Bobby Gillespie: “I’m trying to work out what you do with a band that’s been going as long as we have”

Primal Scream’s twelfth album Come Ahead marks a distinctive break with recent records. In this extended version of the interview in this month’s Uncut, Bobby Gillespie talks us through the radical changes in the Scream’s music-making from the ‘80s through Screamadelica to the present, social justice, his deep bonds with Andrew Innes and his late dad, and writing age-appropriate songs as a sixty-something rocker.

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UNCUT: It seems like the lyrics on Come Ahead follow on from some of the breakthroughs you made on Utopian Ashes, the album you made with Jehnny Beth.

BOBBY GILLESPIE: Definitely. I wrote the lyrics for Utopian Ashes just before I wrote my book Tenement Kid, and between those two releases something was unlocked and made free.

Had you become more confident that you could stand up and make art outside of Primal Scream?

With the book, definitely. We could actually have released Utopian Ashes as a Primal Scream album because I wrote 90% of the lyrics and about 90% of the melodies, and Andrew [Innes] and myself did all of the chords. But also with that record my writing process was different. Since Vanishing Point in ’96, it would be Andrew and myself in the studio, and Andrew would build up textures and atmospheres and rhythms, then I’d write lyrics that I felt would go with that particular soundscape. And we did away with chords. I’m not putting us up with these guys, but with let’s say James Brown or Fela Kuti or Miles Davis, everything’s just on the one chord, and there was influence from that stuff. We would go to the studio five days a week, Andrew would play synths and sequencers, and we’d build tracks from the bottom up, making albums as studio creations. We started Utopian Ashes like that, but thenI started adding chords with an acoustic guitar here at home and shaping the songs in a more traditional way. I was doing it on my own, and that gave me courage. And when it came to Come Ahead I found that I’d written all the lyrics before the record. They were poems. Whole sets of lyrics would come to me, and then I’d pick up the acoustic guitar.

It’s quite a psychological shift in your role in the band. Now it all starts with you.

That’s true, the collaboration comes later. We had this really good thing going for years. But I’d been writing lyrics to try and fit the music, and that was very constricting. I felt that I had more to say, and I found myself writing these long-forms songs. I thought, is this gonna be a folky kind of record? Is it gonna be singer-songwriter? You’ve gotta understand that we grew up in the ‘70s, and the blueprint for commercial rock and roll was two verses and two choruses. It takes a lot of skill to say a lot in two verses, and a lot of the times what I was saying was quite fractured, but I was writing to fit into a structure that would make an exciting pop or rock and roll record. With the original guitarist Jim [Beattie]’s beautiful elegiac 12-string then Robert Young and Andrew Innes, I was always thinking about hooks and guitar riffs. That busted open with Screamadelica when we started writing on keyboards and collaborating with Weatherall – I think the only guitar song on Screamadelica was originally “Shine Like Stars” and “Damaged”, and that changed everything as well. But being brought up on the pop song is kinda in your blood, we didn’t do the long-form song with loads of lyrics. And now I wanna write, I don’t wanna be hemmed in by having to make a three-minute song.“Settler’s Blues” on Come Ahead has 16 verses!

And along with your expansive lyrics, Andrew’s playing Floydian solos.

Before, me and him coproduced the records as well, we had so much work to do, and I think he concentrated less on guitar. This time he’s really had to think hard because there was limited space for guitar, and what he’s come up with is incredible.

You’ve both gone back to your essential talents.

I hope so. When I sing and he plays guitar, we’ve got a groove and an understanding and we know where each other’s going. And that’s Primal Scream. There’s a connection that goes all the way back to being 16.

With all that history, you’ve been quoted as saying you thought there might not be another Scream album.

That’s been overstated. In 2021, Utopian Ashes and Tenement Kid came out, I had so much work to do. David Holmes caught me up that year and said, ‘Let’s do a record.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m not right, I don’t wanna do another record’ – at that point. At the beginning of 2020, I sat down and wrote a list of things that I wanted to do, and things I didn’t. And one of the things I didn’t wanna do was start a new Primal Scream record, and I knew that there had to be a different approach to making music. Because every year Andrew and I would make the album in the studio, it would be presented to whichever record company we were signed to, and a few months later they would release it. We would have to rehearse the band with the songs that we’d written, tour for a year ending in December, and then in the first week of January, Andrew and I would be back in the studio, feeling around in the dark to see if we could find something that sounded good.

So it became like clocking on, more than being creative?

We wanted to be creative, and also we’re workers. We didn’t wanna be lazy people. There was a period where that really did work, from ‘96 to maybe 2002, and after that, I’m not so sure. We both started having kids and families, and I guess it was just keeping ourselves busy. It would’ve been maybe better to take a couple of years off, but we wanted to keep working because it was the way we were brought up. You know, our parents worked.

Effectively, you did take a couple of years off from Primal Scream, and it seems you’ve refreshed the band and your place in it.

One-hundred percent. I’m trying to work out what you do with a band that’s been going as long as we have. I just wanna make records and write songs that reflect how I feel at the age I’m now and the world in which I find myself living, and I’m very curious about the world. It’s not like you’re trying to be better than anyone else. I just wanna make a contribution to music.

Thinking about Come Ahead’s themes, are the soldier from the closed-down mining town in “False Flags”, the cycles of colonial violence in “Settlers Blues” and the oppression and division of the working-class on other songs all sides of the same story?

“False Flags” is about someone like my father, a typical young man who joined the Army at 17. He had next to no education, my dad. He grew up during the war, his father wasn’t around. His mother was working very hard in the uranium factory. She may have got cancer working there, and he was brought up by his sister who left a home at 16. He ended up on the streets. My dad had malnutrition, he was put in homes, he was shunted from relative to relative. And he was clearly not a stupid man. He was self-educated, but he joined the Army as a way to get outta Glasgow. And he said the Army made a man of him, right? There’s a little bit of that story in there, but also about deindustrialization, and how the Army’s recruited from the poorest, most ill-educated people in society, the lower ranks. And my dad was one of them. So it’s that soldier’s tale, and how I think they were used, abused and discarded. And “Settlers Blues” is about the religion of the flag, just like the army is, and it goes through a few different centuries, and shows how the victim historically becomes the victimizer, like what’s happening just now in Gaza.

If there’s a dominant sound to Come Ahead, it’s funk or even disco. How did that come about?

The initial rhythmic tracks were breakbeats that David Holmes sent over to me, and then I would do a very lo-fi acoustic guitar sketch on my phone. It began when I got a text from David, who goes, ‘Check your email.’ I checked and heard these breakbeat drums, and “Ready To Go Home” sounded really good with it, if I modified it to fit the new, funky rhythm, and the chords moved faster. He went, ‘Brilliant. You ready for another one?’, and it was a disco rhythm. I tried the lyrics to “Innocent Money” over that, edited, because it was a long-form poem. He emailed back and said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve just started the new Primal Scream album.’ Holmes is instrumental in this record. I wanted to be produced, that was the thing. I remember calling up Andrew and saying, ‘I’m gonna make a record with David Holmes. I’d love you to play guitar.’ And he goes, ‘I’m in.’ And so Holmes has gotta get equal credit, because his ideas have been fantastic. I went over to Belfast and recorded my vocals with him, and then Andrew went over separately and did his guitars.

Come Ahead’s cover photo is of your late dad. Is this record for him?

Well, I’ll tell you. When we were researching album titles, I had a few that were a bit serious – we might have called it Manichean Times. But I thought Come Ahead works on a variety of levels. If somebody challenges you they say, ‘Come ahead’. And also, I’m not Miles Davis – far from it – but Miles had Miles Ahead, and it’s quite a cheeky title. And when I was looking for photographs for Tenement Kid, my mum had these photographs of her and my dad the year before I was born, 1960. My dad looked half Teddy Boy, half Mod, and I thought, ‘Man, that’s a really powerful image.’ Also a lot of the things I sing about on the record and my attitudes and feelings about things come from my upbringing with my dad. He was all for social justice. Some of those themes were in the record, and it all came together. I just thought it was a great rock and roll picture for the cover – Morrissey would die for that! – and a good rock’n’roll title. We’re saying, we’re still here and we’re still rocking. The Scream are rolling on and we’ve made a record we’re very proud of. It’s the kind of songs and music we should be making at this point in our career. I think I’m getting better and Andrew’s getting better. We’re doing our best.

Come Ahead is out now on BMG