ScottishNews.com

In 1991, Primal Scream were a struggling Glasgow indie group who the music press had largely written off.

But singer Bobby Gillespie’s self-belief, a former school pal’s loyalty, acid house and Andrew Weatherall all helped turn the band’s fate around with the relesase of one of the greatest albums of all time.

Formed by Glasgow pals Gillespie and Jim Beattie, Primal Scream delivered their third album Screamadelica to the public on September 23, 1991.

At the time, they were being paid a salary of just £50-a-week by Creation Records boss Alan McGee.

McGee, who had gone to school with Gillespie, had kept faith in his pal’s talent after signing the band to his label which itself was struggling to break even.

The release of Screamadelica – with a glorious collision of rock’n’roll, acid house, psychedelia, soul, dub and dance – would transform Primal Scream from struggling Glasgow indie outsiders into one of the hottest bands in the world.

It won the band the inaugural Mercury Music Prize for best album of the year, sold million of copies and helped establish McGee’s label as a major force years before he went on to sign Oasis.

Yet only two years before Screamadelica, Primal Scream were in trouble.

McGee would later admit that, as far as the media were concerned, the Glasgow band were a “joke”.

Primal Scream had emerged from the city’s early-80s indie scene at a time when Gillespie had been drummer in The Jesus And Mary Chain - recording Primal Scream’s earliest demos in a flat in Glasgow’s south side.

His band’s 1987 debut album Sonic Flower Groove failed to make the Top 50 let alone the top 30 and 1989’s self-titled follow-up saw them turn away from jangling indie towards the Rolling Stones, Stooges, MC5 and Ramones.

The music press didn’t care and Melody Maker dubbed them “Primal Tap”.

By then, Happy Mondays’ 1988 second album Bummed had been No2 in the charts and the hottest band in the world, Ian Brown’s Stone Roses’ had enjoyed a Top 10 hit with their classic debut album.

The turning point came for Primal Scream when their sound collided with the Madchester scene, which McGee had embraced full on.

Gillespie said: “If the first Primal Scream album was acid, and the second one was speed, then the third phase was E.”

More important, however, was the arrival of DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall.

Primal Scream press officer Jeff Barrett gave him a copy of the band’s second album and he became fascinated by the ballad I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have.

Weatherall dismantled it, adding a drum loop and sampling Peter Fonda’s speech from 1966 biker movie The Wild Angels.

The line, “We wanna be free to do what we wanna do” became a rallying cry for clubbers hearing the new track Loaded.

Released in 1990, it reached No.16, becoming Primal Scream’s first Top 40 hit.

The Glasgow rock band once steeped in the Stones, American blues and garage rock found themselves embraced by the rave generation.

It had been Gillespie’s self-belief through hard times that drove the band on.

“I know it sounds really arrogant,” he said. “But when it did happen for us with Screamadelica we weren’t surprised.”

Gillespie also recalled that instead of sitting down with guitars and searching for chord sequences, the band began writing around drum loops, keyboards and samples.

“It just opened everything up to us,” he said. “We started to write and think in a totally different way.”

Weatherall, who died in 2020, produced much of the record, but Primal Scream also worked with The Orb’s Alex Paterson and Jimmy Miller, the legendary producer behind classic Rolling Stones albums.

The bulk of Screamadelica was recorded during six intense weeks at Jam Studios in Finsbury Park in the summer of 1991.

Remarkably, despite the different producers and the album’s mixture of gospel, rock, funk, psychedelia and electronic music, Screamadelica flows as one piece, thanks to guitarist Andrew Innes who deliberately sequenced it like a weekend.

Movin’ On Up was Friday night, getting ready to go out. The psychedelic middle of the album was the dancefloor at its peak. Shine Like Stars was the comedown.

“I thought, I’ve got to run it like how we are,” Innes said.

Music magazine Melody Maker declared “a new language has been created here” and its rival, music paper NME predicted Screamadelica would be recognised as “a musical benchmark for these times”.

Movin’ On Up and Come Together also became Top 30 hits and the album carried Primal Scream into the mainstream.

35 years later, the story of how the album was made and its impact is proof that even today it sounds as fresh as it did on first listen.