Tonight’s selections from Primal Scream’s third album, Screamadelica.
As psychedelic drugs (re)conquered England, the C86 crowd began infiltrating the burgeoning rave scene, and the bowl haircuts and Rickenbackers were replaced by baggy pants and sampling equipment practically overnight. Primal Scream seized the moment brilliantly — if inadvertently. Letting DJ friend Andrew Weatherall (who'd never been in a recording studio before) have a go at remixing “I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have,” a track from Primal Scream, he chopped out most of the original song, threw in a groove and loads of samples (including Peter Fonda dialogue from The Wild Angels) and emerged with the awesome “Loaded.”
“Loaded” primed the works for the dazzling Screamadelica, a dance album with a rock album's accessibility. Primal Scream found itself reborn as an avatar of pop/ambient/house. Although the technicolor sound was basically masterminded by Weatherall and programmer Hugo Nicholson (apart from [Bobby] Gillespie [vox], the actual band seems to appear on less than half of its own album), Primal Scream's flagrant derivativeness works beautifully to its advantage in this format: MC5 quotes and guitar solos appear in the middle of tripped-out dance grooves, and the group spans three generations of British beat by collaborating with Jimmy Miller, Jah Wobble and the Orb on a single disc. A truly inspired fusion of pop, rock and dance, Screamadelica brought new respectability to the word “influences,” and even won the prestigious British Mercury Award. — Trouser Press
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Movin' on Up [1991]
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Conceived and fashioned as a convergence between the hedonism of club culture and join-the-dots record collection rock/pop, Screamadelica led with the exultant, Stones- in-gospel-mode- infused swagger of Movin' On Up, produced by Jimmy Miller, the man behind the Glimmer Twins' finest albums in the late 1960's and early 1970's. An unrecognisable, sinister electronic interpretation of the 13th Floor Elevators' Slip Inside This House followed, an 'Amen' breakbeat monster in which lead singer Bobby Gillespie's reedy pipes were absent and replaced by those of guitarist Robert Young, the first sign of the band's catholic, open-ended approach to authorship and collaboration: their attitude during this frenetic period of creativity was one of “whatever sound, instrument, voice or tempo fits the track”
The album's centre-piece and mission statement, Come Together, dragged Screamadelica into a rarefied stratosphere; Andrew Weatherall rebuilt the Scream's original, Terry Farley-produced song and plundered a stirring, goosebump-inducing speech by Jesse Jackson from the 1972 Wattstax concert (“Today on this program you will hear gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz, all of those are just labels, we know that music is music”) as a flanged chassis upon which to concoct a regal, gospel-house lope that seamlessly stitched together disparate musical elements with an ingenious delight in boundary-shattering. — Vinyl Chapters
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Come Together [1990]
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Despite the media's almost unstinting disapproval, that second Primal Scream album did at least snag the imagination of one punter. The band's press officer, Jeff Barrett, had given a copy to his good friend Andrew Weatherall, a club DJ and publisher of a fanzine called Boy's Own. Weatherall was much taken with the album's ballads, particularly I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have. Urged on by Barrett, Weatherall remixed the song, dug out a drum loop from an Italian bootleg version of an Edie Brickell tune and added an intro from the old Peter Fonda biker flick The Wild Angels: 'Just what is it that you want to do?/We wanna be free/We wanna be free to do what we wanna do/And we wanna get loaded'. The band themselves were intrigued and, thus, Loaded was born.
Loaded was released as a single in March 1990, and reached made No.16 in the chart. It was Primal Scream's first UK Top 40 hit, and one that had the curious effect of crowning this most rock'n'roll of bands as the new darlings of the rave scene. The success of Loaded led to Alan McGee [Creation Records owner] putting the band on a weekly wage of £50.
“We were on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme just before that,” Gillespie recalls. “We were absolutely skint. He gave us an advance of a few thousand pounds, so we built a studio in Hackney, on Tudor Road. We rented an office and turned it into a writing studio. We wrote a lot of Screamadelica in there. — Louder Sound
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Loaded [1990]
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The meeting of these approaches – unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom – is what gives Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. One result is that the record is often better when Bobby Gillespie is a presiding spirit rather than an actual singer. Compare album centrepiece "Come Together" with its single version, where Gillespie enacts a loved-up Ecstasy high in winsome style. The LP drops his vocals, reshapes the track around the gospel backing singers, and it becomes something titanic. It's a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring. "All those are just labels", thunders a sampled Reverend Jesse Jackson, "We know that music is music." If you want to know how joyful – and how corny – pop's discovery of rave could feel in 1991, this is where to start.
Other high points use the frontman better. "Higher Than The Sun" casts Gillespie as an astral voyager in a post-rave take on Tim Buckley's "Starsailor". He sounds as awed by its soundscape of hoots, harpsichords, ambient drift and trumpet blasts as the listener. 13th Floor Elevators cover "Slip Inside This House" is just as questing, but more earthy and urgent, with a ragged-voiced Robert Young pushed beyond his limits by the groove.
Screamadelica is a limit-breaking exercise in general, exploring a central question: what is 'a band' in the remix age? One reason the LP remains a classic is that its answer to this is so bold and open-ended – 'Primal Scream' here is anything from a rock group having the time of their lives on "Movin' On Up", to a vaporous but definite presence on "Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts)". The scoffers' question about "Loaded" – is this really Primal Scream? – is firmly answered: it is if it feels that way. — Pitchfork
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Slip Inside This House [1991]
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It's fitting that the winner of the inaugural Mercury Music Prize back in 1992 was an album which, by its very nature and the influential ripples it sent out, was routinely described as mercurial. Screamadelica proved to be a not just a game-changer for the band who made it, but a symbol of ideas and possibilities that shone brightly above the detritus of the post-Madchester landscape.
Whereas the likes of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays tentatively flirted with the hybrid, Primal Scream's full-on sonic assault was a daring, determined collision between traditional indie-rock tropes and the kaleidoscopic nooks and crannies of club culture. Given those touchstones, it's no surprise that chemicals played a part in its gestation (it topped a 2011 NME chart of Druggiest Albums Ever), although it's far from the product of spaced-out chancers with no sense of purpose.
Inevitably, the grandeur of Screamadelica and the place it holds in so many fans' hearts casts a giant shadow over the Primals' subsequent eight albums, and Gillespie is on record saying it has occasionally felt like an albatross around the band's neck. But if you must have an albatross, it's good to have a magnificent one that continues to fly so high with no sign of ever coming down. — Record Collector
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Higher Than the Sun [1991]
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