STACK NZ Apr #72

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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

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

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

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

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