Primal Scream grace the cover of Issue 29 of Clash, here we present the full version of the interview.
Read more about the issue here.
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Clash: So ninth album, you kinda gotta go for ten now don’t you?
MANI: No…
BOBBY: Well Celtic did nine championships in a row… It’s a Gary Glitter song ‘nine in a row, nine in a row’
MANI: Long may it continue. The music is just flowing out of us at the minute.
BOBBY: Somebody told me the other day that when we go back to Japan and play Mount Fuji …it will be the sixty seventh gig and we’ve been there sixteen times…
MANI: Lets make it a European cup winning sixty seventh then.
Clash: Have you managed to come round and start supporting England then yet Bobby?
You have to be funny to work with us. Or we’ll destroy you.
BOBBY: No, no I don’t support England.
MANI: I support football, that’s why I don’t support England, coz they are shit.
BOBBY: I support a wife and two kids.
Clash: It seems to have been quite a smooth transition from this album to the next, it has been pretty quick. How are you feeling now that it’s out? What’s the perspective on it?
MANI: Do you know what, for ‘Riot City Blues’, we recorded that pretty quick and went straight on tour and just decided we didn’t want to stop because we felt that good about what was happening amongst the band you know, so you know, we were fucking smoking last year and we just wanted to continue with it and keep the energy going instead of going off to Gloustershire making cheese at the fucking cheese factory you know?
BOBBY: We toured ‘Riot City Blues’ up to December 2006, January 2007 and we were back in the studio writing. This album was written by September, October last year and we recorded the first two songs, we recorded ‘Beautiful Future’ and ‘Can’t Go Back’ with Paul Epworth.
Clash: And did you write them on the tour?
BOBBY: No, we never write on tour. You hear of those bands that do… no no we don’t, we are too busy.
MANI: Every afternoon it’s like ‘lets book some studio time’. Yeah right!
BOBBY: You know what, I think that when you are on tour you are there to play live, and your whole being, your whole day, your whole energy going into that hour and half on stage every night so it’s all about psyching yourself up and getting ready to perform well to the people that come to see you and to, you know, play well. So I don’t really see a place for writing songs on the tour.
MANI: You can get inspired, or get an idea that stays logged in there.
BOBBY: The band might do something on a sound check and play in a different rhythm or something or somebody hits a riff and you think ‘oh that’s fucking good, that’s a bit different, better remember that’ but you know, sitting in a room after a gig with an acoustic guitar, no not for us.
Clash: So how did the writing, what period was it written in?
BOBBY: I would say, if we started in January, I would say March. We messed about for about six weeks, not messed about but we were trying to find a way and by sometime in March we wrote ‘Can’t Go Back’ which is the first single and I can’t remember the order in which they were written in but I remember that ‘Can’t Go Back’ was the first one and Andrew Innes started playing guitar in a different style coz in the last album he played in a very bluesy, garagey, rock and roll kinda way and in this, when we wrote ‘Can’t Go Back’ it’s a very staccato, machine like precise angular guitar style. He started playing guitar like that and so it was like ‘this is different, this is exciting’, so we started writing songs in that style, you know? We all started playing differently and writing differently and singing differently so and I think after that we wrote ‘Beautiful Future’ and Uptown I think it might have been the next two, I’m not sure what order they were in but again, they were different from anything that we had done before and that’s how it went. Suddenly we wrote three or four songs and thought ‘hey, we’re on the way to writing a new album’ so it was exciting, we knew we were on our way to something good, so I guess, does that answer your question?
As far as I can remember, and what Mani said earlier, because we had such a good year, great gigs you know, really well attended gigs in the November, December ‘Riot City Blues Tour’. The energy level was so high in the band, we were playing so great and we were getting so much great reactions from the audiences that we thought this is just so exciting, we just got to keep going. And you know, here we are.
Clash: So quite optimistic compared to, well not ‘Riot City Blues’, but before that you had quite a dark edge but the songs seem really upbeat.
BOBBY: They are ecstatic and euphoric but there’s not a real optimistic, I think the energy and the mood of the songs is euphoric and ecstatic and I always use those two words, but…
Clash: ‘Beautiful Future’ is obviously quite a cast to the upbeat?
MANI: The overall vibe for me is just about enjoying being together and enjoying playing music. That’s it you know, we love being with each other, and what better thing in life that to just ponce around a room and fucking make rock and roll music? It’s great.
BOBBY: Our world view hasn’t changed. We are affected by the culture, affected by everything that happens. It’s in the album, it’s in our music, it’s in our songs.
Clash: There’s only so long that you can be disparaging about the world, and obviously…
BOBBY: You should listen to the record then, its not like everything is bright and rosy and beautiful. It’s not love, peace, and flowers kind of hippy thing. We had a great hit record last year and we feel great, it’s a punk record. It’s a view of things. It’s very strongly put across in this record.
MANI: We don’t do smug and contented.
BOBBY: We don’t like the way things are, and you know what? We are writing about it and singing about it you know?
MANI: Once again, I am going to use this on, eh, the Primal Scream Trojan horse comes rolling out. People think you get one thing and it sounds a certain way, but if they did a little deeper people will find out there’s something else going on underneath it.
BOBBY: It’s bubblegum with razor blades in it. That’s my little phrase.
Clash: So what kind of emotions do you go through before you, at this point just before you know that it’s just about to go right round the world?
BOBBY: Well knowing that it is a good album, I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’m proud of it, proud of the band. I’m really happy, I think that we did really good work and we’ve excelled ourselves in this record and we’ve done things in this record that we have never done before, so it’s kinda like everything we dreamed about and dreamed the record would be it is, that’s like a satisfying feeling I think. No it is a satisfying feeling, I think it’s a great record.
MANI: We just hope people enjoy it as much as anything because at the end of the day we’ve got to please ourselves before we can please anybody else and if we’re happy then it comes out, you know, and I hope that people just get on it and enjoy what it does.
BOBBY: Yeah I love it.
Clash: So has there been any changes in the band that fans would be interested in? Is it still pretty stable?
BOBBY: Completely, yeah.
MANI: We’ve been ten years, and it’s as good as with this line up now so there’s no reason to change it.
BOBBY: It’s a great line up, I love it. It’s fantastic, it’s a great band. I wouldn’t change it for the world, it’s great.
Clash: So I think you’ve had about twenty people over the years and the last ten years has just been…
People are getting force-fed bollocks and swallowing it. I’m not having it.
BOBBY: Yeah but do you know what? People might have been in the band for fucking two months, or a tour or they might have played live with the band for a little bit but they’ve never been in the studio with the band. The core of the band is tight core. There is the tight core of the band then there and other people that come in. You might have a horn section or backing vocals just to augment a live show, but they are not really band members. The core of the band has been strong for ten or twelve year now, the same core members.
Clash: I’ve not seen a finished copy of the record, how are the writing credits, who wrote what?
BOBBY: It’s a group thing
Clash: What did you differently with this album compared to the last one?
BOBBY: Well I told you earlier when I was talking about the guitar playing being different.
Clash: On ‘Can’t Go Back’?
BOBBY: On everything. It kinda laid down the law for everything, it was a more angular style.
MANI: I suppose if you approach every album with the same way you approached the last one then you become involved in the repetition.
BOBBY: And also we got into the production thing in terms of we wanted it to sound big and expensive like Roxy Music records. Not copying a Roxy Music record but that really expensive production, we wanted it to be a really big sound, we don’t want it to be dark, garegey or grungey you know, we wanted it to be really expensive sounding like a pop sound as well, shiny and beautiful.
Clash: Its definitely got that. Did you chose Bjorn because of that? How did that hook up come about?
MANI: I like his style of how he does everything. He knows how to use space instead of just chucking in a lick or a fill in every available gap you know? He is a very minimalist kind of guy in the way that he thinks about things. He’s tremendous with his thought and arranging things and stuff like that. It’s very helpful and easy and…
BOBBY: Bjorn, his aesthetic is very much drums, he loves drums.
Is he the drummer in Peter, Bjorn and John?
BOBBY: Keyboards I think. I think he plays bass with them but.
MANI: I think he plays everything, he’s a talented git.
BOBBY: Yeah but he’s really interested in drums. He loves Bo Diddly. His whole thing was that, he was like ‘your band reminds me of Bo Diddly’ and I was like ‘what? I don’t know what you mean’ and I think what he meant was just his obsession with rhythm. Not always trance like drums and he said ‘I just love the way your band is really rhythmic’ and his whole thing was about keeping it really simple, clear and uncluttered and also very drum driven. Really big simple glam drum beats. He was really into that, which we were into. We were pushed, if you listen to the demo we had these big glam drum beats but he wanted to make it even more minimal and more primitive. So we were like great. He is a great producer and he encouraged Primal Scream to be Primal Scream. The things that he loved in the band, he wanted to encourage rather than inhibit, which some producers can do. Some producers try to mould you into their vision of what rock music should be, where as with him it was more about trying to maximise the great things about Primal Scream, that’s what I think anyways. And he gave us the courage to do the things that we were good at, so to me that’s why he is a really good producer, he’s really thoughtful and he’s a really funny guy as well. You have to be funny to work with us. Or we’ll destroy you. He had a great sense of humour you know. Musically he was great you know and hes got a really good pop sensibility and I think that really helped. He wasn’t coming from a rock sensibility, it was pop. The rock and roll that he loved was great rock and roll. Buddy Holly, Bo Diddly.
Clash: When was the last time you as a band tried to go for a more pop aesthetic?
BOBBY: This album.
Clash: I know but before this?
BOBBY: Before this? I’d probably say Screamadelica.
I know, I was gonna say that it has been a bit of a dirty word over the past ten years or so for bands to say ‘lets go poppy’.
BOBBY: Some Velvet Morning with Kate Moss is pretty poppy if you ask me. That was a very pop move. But I think that Screamadelica is very poppy.
MANI: It’s not as if we sit down and go ‘we’re going to make a pop album this time’. Things just evolve and happen and if something good comes out then it’s like ‘fucking hell, how did that happen? Great, lets go with it’
BOBBY: What Mani says is right, things really just evolve, If anything this record is more melodic than the previous few. I think that with ‘Vanishing Point’, because we had had enough of writing song songs, you know, verse verse chorus chorus, middles, and bridges, and intros we just felt that we had been straight jacketed, it was inhibiting creativity you know. So we went and did it our way and so we concentrated more on sound and atmosphere and rhythm. Make music inspire art which is hoe we got ‘Evil Hate’, ‘Exterminator’, and ‘Vanishing Point’. ‘Riot City Blues’ was song based but it was more rock and roll song based, this is more something else you know. More structured pop songs. In saying that, most of the songs are the same three or four chords all the way thorough. ‘Beautiful Future’ and ‘Can’t Go Back’, it is the same chord sequence the whole way through.
MANI: We don’t like to do things mathematically precise.
BOBBY: It’s almost like a one chord thing, isn’t it? Most people have bridge chords, verse chords, chorus chords and they all change, whereas with us it’s more if there are four chords in the verse then it’s the same four chords in the chorus. Two chords for the verse the it’s the same two chords for the chorus, which is just kind of like a motor, isn’t it? That’s hard to do as well though, that’s like a James Brown thing, take it back to James Brown when you get one bass line. We do that a lot. One great bass line and we play it all the way through: like ‘Uptown’ It’s song writing skills you know. We don’t arrive at it by chance, it is a skill. It is a aesthetic, a really strong aesthetic.
Clash: So Bjorn has a really narrow idea of what he wanted?
BOBBY: No, not narrow. No, it was very wide. His ideas were very wide, they were kind of like, they were very all encompassing. Not narrow at all. He was very much up for trying things out and experimenting. He just wants space in the songs.
MANI: That’s exactly what I love about him, sometimes what you don’t play is better than what you do play and he achieved that.
Clash: And then Paul Epworth, how did he shuffle into the frame?
BOBBY: Epworth is a great guy.
Clash: Did you target him or was that just a hook up?
BOBBY: We searched the record company and said that with this album we wanted to work with new, young, new producers with a lot of energy. Just to see what that would do, to see how we would react to them and hoe they would react to us. And so they set up a meeting with Epworth and we met with him last August or something and he was great. We liked him as a guy, we just thought that he was a nice guy and I think it was about last September, October we set up a session with him and recorded ‘Can’t Go Back’ and ‘Beautiful Future’. It was a really good session, two or three days I think. We did three tracks, we scrapped one of them and the other two are the first two tracks on the album. So that was great, that was a good session. In retrospect it was a good session.
Clash: What did you learn most from him?
BOBBY: Epworth?
Clash: Yeah, any revelations?
BOBBY: Okay. Well, what was good about him was…Yeah, again with him is that he must be late twenties, early thirties and with him, he was just great. He has a lot of energy, he had a lot of ideas, he never stopped once you know. The session just kept on always flowing and if he tried something out and it didn’t work then he was right onto the next thing, while we were trying that he was always thinking. He was always thinking ahead. He’s musical, he has got a lot of great ideas, he’s got fucking boundless amounts of energy. He has got the energy of like a kid almost.
MANI: He is a great guy.
BOBBY: He is a fucking great guy and I think that he is a good producer. And what we got from him was like an energy high. And also his enthusiasm, his ideas, I’d work with him again, I think he is great. Epworth is great, I think he is brilliant, I love Epworth. He’s fucking brilliant.
Clash: With your producers, you have Kevin and Andrew, but you like to throw new ones in don’t you?
MANI: Well you never know what people can bring to the party unless you try something new.
BOBBY: You won’t make new records unless you work with new people. It’s a fact. You just make the sane record over and over again.
MANI: It probably works for some people, it probably works for Radiohead to work with Nigel… a lot.
BOBBY: Did he produce their last album?
MANI: Mabye so, I’m not sure. It doesn’t work for us that way, we are on an exploration thing. Trying out different things, a bit of danger. It gives some up and coming kid a chance. He’s not gonna be sat there smug and fat thinking I’ve got everything and I know everything beciuase I made as hit record. We want kids that are up for it, mean, lean and a bit dangerous.. Kids that are up for it.
BOBBY: You wanna try new things, it’s a different mentality you know. Sometimes you get older guys and that can be great.
Clash: What legendary ones would you like? Who would you chose?
BOBBY: Phil Specter. He is the master, he is the master. I would do anything to do a session with Specter.
MANI: You’d have to take a gun in with you.
BOBBY: I would be disappointed if he didn’t pull a gun on me. I’d want my fucking money back. ‘We want out money back’, I love that chant, I love it. It’s the best chant ever isn’t it?
Clash: So what did you think when you heard Brian Eno was working with Coldplay?
BOBBY: Well, nothing. It doesn’t bother me.
MANI: I don’t think he has moved into an electro punk, they’ve not shifted that far from their comfortable access. But I think that ‘Violet Hill’ thing is trying to be a little bit more upbeat for them.
BOBBY: You know I am sure, I haven’t heard their record right…
MANI: I’m sure. I’ve met Chris a couple of times and they are lovely. Anyone who is not in the business is slagging it off and commenting on it.
BOBBY: Yeah i’m sure they are sincere in what they are doing. they are just doing what they are doing. I haven’t heard it but I am sure they are just trying to make a different kind of record from the ones they have made before just to rave in their interviews.
MANI: Ian McCulloch’s solicitor will be on the phone first thing on Monday morning. There are a lot of men influencing him.
BOBBY: He thinks he is Bowie doesn’t he?
MANI: Everyone thinks that they are somebody else. I think I’m you.
That must be a dark thing.
BOBBY: I was gonna say something evil there but I can’t be bothered.
MANI: He thinks he’s more me than him.
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