Primal Scream
12:30am, Cedar Street Courtyard (Also: Fri., La Zona Rosa, 12:45am)
The last time Primal Scream came to town – the XTRMNTR tour, June 2000 – the Scottish rockers started a brawl at Ruth’s Chris Steak House, drank the town dry, and then managed to blow out a pair of day-old Polk Audio speakers within five minutes of arriving at an impromptu afterparty hosted by yours truly. Frontman Bobby Gillespie inadvertently locked himself in the WC later, requiring much assistance and a bolt cutter to effect his escape. Then the cops dropped by.
“I did all that?!” the newly clean and sober Gillespie puzzles through his dense Glaswegian burr. “Ah, man, I’m sorry. Psychotic episode, right? But that’s just so weird, right, ’cause up until just this moment, I thought the last time I’d been in Austin was in 1990 when Sire Records flew me down to meet Roky Erickson.”
Primal Scream’s imminent ninth studio album, Beautiful Future, is a 1980s-esque, synth-and-hand-clap-driven power-pop masterpiece. “It’s sincerely sarcastic and sarcastically sincere,” says Gillespie. “The idea was to have a pop song [“Beautiful Future”] that would get on the charts and have everybody humming along with it. ‘Cause at the time it was written, it felt like we were living in a dystopia, like J.G. Ballard, Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick all come true. So that song was a reaction to that dark culture.”
Pop music to the emotional rescue, then?
“If you react with another angry punk song, that’s not going to get anywhere,” Gillespie muses. “But if you make a really beautiful pop song, like Blondie, a real feel-good pop song with a huge chorus of bells and a beautiful melody, really joyful but also sneaking in malevolent lyrics with a critique of society in there, you know, that’ll get through to people, right? It’s kind of conceptual, but that was the general idea.”
Clever lad. Beautiful music. Primal Scream.
This article appears in March 20 • 2009.