So this is what gigs look like these days. It’s been awhile. Last time I was here I got thrown out for pogoing atop the right-hand side speaker stacks on, if I remember rightly, a combination of mushrooms and speed. This time I sit quietly on the stairs overlooking the audience and crowdwatch. Well, I’ve not been well. Girls with those colourful children’s hairclip things that I’ve never really fully understood the point of mill about below. One solitary chemically empowered casual dances wild-eyed to the pre-gig choonz on the PA, and is given an appropriately wide berth by those around him, but other than that there are no real characters for me to report. The boys drink much beer and look strikingly ordinary, most all of them having that Oasis-casual thing going on so unfortunately prevalent today. Younger people than I sit alongside me and take photographs of each other. I press my face to the railings on the stairs and watch the crowd below, wishing I was on drugs. I console myself with the fact that I at least look as though I am.
Both this time and the time before I was here to see Primal Scream. It is a little kept secret that their high-NRG Techno Rock anarchist rebirth has restored my faith in Rock & Roll, and the future of music in general. If you’ve heard what Primal Scream are sounding like these days then you know what I’m talking about already – imagine THAT but up LOUD. If you’ve not and you don’t, then there is no task more pressing for you than for you to purchase, shoplift or ramraid yourself a copy of Exterminator right away. Yes now.
The stage is all strobe lights and barbed wire and thick white smoke drifts off and down into the front rows. Bobby Gillespie shambles onstage looking and sounding like a particularly hungover Mark E Smith, and the comparison is borne out by the truly awful shirt he has on. He is wasted, of course, and can’t sing, but no change there. And to be honest with you, the whole band is a bit on the sloppy side, burned out and well into a long tour, but to come onstage to a song like “Swastika Eyes”, and not have it sound like the first great song of the Millennium, which is what it is, the bag would have to be full of more than drugs. They follow that with “Shoot Speed/Kill Light”, and the rest of the show keeps almost exclusively to the new stuff, as if they know that what they are doing now is easily the most important stuff they have ever done. And they’re right. The few backwards glances are to “Rocks”, “Movin’ On Up”, and an eerie take on “Higher Than The Sun”. For the rest of it, they play the entirety of the new album, even (a little ill-advisedly) the instrumental “Blood Money”, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like being at a club.
That they can create that kind of atmosphere is itself strange and impressive, but it’s odd getting used to not looking to the singer as the focus of attention. Bobby G sometimes looks a little lost amidst all of that SOUND. The focus of attention now, if anyone, is Mani. Mani’s great. I was surprised to discover that he has already become the heart of The Scream, like Keith Moon was in The Who, and Keith Richards in The Stones respectively. He’s the spirit of the show and talks to us more than Bobby. And he’s the most ROCK of them all right now – looks the best, too, like a Viking in leather trousers, legs apart, electricity coursing from him, pounding out these fucking HUGE pounding pounding throbbulatious basslines. So much energy, and it’s all over the place. The crowd get frisky. Bobby gets bottled a couple of times and leaves the stage twice. There seems to be just something in the air. I break up a fight myself to “Accelerator”. “Keep your dreams” kicks in, a little lumpen live, but still beautiful, drawing me in, lighting my fire, and then “Exterminator” itself, all funky Donna Summer and upful dissent – gets my body movin’ and I give in at last and the elevation music takes over. And I’m dancing. I can’t help it, I’m dancing. They’re playing “Exterminator”. Nothing else matters. I’m dancing.
And I’m like that the rest of the night. I feel good. There is a ringing in my ears. I smell like an ashtray. All the way home I pirouette and swirl and dance over the darkness of Hyde Park. Ragged and wasted and right royally fucked as they were, tonight Primal Scream were the greatest rock & roll band in the world, hands down, no contest. Too right. Stitch that, y’fucker.
-Harper Godhaven-
