• Primal Scream Interview: "Rock is part of the system, it doesn't go against it"

Bobby Gillespie (Glasgow, 1962) is no longer the same as the standing drummer with The Jesus & Mary Chain in the mid-1980s, nor the one who turned British rock upside down with Primal Scream in the early 1990s

. that he does preserve intact, like the relics of a saint, are the long hair and the intact curiosity

of a tireless explorer of sounds and experiences. From his beginnings playing in the underground gambling dens of Glasgow, Gillespie has made his own electropop, acid house, industrial rock, dub, gospel, country, funk, blues and everything in between with astonishing naturalness. . His new sound adventure,

Utopian Ashes,

sounds so classic that it must be revolutionary: an album of ballads reminiscent of

Rollingston

and the decadent tone of the Walker Brothers, sung in duet with Jehnny Beth, former Savages frontman.

"I had seen Jehnny for the first time in a 2013 concert with Savages, opening for Iggy Pop and the Stooges, I loved what they did live!", Gillespie tells by Zoom from his London home, with a large library at his disposal. back, blue shirt with white polka dots open to the chest and without stopping to move.

"Then I met her at a fashion event in Paris a year later, we met there and chatted for a while. The following year they invited me to sing

Dream Baby Dream

at the last Suicide concert and they had asked her too, so that It was the first time that we sang together.

That experience allowed us to strengthen our bond ".

Gillespie closes his eyes, seems to be searching his memory, like a dog digging for an appetizing bone. He seems to have found it: "Another year passed and we coincided at a festival in Bristol, where Primal Scream and Savages were in charge of opening a Massive Attack concert. I invited Jehnny to sing with me

Some Velvet Morning,

by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, and there was great chemistry between the two on stage. That same night it was Primal Scream guitarist Andrew Ennis who suggested that we make music together. " Thus arose the first sketch of

Utopian Ashes

, first as we give in some sessions in Paris.

"They had that electronic, cold, very European touch ... they sounded like Kraftwerk. When I brought those ideas to London and started working with them, I gave them a touch closer to British rock and roll. From there, I worked hard on the songs, in the lyrics, in the arrangements ... and I thought,

how can we make this work with two singers?

Our voices matched very well, so I suggested that we do a duet album. And that we have done, "he says. Gillespie, who from time to time stops his speech and takes the opportunity to throw an almond into his mouth.

30 years ago it was most likely ecstasy pills instead of nuts.

Age things.

Jehnny Beth and Bobby Gillespie.

The songs, with titles as resounding as

"your heart will always be broken", "you don't know what love is" or "living a lie",

accompany a couple in the apparent disintegration of their relationship. The Scottish singer-songwriter sees it as "the struggle of two people trying to keep their marriage together and the pain that this entails", a theme that has given him "more space at a melodic level than he was used to. Both in the albums of Primal Scream like Savages, the songs are very

aaaahhhh

!!! (he raises his fist and moves it very fast). This is something else. " In fact, it is so different that it has allowed him to try new vocal registers, lower than usual. "If I make more records, that's going to be my new vocal range",He says. Here's a potential crooner.

Gillespie has taken advantage of the confinement and the suspension of concerts due to the pandemic to settle another pending account. "I wanted to do something creative, but something other than writing and recording a rock album. For a decade Lee Brackstone, who worked at the Faber & Faber publishing house, insisted that I write a book. He had been behind the editing. of memories like those of Kim Gordon and I always told him no, but I had already put the seed of that idea in my head. Last year I called him and said, 'I think I'm ready to write my book. The autobiography, of which he is correcting the latest evidence, is titled

Tenement Kid, will

be published before the end of 2021 and is the result of "offering my own voice, without resorting to a literary black,to tell

the story of a working-class boy in his desire to become a creative person. "

The Glasgow of the 60s, 70s and 80s, his adventures in music, the people he met, everything that happened around him friend Alan McGee and Creation Records ... "but I also wanted to talk about politics, family, art, melancholy, rage and violence. I didn't want them to be a typical rocker memoir, I wanted something more, because I felt I had a lot to say. "

Among other things, the book deals with that key moment in which

Screamadelica

(1991) appeared, the album that was a before and after for Primal Scream and for rock in general. "That happened when we discovered acid house, which arrived during

Margaret Thatcher's rule, a very hopeless time in British history.

She embarked on a kind of war against the working class, and acid and other artistic manifestations emerged in response. in such a critical situation ".

Do you see any parallels between that time and today? Gillespie rolls up his sleeves to elaborate on an issue that particularly concerns him: "England is immersed in an identity crisis that has been brewing for centuries.

English nationalism is a strange mixture of racial supremacism and national humiliation,

a conflicting duality. It is. They feel superior but are also afflicted with shame at having lost the empire. Now they want to remain isolated, as much as their history is completely intertwined with that of Europe. When historians refer to this time, I think it will be quite clear that it

was Brexit which led to the demise of the UK

, because the Scots and the Irish want to continue to be part of Europe.

The English are deluded, they are looking to the past rather than the future.

The song English Town on this album describes my feelings about what is happening quite well. "In it, he and Beth talk about streets full of garbage, people who behave like zombies and their desire to get away from it all. that: "

I want to fly away from this city tonight, so high, so high / I don't want to die in this English city tonight / cold English city."

Bobby Gillespie.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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