Rock your testimonials

Primal Scream plays the sound track for protest dancin' in the streets.

by Carleton S. Gholz
5/24/00

"It's angry,
because we're angry."

Primal Scream

Wednesday, May 31
St. Andrew's Hall
431 E. Congress, Detroit
8 p.m.–All ages
Call 313-961-MELT.

"This single is dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg, Sam Peckinpah and John Coltrane." – from the notes to Primal Scream’s "If They Move, Kill ‘Em"

In the year 2000, Primal Scream is the sonic Molotov cocktail par excellence.

The band – currently vocalist Bobby Gillespie, guitarists Robert "Throb" Young, Andrew Innes and Kevin Shields, keyboardist Martin Duffy and bassist Mani – makes music that moves both head and ass. Though hailing from northern Great Britain (Glasgow, Manchester, Ireland), they’re the most righteous exemplars of the Detroit-born mantra of "rock ‘n’ roll and fuckin’-in-the-streets." And their return to Detroit next Wednesday, on the heels of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, points up their house and techno roots.

It’s cause for celebration. Or so Mani (Mom and the cops call him Gary Mounfield) would have us believe. He’s convinced that moving from bassist of the once-great Stone Roses to the ever-shifting PS stable in 1996 was the second-best move he ever made (the first: meeting Stone Roses guitarist John Squire). "I’m having the time of my life at the moment."

Mani is, quite simply, brilliant – warm, honest and excitable. His Manchester accent never loses its charm as he moves easily from talking about the band ("We’re just like a Stooges gig on stage – fuckin’ raw power, completely."), the new album ("I feel like I’m completely off the leash with this LP.") and drugs. ("We’re lucky to be alive. But we know when’s the right time and when’s not. But don’t get me wrong: We’re no angels.")

Born in Crumpsall, part of greater Manchester, on November 16, 1962, Mani is one of the chief representatives of a graying set of British rockers and first-generation club kids who make up Primal Scream. But on the phone he intimates that he still feels 14, "pogoing to the Clash. I’m feeling more angry and dangerous than I ever have."

With albums like the newly released XTRMNTR under his band’s belt, it would be mindless to argue with him.

Mani joined Primal Scream in the fall of 1996 as it was just putting the finishing touches on Vanishing Point, a powerfully strange record that resurrected the band from the career low of 1994’s Give In But Don’t Give Out, a sprawling rock-funk outing (featuring George Clinton, no less) that showed about as much soul as a cokehead looking for the next line.

At the time, Mani himself had just left the Stone Roses, a band crumbling from its own drug addictions and business problems, as well as from guitarist John Squire’s less-than-friendly selling out of his mates. Mani squarely remembers hearing Squire working on new songs during the Roses’ sessions for Second Coming, only to have the guitarist click off the tape recorder once Mani walked in. (These would later become the first songs for Squire’s horrific band, the Seahorses.) Knowing that Squire "was up to no good," Mani quickly made a deal with Gillespie at a summer festival, finished his touring commitments to his longtime friend, Stone Roses vocalist Ian Brown, and joined the Primal team.

The band, formed by Gillespie in the mid-’80s while he was drumming for proto-shoe-gazers the Jesus and Mary Chain, had a fairly pedestrian underground life, filled with ‘60’s guitar-kitsch and standard rock posing. But that all changed in the late ‘80s as the new psychedelia, fueled by ecstasy and underground dance music (techno and house from Detroit and Chicago) hit British youth.

Britain’s second one-love revolution sucked Primal’s standard rock riffs through the looking glass with the help of newly invented production geniuses like Andrew Weatherall (Two Lone Swordsmen) and Alex Patterson (the Orb). The result, with songs like "Come Together," "Higher Than the Sun" and the Peter Fonda-sampled "Loaded," was 1991’s mind-warping Screamadelica. Primal Scream, in an effort to capture what group members were seeing and hearing in the clubs and in their minds, had stumbled upon the zeitgeist.

1997’s Vanishing Point, coming after the crippling Give In But Don’t Give Up, saw the band rekindle its fire by re-creating Screamadelica’s sublime sense of freedom and sonic collage, while increasing the band’s political militancy and revolutionary name-dropping.

Then XTRMNTR shores up Vanishing Point’s successes. Put together in Primal Scream’s studio in northwest London, XTRMNTR was created in a "rolling process" where early creations tend to become B-sides and new ideas – turn this dial now, drop this guitar here – are thought up and abandoned daily. Mani calls this place where the band creates "mad sounds and drum loops" a "halfway house for wayward musicians," where artists such as Paul Weller, Joey Ramone and Bernard Sumner (who plays guitar on "Shoot Speed/Kill Light") drop by, lay down a guitar track and stay awhile.

It may be an inexact science, but it shows that Primal Scream has knowingly incorporated the device that made it great – the remix – into its daily practice, opting for a postmodern partiality where unfinished pieces clash and mesh to produce greater wholes. The result from this cut-and-paste, smoke-and-listen, sample-and-scream approach is a record that promises far more than it could ever handle, and yet delivers more than you could ever hope for.

Songs like the opener, "Kill All Hippies," and the first single, "Swastika Eyes," mix the sexy with the incendiary, pushing the largely electronic beats, samples and loops up against Gillespie’s penchant for political rabblerousing. In "Swastika Eyes," Gillespie, in the true punk stance – part hysteric, part cool customer – sings "blood in my eyes (but) my vision is clear," while he points out the infested eyes of those in power. Later, in "Pills," Gillespie and the band keep attacking the "military industrial delusion of democracy" that pervades the West by creating the shout-down-Babylon mantra: "I’m gonna tell you the truth/the truth about you/you ain’t never been true/you ain’t nothing/got nothing to say/shine a light on you/you fade away."

Mani agrees with the album’s tenor. "It’s angry, because we’re angry. We can’t help but reflect that in our music."

Drifting between general concerns about capitalist greed, as evidenced by the recent WTO protests and more locally charged situations such as Primal Scream’s support of Satpal Ram and the Liverpool Dock Workers [see side bar], Mani points to a direct correlation between the band’s current disposition and the state of the world. "The LP’s exactly how it feels living over here. We’re the truest band here, because we don’t mind playing how we feel. We don’t pander to any kind of scene and hopefully people will get on it."

But though the album is claustrophobically produced, with numerous layers of distortion, strings and horns, XTRMNTR still breathes in new directions for Primal Scream, from the nearly invincible instrumental update of the MC5’s "Skunk (Sonically Speaking)" to the Kevin Shields-MBV Arkestra redo of Vanishing Point’s, "If They Move Kill ‘Em." And "Swastika Eyes" gets the remix treatment on the LP from big beat purveyors the Chemical Brothers.

Mani is convinced it’s an important album, somewhere between Peter Tosh’s Legalize It and the Clash’s London Calling. "We’re pushing the envelope a little bit ... We’re trying to repoliticize people. So many in Britain just sit back and take it. We want to motivate people. We want to get people dancing."

Carleton S. Gholz writes about music for the Metro Times.