FEATURE:
Higher Than the Sun
Primal Scream’s Iconic and Mind-Blowing Screamadelica at Thirty
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THERE are a couple of reasons…
why I am coming back to the exceptional third studio album of the Scottish band, Primal Scream. Screamadelica was first released on 23rd September, 1991. It won the first-ever Mercury Prize (or Mercury Music Prize as it would have been known) in 1992. The album features the legendary Manchester singer, Denise Johnson. She sadly died last year. It is amazing to hear what she delivers on the powerful, Don't Fight It, Feel It. Of course, Screamadelica is coming up for its thirtieth anniversary! I do like marking big anniversary for albums that have stood the test of time and are hugely influential. Even if you were not around in 1991, you can listen to Primal Scream’s opus and be transported. One of the album’s producers, the iconic Andrew Weatherall, died last year too. Not to make things too depressing, but it would have been great to have him and Denise Johnson around so they could see the impact Screamadelica still has – and the celebration it will receive on its thirtieth anniversary next month. I am going to source an article and a couple of reviews for Screamadelica. On 17th September, there is a nice package that Primal Scream fans will want to get hold of. As we read on the HMV website, Screamadelica: The 12" Singles is going to be very special:
'Screamadelica' is the third studio album by the Scottish rock band, originally released in 1991. It was Primal Scream's first album to become a commercial success and it pushed the band firmly into the limelight, winning them the Mercury Music Prize in 1992. This 12-inch singles box features nine replicas of the singles from the original campaign, all pressed on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl, as well as a tenth disc, which consists of a previously unheard remix (and accompanying instrumental) of 'Shine Like Stars' by the album's late and beloved producer Andrew Weatherall. The box also features three art prints by the album's cover artist Paul Cannell and a download code”.
There is no doubt that Screamadelica is one of the masterpieces of the 1990s! There are a few huge albums celebrating their thirtieth anniversary next month – including Pearl Jam’s awesome debut, Ten. Actually, there are a couple of articles worth dropping in. If you want the original album, you can get it on vinyl here. In 2018, LOUDER spoke with Bobby Gillespie about the making and impact of Screamadelica. I have selected some sections from the feature:
“I honestly never thought it would be a commercial record,” Gillespie says. “I thought it was going to be just a really cool underground album, like Tago Mago by Can. But then it started getting amazing reviews and just kept selling and selling. I believe it’s sold a couple of million now.”
The success of Screamadelica – led off by two UK Top 30 hits in Loaded and Come Together – was as swift as it was unexpected. Emerging from Glasgow’s early-80s indie scene, Primal Scream had been formed by Gillespie and schoolmate Jim Beattie, fired by punk and the licentious rock’n’ruin of the Stooges and MC5. In fact Gillespie was the drummer for The Jesus And Mary Chain by the time of the Primals’ first official gig, in 1984.
There were a couple of unsteady PS singles, followed by the inclusion of Velocity Girl on the NME’s fabled C86 cassette, a compilation that celebrated the new jingle-jangle dawn of British indie bands. Primal Scream’s debut album, Sonic Flower Groove, in 1987, was an awkward conflation of Love, the Velvet Underground and the Byrds, recorded for McGee’s micro-label Elevation. It peaked at 62 on the UK chart.
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 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. We wrote a lot of the songs on keyboards, though I shouldn’t really be saying that in Classic Rock. I mean, we are a guitar band live, a high-energy rock’n’roll band.”
They were certainly living the life. Screamadelica was a filthy party animal of a record. It was a place where the tribal edicts of rock’n’roll were played out amid the glowstick rallies of rave. The album’s unbowed hedonism was typified by songs like Higher Than The Sun, Gillespie intoning to some imaginary Golden God: ‘I live just for today/Don’t care about tomorrow.’
“That’s exactly how I felt,” Gillespie says today. “I didn’t care if I died. I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s all there in the lyrics. We were out there taking ecstasy and speed. Speed was our main drug of choice, then people got more money and got into cocaine, then they got into heroin and it kind of fucked everything up. But I can’t really include heroin here, because while we were making the record it’d be speed and ecstasy. We’d never record on it though; you can’t play rock’n’roll on ecstasy.
“Acid house was similar to the LSD explosion of the sixties. The music was different, but I think it released a similar amount of energy and creativity in people who maybe hadn’t realised they had that inside them before. The energy in the clubs was intense. It reminded me of early rock’n’roll and punk. And that energy was extremely seductive. So we were up for days, living what it says in the songs. Being up for days meant we were exposed to a lot of great scenes and wild, strange, dangerous people. And fucking weird scenes with weird women. But we were a serious band when it came to recording and gigs. We may have partied at the weekends, but every week we were in the studio writing. At that point in your life you’re really out to prove to the world what you can do.
“We had a fucking great time, and that found its way into the music and the songs. I think it’s a very euphoric record. To me it’s ecstatic rock’n’roll. It’s what rock’n’roll should be: joyous and celebratory.”
So was Screamadelica ultimately a balancing act between guest producers and the Primals’ own artistic vision?
“With Andy Weatherall, I think we were both coming from the same place,” Gillespie offers. “I think we married a rock’n’roll attitude and sensibility and songwriting instinct to Andy’s knowledge of the dancefloor and contemporary rhythms. Also, Andy was a bit of a punk. He wasn’t a musician, but what he had was ideas in abundance. I think the best records are not just made by people with loads of technique, it’s about attitude and imagination. And between Andy and us – and The Orb and Jimmy Miller – we made a fantastic record. I’ve got to give those guys credit, but then they did what producers are supposed to do.
Producers are supposed to enhance your songs and suggest things. For example, I know the Stones struggled with the rhythm of Honky Tonk Women, then Jimmy Miller came up with the cowbell intro. Charlie Watts says that it was Jimmy’s riff. And that’s one of the most famous intros in the whole of rock’n’roll.”
True to their own wilful nature, Primal Scream refused to repeat Screamadelica. Give Out But Don’t Give Up, in ’94, was instead a return to the visceral charge of time-worn rock’n’roll. The music press largely bemoaned the fact that this was no Son Of Screamadelica, and duly waded in. True, the album may have been uneven, but there were more than a few choice moments.
“Even if we’d wanted to we couldn’t have made another Screamadelica,” reasons Gillespie. “We were in a different place, and so was Andy Weatherall. I know that he didn’t – and we didn’t – expect that success. And then we went away and toured the world. Some of the band got into heroin. My take on it is that the creativity seized up a little. It was a really strange period, then out of that came the …Don’t Give Up album. We could have made a better record than that, but maybe that record was as good as it could be. There are two songs from that that we play live every night: Rocks and Jailbird. At the time, the music press in Britain slagged it. But when we play Rocks at our gigs these days, younger and younger generations just love it and the place goes fucking nuts. To me it’s like School’s Out by Alice Cooper”.
I want to come to a couple of critical reviews for 1991’s Screamadelica. There is no doubt there will be new focus and attention ahead of its thirtieth anniversary – not just because of the timelessness of the album; the fact Andrew Weatherall and Denise Johnson are no longer here adds extra poignancy and importance. THE LIST published a feature back in 2011, breaking down the components of Screamadelica:
“25% An Acid House Defining Sound
As described in the recent Creation Records rockumentary Upside Down, Screamadelica’s story began in 1989 after Creation boss Alan McGee relocated from London to Manchester for a year to be at the epicentre of one of the biggest youth culture phenomena Britain had witnessed since punk – acid house, and the so-called second summer of love. He began preaching the gospel of E to Primal Scream singer and bezzie mate Bobby Gillespie, whose band were hitherto jangly indie also-rans that had failed to deliver Creation a single hit in six years. In a cauldron of pills, crossover experimentation and all-night raving, Screamadelica was cooked. Hailed as an instant classic upon its release in 1991, it won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize, framed the zeitgeist and enshrined rock’s enslavement to the beat.
5% Bobby Gillespie’s Swagger
The Primal Scream frontman has always been a divisive figure, with a personality veering from righteous groover to arrogant, lunkheaded prick over the years, depending on his mood and state of intoxication. But the cult of Screamadelica owed everything to his totemic presence, as did the fate of Creation. Screamadelica was Creation’s first in a clutch of epochal albums, and it turned the iconic label’s fortunes around in time for them to sign Oasis and sell tens of millions of records worldwide. ‘I couldn’t have done it without Gillespie,’ says Creation boss Alan McGee at the end of Upside Down of his old Glasgow schoolmate, a figure in whose footsteps Liam and Noel Gallagher promptly followed, swaggering.
35% Pills, Thrills and … more Pills
Nobody will be rubbing their hands together in greedy anticipation of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica performance more than Glasgow’s drug dealers. It’s the quintessential ecstasy album – the very sound of guys on pills making music to take pills to. Gillespie has described ecstasy as the drug that ‘opened everyone’s minds’ during recording sessions. Without it Screamadelica would probably have never existed. Or at least it would have sounded very different, as proven by its lackluster 1994 follow-up Give Out But Don’t Give Up, which was made after the band had developed such serious smack habits they actually thought they were The Rolling Stones.
10% Andrew Weatherall’s Production
The undersung hero of Screamadelica is producer Andrew Weatherall, the Windsor bricklayer turned DJ who was central to a London enclave of acid house centered around the Islington club night Shoom. He brought an inventive, eclectic cut’n’paste aesthetic to bear on the album. ‘Loaded’, for example, is simply a remix of Primal Scream’s ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’ overlaid with a sampled bassline, bits of obscure movie dialogue and a Gillespie lyric borrowed from Robert Johnson’s ‘Terraplane Blues’. ‘I’m just glad I was part of something that resonates 20 years later,’ a modest Weatherall recently told The List.
20% Songs to Come Up To
As the oft-quoted sample from Peter Fonda B-movie The Wild Angels at the start of ‘Loaded’ (see below) concludes with the lines ‘We’re gonna have a good time, we’re gonna have a party,’ be sure that an SECC on MDMA will follow suit. From the Stonesy gospel of ‘Moving On Up’, through the soulful, psych-frazzled 10-minute epic ‘Come Together’ and the beatific dub of ‘Step Inside This House’, Screamadelica is an album that repeatedly lives up to the title of its standout track ‘Higher Than The Sun’.
5% Songs to Come Down To
While it’s best known as an album for enjoying on a high, Screamadelica is also a record sensitive to the lows too, both emotional and chemical, be it the broken-hearted bluesy wail of ‘Damaged’, or the dawn haze of the almost sea shanty-esque final come down ‘Shine Like Stars’, which sees the album wash out woozily to the sound of a wheezing harmonium and lapping waves”.
Before wrapping up, here are a couple of reviews for Screamadelica. I don’t think many who have approached the album have given it anything but glowing praise – maybe one or two were not sure how to perceive it in 1991 but have changed their opinions in the years since. This is what Entertainment Weekly offered in their 1991 review:
“…The musical palette is a bit broader on Screamadelica, the first full U.S. release from Primal Scream. My personal favorite is the band’s cover of Roky Erickson’s ”Slip Inside This House”; with their wound-up house-music version, they pull off a nice aural pun. Elsewhere you get everything from thoroughly modernized Stones (”Movin’ On Up”) to a thoroughly rocked-up take on the percolating black pop of Soul II Soul (”Don’t Fight It, Feel It”). Ultimately, though, the pastiches backfire a bit; the dizzying array of styles keeps the band from developing a consistent personality….Screamadelica: B+”.
I am really looking forward to seeing and hearing what is said of Screamadelica on its thirtieth anniversary. I discovered the album when it came out in September 1991. It took a few years before I completely appreciated and understood the album, as I was eight when it was released. Now, it is this broad masterpiece; a real musical odyssey. I often wonder whether a short film could be constructed around the album’s songs - such is their power and vivid nature. One cannot put Screamadelica on in the background: it is an album that needs to be played loud and focused on!
Pitchfork investigated Screamadelica in 2016. This is what they had to say about a mind-blowing album that is among the most-acclaimed and revered in all of music:
“If welding "dance" and "rock" was all it achieved, its 18-month gestation would have hurt Screamadelica. The album might have been a mere appendix to a briefly promising scene. Fortunately, Screamadelica's power isn’t in an abstract clash of two different genres, but in the marriage of two very similar sensibilities.
One is Bobby Gillespie’s. Primal Scream’s output has sometimes been dismissed as "record collection rock", their versatility no more than a procession of learned poses – the Byrds, rave, krautrock, post-punk. But Gillespie’s approach is less bandwagon-jumping and more a kind of aesthetic cosplay, where his fannish intensity of identification works to overcome the limitations of technique. The comedown blues of "Damaged" is Screamadelica’s weakest song, but Gillespie’s conviction makes it essential to the record.
The other is producer Andy Weatherall’s. Weatherall, along with Terry Farley who remixed the "Come Together" single, was part of the Boy’s Own DJ and fanzine collective in the earliest days of London Acid House. Boy’s Own loved big, uplifting records, played any genre they fancied, and everything they did, in print or on record, was touched with a cheeky swagger. The euphoric splash of Italo house piano at the climax of "Don’t Fight It, Feel It", Screamadelica’s most floor-ready track, is a great Weatherall moment.
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”.
I would suggest to anyone who has not heard Screamadelica to stream or buy the album. It is a revolutionary release. Whilst there are some associations between Screamadelica and drugs such as LSD and MDMA, it is the musical invention and the sheer power of the songs that is the most important aspect. It is hard to believe that it is almost thirty years old! A lot of albums from 1991 sound a bit tired or dated now. That is not true of Screamadelica. Primal Scream’s third studio album was not only a progression for them. It was a huge album full stop! One that, in many ways, few have been able to equal! Starting with the epic Movin' on Up, Screamadelica is an album without any……
WEAKNESSES or less-than-genius tracks.