Shindig! Issue #157 – Primal Scream

MARTIN RUDDOCK spoke in depth with BOBBY GILLESPIE for a two part early days PRIMAL SCREAM story. In this abridged extract he talks about the band’s love of garage and psych

Sacked from The Wake in late ’83, Bobby immediately reconnected with Beattie and the pair began writing songs. “When I got kicked out of The Wake, we started to write songs that we could play in a band. We were inspired by obviously punk, but also ’60s bands like Love, The Seeds, 13th Floor Elevators, The Byrds…”

Soaking up Pebbles compilations, the pair went down a rabbit hole together. Beattie acquired “a beaten-up acoustic 12-string” and Bobby caught the train to Motherwell to buy a sky-blue Vox Phantom guitar that unlocked a flurry of dark-eyed, jangly tunes. “‘Velocity Girl’ was written on that, and ‘Gentle Tuesday’, ‘Imperial’. Yeah, that first album was all written on that guitar. Jim had an acoustic 12-string, and then when we got a record deal, or maybe just before, he bought a Rickenbacker 12-string.” … ….

Sonic Flower Groove was released on 5th October 1987. We put it to Bobby that it’s a sorely under-rated debut album. “I think I possibly wanted a more lush production, and probably couldn’t express then what I could now,” he says. “We were ’60s influenced, but we didn’t want to be one of those bands that wanted to get everything to sound like the ’60s. We wanted to bring something of the ’80s into it like New Order and the Bunnymen had done.” 

Tantalisingly, Bobby says a remixed, expanded SFG is on the cards. “I think if we do a remix of Sonic Flower Groove we’ll take off the gated snare and make it more organic.” There’s also some top tier unheard material, including early Scream gems recorded for Peel and Janice Long (see last year’s ace Reverberations (Travelling In Time) collection of radio sessions and early singles). “We actually recorded a song called ‘Tomorrow Ends Today’ for the first album, and it sounds fantastic. A friend of mine gave me a tape from a mastering session that somebody had given him, and it was an alternate running order for the album plus an extra track, or two tracks. We’re hoping to release that in the future.”

To read the full article order issue #157 here