Label: Creation Format: CD,LP
“The time to rise has been engaged” – REM
It has occurred to me on more than just this one occasion that giving our seers and soothsayers money to throw about is often not the best thing for them. Witness the fate of Roxy Music and Johnny Rotten, Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone, The Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain and (most recently) Van Morrison and Prince. One of several things almost invariably happens. Either they dry up, they compromise their vision, trying to recreate past glories, but with a more commercial spin on it; more catchy, more popular. Or they get a taste for all the money thrown at them, and want more. Or else they spend it all on drugs. Some of them just can’t handle it at all, the machinations now surrounding them, the men in suits and limousines and fake smiles everywhere they go. Their fame removes them from the people they come from and belong to, and whom their role should be to serve, to be of use to. The limousines and swimming pools isolate them from anything and anyone real, and they find themselves in the terrible position of having all the time and money in the world to say whatever it is they want, and nothing at all to say.
On the other hand, may I bring to the attention of the jury the case of one Julian Cope, who after stagnating in an acid-drenched Eighties, was reborn in the 1990s as a burning white light of righteousness, truly and unquestionably great at last. Then there is the little-heard story of Big Star, whose early dreams of stardom and innocent, gorgeous pop songs sank without a trace because of record company distribution troubles, made their classic “Third” album (that was its name) in the knowledge that it, too, was going nowhere. The terrible defeat and sadness hanging over them in the writing and recording which should have, by any means of calculation, resulted in an abysmal disgrace, instead drove them to rise above it all and transcend their despair to create something utterly, achingly beautiful and timeless. The Jam started out in suits and ties, Union Jack waving conservatives. Soon they grew disillusioned with Punk and nearly split but instead came back with “All Mod Cons”, and “Down in the tube station at midnight”, and then Going Underground, which went in the charts at number one, and that was in the Seventies, a time when, as my friend Merrick never tires of telling me, going in at No.1 really meant something.
Most surprisingly, The Verve, who were previously certainly on my shortlist of `The Worst Bands I’ve Ever Seen (In My Life)’, suddenly, and amidst death, drink, drugs and despair, woke up out of their bad Prog nightmare with something to say, and in the process making some of the best pop songs of the last ten years – “Bitter Sweet Symphony” being one of the last songs which really meant something to everyone who played it. It would seem that here, as in all other forms of art, times of struggle and desperation most often give birth to our artists greatest works. It is left to those who struggle on without the assurance of financial and social rewards to come up with the real goods.
I make this observation with the sound of Primal Scream‘s Exterminator on my mind and morphing loudly around me like funky upful ectoplasm. It is, I think, their best so far, and THE first great record of the 21st century. I’ve really never heard anything else quite like it. The sound of this album, in particular the first half, is unlike any other. Though one would hardly think it possible, they really have (and hear me out, here) successfully paired up (and off) Donna Summer and Mark E Smith in the back seat of a car burning along at tremendous speeds down Kraftwerk‘s “Autobahn”, Donna moaning “I Feel Love” at the top of her lungs while MC5 and Joy Division pound out of the radio, Jello Biafra in the driving seat flinging anarchist tracts out of the window to go fluttering over electric pylons and overpasses and down into the hands of waiting children.
Primal Scream I have always loved with a mothers love, probably because of all the good times I’ve had to their music: yes I got thrown out of their gigs for dancing on their speaker stacks; yes I heard “Come Together” for the first time coming down off my first E. Their work with Andrew Weatherall around the time of Screamadelica (especially on “Loaded” and the non-album mixes of “Come Together”, “Don’t Fight It, Feel It”, and “Higher Than The Sun”) was truly groundbreaking: no-one had then married up the big beats of HipHop and house with Indie songs and sensibilities and (many many) Rolling Stones riffs. The only thing even vaguely in the ball park was the one-off “Pump Up The Volume” by M.A.R.R.S. It was a beautiful, heady concoction, a mix of styles and races and drugs no-one had thought of before, and a lot of people caught on. Everybody heard “Screamadelica”. But that was ten years ago now, and in the meantime they seemed somehow to have lost their way, making first a sloppy, smacked out Country Rock album, then a couple of half-hearted dub workouts. All with some great moments on them, of course, but all, in the end, somehow unconvincing. It didn’t look like it was fun anymore. Somewhere in there you get the feeling that it all went wrong.
Which makes it all the more surprising, then, that Exterminator should be the shakingly Up-For-It album that it is. Primal Scream, you see, have always wanted to be the biggest band in the world. They needed to be big. They were, in fact, pretty much designed specifically FOR that role, but it didn’t work out that way, and instead they remained an Indie band. The world turned its back on them when they tried to emulate their heroes, because they only ended up copying them, wearing masks and striking poses, dressing and sounding like people from the past, which wasn’t what was important about them, or about anyone, for that matter, at least anyone of worth. On Exterminator -as, to some degree, on Screamadelica – there is the feeling that here, at last, they have broken through to something bigger. There is a strength and clarity to Bobby Gillespie‘s voice for just about the first time which truly convinces, and he looks to use it in new ways throughout. On “Pills” he actually raps(!), as well as keeping up a repeated chant of “YOU’RE SICK FUCK SICK FUCK SICK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK” for longer than would usually be thought necessary in a letter to Points Of View.
When the dreams you are chasing break down, you can either turn back and chase the money instead, or come through it all with the realization that you can never belong to that world, that you never did, and that all you are has always been the polar opposite of it. This, I think, is what has happened to Primal Scream. Throughout the Nineties from time to time they did some truly remarkable and beautiful good deeds – their Sheffield Arena gig with The Orb to help out the striking miners; their support for the release of Satpal Ram the last three years – but this has never been explicit in their work before. Whereas on Exterminator it is the ONLY subject, the only theme. Their timing is impeccable, and something this rousing (and believe me, it is) is just what is needed right now, with the rapid rise of the multinational conglomorates and the World Trade summit “Battle For Seattle” still in fresh memory. There is something in the air, and it’s been building, particularly over the last ten years, with the growth of the Direct Action movement, the road protests, the “Criminal Justice” Act bringing people from disparate areas and concerns together, an awareness of who controls what, of the multinationals, the corporations, the awareness that time is short, the world’s resources are finite and in the end, that we cannot eat money.
Surprisingly, for such a good-time party band – THE most hedonist of hedonistic bands – the songs here are all well sussed as to what’s (really) going on and up to the challenge and here with the express purpose of WAKING YOU UP. “C’MON!”, Bobby G screams on “Accelerator”, “C’MON!!!” A line is being drawn here, between those with the money, and what they have to offer (fascism and death, essentially) and what we have that’s more important (freedom, life). This runs all the way through the record: “You got the money, I got the soul: can’t be bought, can’t be owned”. For the first time they don’t sound like they’re putting on a front: they sound like they really mean it. The introduction of My Bloody Valentine‘s Kevin Sheilds and the Chemical Bros. is felt throughout, and I like to think I hear the influence of Shield’s favourite band, The Third Eye Foundation in there, too.
Dylan‘s “Look out kid, they keep it all hid” is gleefully and convincingly stolen for the title track, which somehow manages to put “Exterminate the underclass, exterminate the telepaths: THE CIVIL DISOBEDIENTS, THE CIVIL DISOBEDIENTS” into a pop song and make it an irresistably catchy HI-NRG Disco thang. And lines like “Your auto-suggested psychology elimination policy, a military industrial illusion of democracy” in the flagship single off the album – called, let us not forget, “Swastika Eyes”. Alongside this they place their most beautiful, delicate, warming song since “Damaged” (off Screamadelica) or “Stone my Soul” (off the Dixie-Narco EP from the same time). It goes:
Stuck in stasis you will rust
Time will turn your bones to dust
Alchemists’ turned lead to gold
Keep your dreams
Don’t sell your soul
Be careful
Which just about says it all, I guess. What else needs to be said, right now? Exterminator is a call to arms – no, a call to action, as well as a reminder and testament as to what is today and yesterday and always, forever, important. A kick up the arse much needed. And it fucking ROCKS. Like a BAG OF BASTARDS.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE! CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE! C’MON!
-Harper Godhaven-
For more Primal Scream information, visit Webadelica.
