.
IW: Race/ethnicity was another one. Those attitudes went through to other stuff, like ska, 2 Tone, and acid house. Same vibe then. It all came out of the same punk idea.
BG: Punk, post-punk, it was a break from the old order. It was meant to be about a new kind of person. It wasn’t racist, it wasn’t sexist, it wasn’t Tory.
I ask Gillespie and Welsh for their thoughts on Brexit and Scottish independence. In July, Gillespie expressed concern about Brexit making life harder for musicians. Previously, he described Scottish independence as “inevitable”, while emphasising that he in no way considered himself to be a nationalist.
BG: Brexit is an English and Welsh thing. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain. I don’t want to bring nationalist politics into this, that’s not my thing. I guess all nationalism is exclusive, not just English nationalism… When it happened, I thought, well, maybe this is English nationalism, which is, for me, frightening.
You could look at the different reasons for Brexit: socioeconomic, xenophobic, maybe 40 years of neoliberalism is to blame for the disconnect, the inequality. People at the bottom felt through their newspapers or Facebook groups that the EU was to blame for their circumstances… It also became this emotional thing. I think it’s less about class-based politics now, and more about emotionalism.
IW: The media fanned the spark that had been there for years. Brexit became a kind of civil war of elites that everybody else was dragged into … I’m not as much for Scottish independence as I am against imperialist nation-states. I think it’s better to be governed by non-hierarchical nation-states that aren’t based on imperialist precepts and entrenched beliefs. I’m for Scottish independence as a mechanism for breaking up the UK, and I’m for English independence and Welsh independence. The real fear of elites in England is that, if Scotland is independent, at a stroke, there’s no royal family, no House of Lords, no Eton. And people in England are going to say – we’ll have some of that.
I’m glad I’ve got two beautiful sons. It’s about giving them a loving environment to grow up in... So long as they’re all right, I’m all right
Bobby Gillespie
BG: I remember reading you at the time of the vote in 2014, and thinking, that’s interesting. This idea that, if Scotland gets independence and becomes a more social democratic, left, liberal country, maybe people in England will finally wake up. I totally understand that point of view, but I find it very hard. I’m only nationalist when it comes to football. My dad’s influence was to be internationalist.
Gillespie’s father is a former Sogat [print union] official who came second representing the Labour party in the 1988 Glasgow Govan byelection. Gillespie has two sons with his wife, stylist Katy England.
BG: I’m glad we’ve got two beautiful sons [Wolf, 19, and Lux, 17]. It’s about giving them a loving environment to grow up in, letting them be themselves. So long as they’re all right, I’m all right.

IW: I wouldn’t have been a good parent. I’m not interested. I always moved around physically. I would have been very absent, and conflicted. What I wanted to do required a lot of selfishness if you were doing it right. I’ve met your dad. I recognise him from what you say in the book. I didn’t meet your mum.

BG: When Mum met Dad, she became politicised: she marched, made Young Socialists banners – she was creative and strong, I guess she had to be – my dad’s a big character… I couldn’t write too much about their marriage dynamic, it’s their private stuff. Politics and romance are very hard, I don’t know if they really mix. I couldn’t understand it as a child. I was just very upset. I was aware of that tension when there’s going to be an explosion. You want to hide, but you’re stuck. When you’re very young, you don’t have the emotional intelligence to understand. You think: Mum and Dad should love each other, and they don’t [laughs ruefully]. Under the circumstances, they did their best, they loved us.

IW: You’re finding out about the world through your parents, through the dynamics and changes in their relationship. You think: it can’t always be sweetness and light. It’s just life, it grinds people down. And you’re aware, even when you’re young, that you’re only seeing the tip of the emotional iceberg. That there’s more, but it’s not your place to intervene.

BG: As you become older you start to understand more, but you still feel sad about it. You’re burying stuff and it comes out in other ways. You can turn it into good art. I haven’t done therapy for a while but, when I did, I’d describe certain reactions and they’d say, you’re disassociating. I thought, maybe that’s right, just that feeling, the powerlessness. I could argue with you about football, or with the band about something creative. When it came to women, girlfriends, being angry and emotional, it was almost like I was a football and I’d been punctured.

IW: I’m like that. I can’t argue or anything like that with women. I almost remove myself. I’ve had therapy: I once did it with a guy in Islington who actually made me lie down on a couch, which was fucking great. I always have therapy after a major relationship breakdown. I think, this is over, it’s done, I want to get myself into better shape for the next relationship. Anything that lasts for more than 10 years, you’ve got to put the time in.

BG: When I attempted to stop taking drugs and drinking, what helped more than anything was making a commitment to getting up in the morning, getting dressed and going somewhere, swimming, an NA [narcotics anonymous] meeting. Putting structure into a chaotic life, building defences. Because if I drank, I took drugs. If I took drugs, I drank. I didn’t like the way I was behaving. I hated myself. I didn’t like the impact it was having on my wife and kids. I couldn’t take it any more. I was becoming really deranged and paranoid. I was making myself psychotic basically. It was time to make a change, for many reasons, but mainly my family.
In the book, I write about drugs in a particular time period. About being on stage between Robert Young and Andrew Innes, blasting Les Pauls through Marshall stacks, all of us on speed, feeling like a god. I had to write about it: I experienced it, it was a rock’n’roll experience. Same as what got us into acid house was Alan McGee giving us ecstasy. At first, we were: “Fuck that!”

IW: That lasts until your first pill goes down. And then you think you’ve invented acid house.

BG: There’s Andrew Weatherall’s quote: “Ecstasy is a great drug but it’s also very dangerous because you find yourself on the dancefloor, punching the air to Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh.” But you know, ecstasy, acid house, it all goes together. We liked drugs. I loved taking drugs. I wasn’t wrong. We weren’t wrong. I was right to do it. I’m glad I did it. I just got to the point where I couldn’t take them any more and manage myself.

IW: I’ve never quite got to that point… I’ve just been at the Mucky Weekender festival – I haven’t done so much MDMA powder in 15 years… When lockdown started, I thought, I’m not going to drink or take drugs at all until this is over. I don’t want to wake up and find everything shut down. I’m pretty good, I’ll always take four months off at the start of the year and go back on drinks and drugs on April Fools’ Day, do it for the summer, and then October, November, December off again.
BG: You’re seasonal?
IW: I’m a seasonal kind of guy.
Last year saw the loss of Denise Johnson, whose soulful vocals infused Screamadelica. Gillespie says: “She was a big part of the band.” Tenement Kid is dedicated to influential producer/DJ/mixer Andrew Weatherall – who also died last year, of a pulmonary embolism – and Primal Scream guitarist Robert “Throb” Young, who succumbed to drink and drug addictions and died in 2014, aged 49, several years after leaving the band.

BG: Me and Andrew Innes were expecting [Throb’s death] for a few years. But of course I was shocked. I remember where I was when I got the phone call. I was sitting in my car, I felt my body drop to the floor. It’s hard to talk about. It’s deep, personal stuff, I don’t want to upset his family. It was a long process … Throb was my brother, a co-songwriter, a big personality, an incredibly creative, talented man. When we were making Vanishing Point, he kind of stopped being present. He wasn’t there. He missed the whole record. When he was there, when he came up two or three times, he was on another planet, he was gone, he couldn’t play.
When Andrew Weatherall passed, everything in the world just seemed to turn to shit. It was like the end of an era, for want of a better term
Irvine Welsh: He was in pubs in Primrose Hill a lot. He was always great, avuncular and fun. He seemed to lose interest in playing. Give Out But Don’t Give Up, that was the Throb album, wasn’t it? Total guitar, Stones-y kind of thing – he was in his element. Maybe the way the sound moved, he didn’t feel there was a place for him? If you look at any relationship, it’s the same isn’t it? People going in different directions, and not realising it. It’s an organic thing.
BG: That definitely did happen – we knew the band had to change … But the door was always left open. If you look at that album [Vanishing Point], Throb’s got an equal songwriting credit to everyone else. That was us saying: you’re fucking part of the gang.
Andrew Weatherall was considered a pivotal influence on Primal Scream, a facilitator of the rock/acid house fusion of Screamadelica.
BG: One hundred per cent: No Weatherall, no Screamadelica. I write about it in the book, it’s about trust. Trust in his taste. Trust that when he was mixing our stuff, if he threw something at it, it was needed. Andrew worked with Hugo Nicolson, who had the tech knowhow. Andrew had the imagination and the vision, and together they were an incredible team. Weatherall was unique. He wasn’t a musician or a guy who’d been in recording studios. He wasn’t a geek, sitting in the back room with a computer since he was 13. He was a savant, an artist, who had this natural ability to make visionary music.
IW: When Andrew passed, everything in the world just seemed to turn to shit. It was like the end of an era, for want of a better term. His creative and social tentacles went everywhere. He knew all sorts of people, he had all sorts of associations and collaborations. An amazing character, very conceptual and thematic in his thinking. Probably the defining artist of that era, right through the 90s, to the present day.
Do you remember his funeral? We were in that place in Clapham, and everybody was there, from across all different places and times. He kind of united everybody. That was the last night everybody was together and then, bang, the pandemic hit. In a strange way, if he had to go, that was the time to do it.
BG: I remember in the 90s, whenever I called my parents, they’d say: “We’re just back from a funeral.” Now we’ve reached this age.

IW: The scheme where I grew up was the Aids capital of Edinburgh, which was the Aids capital of Europe. I came to expect people to die. I think we’ve maybe become more aware of death during Covid. During lockdown, you couldn’t mourn people or go to funerals, just online nonsense. As a result, we’ve become a lot more focused on death, more morbid as a society. Death has always been around and it’s always going to be around.
At that festival I went to, I was thinking, well, this is kind of normal life now, I got back to normal life…

BG: In August, we did the NHS frontline workers’ benefit gig at the O2, with Liam Gallagher headlining. It was strange. I hadn’t done anything since 2019… It was like being a football player who hadn’t been in training and suddenly you’re playing a game. It took me a few songs to get my sea legs, to start to enjoy it.

I’d only had a one-day rehearsal with the band. I’d been doing promo in France for the record I just did, Utopian Ashes, with Jehnny Beth, and I had to self-isolate… Making Utopian Ashes felt very vulnerable, country soul. All the boys from Primal Scream play on it. I wrote lyrics on acoustic guitar, then worked through ideas with Jehnny Beth and her boyfriend, Johnny Hostile.
IW It’s very good, very different, it touches on another side to you.
BG Thank you. I wanted to get to the heart of adult relationships, to make an adult record that was appropriate to my age. I’ve always wanted to be a better songwriter, a better lyricist. In the past, I could be quite codified about what I wrote to protect myself. From my background, you hid what you felt, you didn’t want to be ridiculed or mocked.
IW The good thing about being a writer is… you become a writer because you think you’re unemployable in any other environment or circumstance. It kind of cements that unemployability, you dig yourself in, five years, 10, 20, nobody’s going to touch you for anything else. Does it ruin you for normal life? It certainly facilitated my own ruination and thank fuck as well… Work is the only thing that keeps me out of trouble. The devil makes work for idle hands. If I’m not working, I’m basically just disrupting.

BG The band have always kept working, one way or another, I’ve always kept working… With this book, at first, I was, no, no, no, but a seed was planted. At the beginning of last year, I didn’t want to make another rock’n’roll record, I’ve done enough of them. I thought, I’m ready to write a book, that’s going to be my project for this year. I wanted to give a good account of myself and my family. I wanted to do something a bit different, something creative, challenging, something I’ve never done before.
The headline to this article was amended on 10 October 2021 to indicate that it was an abridgement of a quote from Bobby Gillespie. The caption for the photo of Primal Scream in circa 1990 was also amended as the given positions of Robert Young and Andrew Innes were transposed in an earlier version.

Decemember 2021 - Classic Rock Magazine - The Soundtrack Of My Life - 09 November 2021: Interview by Ian Fortnam:
“If you don’t dig the MC5, you don’t dig rock’n’roll.”
Having just finished writing his autobiography, Tenement Kid, Bobby Gillespie has spent the past few months considering the formative musical moments that shaped the man and the musician that he became.
“As a kid, stuff’s always going in,” says the Primal Scream vocalist. “It may not seem to have any significance, but you’re always hearing it: when you’re out on your bike, playing football with your pals, climbing walls or pretending you’re in World War II. Music was a huge part of the ambience of life, and I guess that some of it sunk in.”
THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING - My parents’ records. My dad used to play Ray Charles’s Greatest Hits Volume 2, and my mum Hank Williams’ Moanin’ The Blues. They also had The Supremes’ Greatest Hits and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. So all those plus pop radio: The Move, The Troggs, the 1910 Fruitgum Company. It all comes out in Primal Scream at various points. When you’re young you take this stuff on board as if by osmosis.
THE FIRST SONG I PERFORMED LIVE - Sixteen by The Buzzcocks at the Bungalow Bar, Paisley in 1981. Jim Beattie and myself played one song. We’d a drum machine, Jim played bass and I played guitar. And there was no one there. Literally.
THE BEST RECORD I MADE - Give Out But Don’t Give Up. The original Memphis recordings produced by Tom Dowd. The songwriting, musicianship, production… And the intention behind us going to Memphis to record with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and Memphis Horns. I’m very proud of that record.
THE WORST RECORD I MADE - Crystal Crescent. The second single. I asked [label boss] Alan McGee not to release it. In my head it was like we recorded it too fast, didn’t take time to produce or arrange it, and just got this rush of energy – which is probably why some people liked it. But I knew it wasn’t right; too stuttering, too fast. Luckily everybody fell in love with its B-side [Velocity Girl] and forgot about it.
THE GUITAR HERO - Keith Levene of Public Image Limited and John McKay of Siouxsie And The Banshees who, between them, reinvented rock guitar playing.
THE SINGER - There are so many. It’s a very wide-ranging question. I love Keith Hudson. He’s not what people would normally call a singer, but I love his voice: strident, hard, dense, obscure, abstract. I love soulful rock singers like Paul Rodgers, Gillan. And Phil Lynott, a hard rock singer who could sing you into bed. Peter Tosh: militant, righteous. OV Wright, Bobby Blue Bland. Male voices, men who’ve lived, suffered, been wronged; hard lives, real blues.
THE GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME - Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy. It’s half hard rock (Jailbreak, Warriors, Emerald) and half ballads (Running Back, Fight Or Fall, Romeo And The Lonely Girl). Then you’ve got The Cowboy Song which is half ballad, half rocker. It’s a great mix of stuff. Phil Lynott tried to replicate that on every Lizzy album after and it was really hard, because it’d come so naturally. Phil brought a poetic, romantic sensibility to rock. That’s why people loved and still love him. That record hit me at just the right time. I was fifteen and The Boys Are Back In Town was fucking everywhere.
THE MOST UNDERRATED BAND EVER - Foxygen were a really brilliant band who played one of the best gigs I’ve seen this century. They had an album called …And Star Power that was fucking brilliant. They made about four albums and then disappeared.
THE BEST LIVE BAND I’VE SEEN I always wanted to see the Sensational Alex Harvey Band play, but was too young. Then when I was eighteen I saw him on The Mafia Stole My Guitar tour. He played a gig at the Glasgow Apollo and there was no one there. Four years earlier he’d done three nights at the Apollo for Christmas, sold out, and here he was, in his home town, playing one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, to a near-empty hall.
THE BAND I WISH I’D SEEN MC5. My godhead band. Their music represents everything for me: rock, pop, drugs, sex, they’re the prefect looking band. Again, they’re too good for the straights to ever get them. If you don’t dig the MC5, you don’t dig rock’n’oll.
THE SONG I WISH I’D WRITTEN Warren Zevon’s Hasten Down The Wind. It’s about the true pain of two people knowing their relationship is ending but not knowing how to end it. It’s not a song of certainties, it’s two people trapped in a quicksand of dying love; an observation of human frailty, pain, need and longing, and a fantastic love song.
MY SATURDAY NIGHT/PARTY SONG Sister Ann by MC5. Up against the wall, motherfucker.
THE SONG I WANT PLAYED AT MY FUNERAL There’s a couple, but if I say them, somebody might nick them. Okay, the first is a make-’em-cry song: I Feel Like Going Home by Charlie Rich. The other one, for after, is a make-’em-laugh song, but I’m not going to tell you what that is. Get them laughing as well as crying, duality’s always good.
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