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I
t’s colder than belly-blue hell in
Bobby Gillespie’s car, but that’s
where he’s sitting to take my call.
His house is full of people and he can
only get peace out here, but he refuses to
keep the motor running for the heater. “I
was going to try that but I’m scared in case
I end up f-cking poisoning myself,” he says
in his sing-song Glaswegian accent. “You’d
get a great interview out of that. Greatest
f-cking byline!”
The conversation revolves around
Primal Scream’s new album
Chaosmosis,
which is a Catherine wheel of analogue
and electronic sounds that blend into a
compelling collection of disco-rock, from
the bossa nova of
I Can Change
(“That was
one of those plug-ins – you press down a
key, and it plays a chord and a beat behind
that”) to the brilliant duet with Sky Ferreira,
Where The Light Gets In
(“Sometime
in 2013, I discovered Sky – I became
obsessed by her song,
Everything Is
Embarrassing
. I played it on repeat. There’s
something deeply emotional about her, and
at the same time kind of vulnerable”).
But the veteran musician finds the
most to say about stand-out cut
100%
Or Nothing
. “The song ends with: ‘100
percent or nothing can’t be true, I don’t
want you; 100 percent of nothing is what
you get, what did you expect’ – that’s the
full chorus. You want to feel commitment,”
he explains. “I think that’s the romantic
in me. Of course, when I was younger
and f-cking about, I didn’t really care so
much. It was kind of cool to know the
other person didn’t want commitment.
Those kind of relationships, they are what
they are. I guess if you’re narcissistic like
me, then you want to worship and be
worshipped.”
Those contradictory thoughts bled
through into the track’s form: “The
music is euphoric and you can dance to
it, but the music suggested to me that
the lyrics should be about pain. I call it
‘ecstatic depressive realism.’ You just feel
everything’s so f-cking futile and you just
can’t – here comes my wife, actually,”
he interrupts himself. “I’m talking about
relationships!” he yells out the car window
at her. “She just went ‘Oh,’ and winked,” he
informs me. “Looking good. Looking good.”
Chaosmosis
is a gumbo of approaches,
peeled from the ten previous albums
that Gillespie and his bandmates
– Andrew Innes (guitar), Martin
Duffy (keyboards), Simone
Butler (bass) and Darrin Mooney
(drums) – have created through
the group's various embodiments
over the last three decades.
“We did what we’ve always done: we
just mixed electronics with live musicians,”
Gillespie says. “Andrew was going crazy
with the plug-ins; he was coming out with
all these incredible sounds and riffs and
ideas. The atmosphere of the rhythm with
the riff, that would just trigger off an idea in
my mind and I’d start singing.”
The connections between musicians
can be as volatile as romantic ones, but
you don’t get to thirty years of
musical success by resting on your
laurels. “I don’t think anyone said
relationships were going to be
easy,” says Gillespie. “But I think
some are worth fighting for.”
•
Chaosmosis
by Primal Scream
is out now