Beyond death and drugs, Bobby Gillespie and Primal Scream return

Listening to gospel rave-up Ready To Go Home, the opening song from Primal Scream’s new album Come Ahead, you might get the sense that making music is not the priority it once was for frontman Bobby Gillespie. “I’m so tired of the game, I’m so ready,” he sings with the exasperated ambivalence of a man who’s been in a band, and infamously endured all the hard-living that entails, across five decades now.

In the album’s press notes, he even spells it out: “I had no idea I was going to make a record again. Making music had, for me, started to become too familiar, too predictable… I did not want to make another Primal Scream record,” Gillespie states.

It seems an ironic way to open the band’s 12th album, ahead of their upcoming tour of Australia in January. Is that how he’s feeling about being in a band these days?

Gillespie, seated in his home’s library in London, middle-parted locks grey as smog, smirks at my interpretation. “Well, it’s got nothing to do with being in a band, really,” he says, his Glaswegian mumble so rough and unintelligible that my AI transcribing device refused to engage with at least half of it. “That song is about somebody who’s tired of being alive. It’s a song about the acceptance of death.”

Gillespie (second left) with Primal Scream in 1997.

In the years since Primal Scream’s last album, 2016’s Chaosmosis, death has been a constant for Gillespie, Britpop’s infamous acid-rave shaman, now 63. The deaths of guitarist Robert “Throb” Young in 2014, DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall and backup singer Denise Johnson in 2020, and keyboardist Martin Duffy in 2022 have pierced the band’s legacy.

Considering their contributions to Primal Scream’s iconic output – including 1991’s blissful Screamadelica and 2000’s blistering XTRMNTR, albums that some have surmised signalled the beginning and end of ’90s optimism – how did such loss threaten Gillespie’s idea of Primal Scream, the entity?

“It hasn’t affected the idea of Primal Scream at all,” says Gillespie, flatly. “We’d stopped working with Denise in early 1995. Mr Weatherall was a dear friend and always in touch, and he’s very much missed. Martin [Duffy], his death was tragic and I think it could’ve been avoided if he’d managed to deal with his alcoholism. The same with Robert Young, he’d been a long-term addict of heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals, tablets, alcohol… We miss all those people but the main artistic vision of the band and the music, truth be told, from 1996 to now came from myself and [guitarist] Andrew Innes.”

If Gillespie now speaks with the bluntness of a teetotaller, it’s a remarkable development for a band whose drug use was long part of its lore (go back to Screamdelica’s Higher Than the Sun and tell me you don’t float). He’s described Come Ahead as an album about “conflict, whether inner or outer”, and songs like Heal Yourself and Circus of Life, with its hypnotic descent into booze-soaked madness, play like brutal poetry from the empty pit of addiction.

‘I got to the point where I realised there was too much at stake. Drugs and children don’t mix.’

“I’ve been clean from class-A drugs and alcohol for about 16 years now, and I think I’m more focused now. I’m clear-headed, and I’m very grateful that I’m clean,” says Gillespie. “I think my work has got a lot better, my live performances have got better, my life has got better. In every way, I’ve benefited from cleaning myself out.”

Heal Yourself in particular, where he sings of the “English rose” sent to “heal my heart and save my soul”, finds Gillespie reflecting on the familial responsibility (he has two children Wolf and Lux with his wife, stylist Katy England) that forced him to get sober.

“It was around ’04, ’05, ’06, I had begun a family and I had to clean up,” Gillespie recalls. “It was difficult because being a musician, there were drugs everywhere – other musicians, the crew, tour managers, the hangers-on. At one point I had considered leaving the band, because the circle, it almost seemed impossible to clean up. I was having problems finding any way out. I’d come home from tour and I’d just feel disgusted with myself. But I got to the point where I realised there was too much at stake. Drugs and children don’t mix.”

His friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis were instrumental in his journey to sobriety, he says. “I played some gigs with Grinderman around 2007 and during rehearsals I saw how Nick and Warren were now that they were clean; they were doing incredible work and they were so engaged. It just showed me that it can be done. Those two guys inspired me.”

Last June, a statement made by Martin Duffy’s son Louie circulated online, accusing Gillespie’s “tough love” treatment of Duffy – who had featured on all the band’s albums through to Chaosmosis – for contributing to his father’s isolation before his death. He also suggested the band’s members had cut his father out of financial shares he should have received from their tours and back catalogue.

Having endured addiction himself, Gillespie says he’d tried to get through to Duffy. “Martin’s drinking had got to the point where he was too incapacitated to get on stage. He’d be carried on stage and carried off stage; it happened a few times. It was the same point I’d gotten to and Robert Young, where it was a case of you have to clean up or you’re going to die. It wasn’t a case of if, it was a case of when.”

If death and sobriety have curbed Gillespie’s nihilistic tendencies, so did the writing of his memoir, 2021’s Tenement Kid. In the book, which covered his upbringing in Glasgow’s slums and radicalisation by the twin forces of punk rock and Celtic FC, he wrote reverentially of his dad Bob, a trade union official whose revolutionary politics manifested in Che Guevara and Black Panthers posters gracing the family’s walls growing up. In early 2023, Bob too died; it’s his face, in young teddy boy guise, that graces Come Ahead’s album cover.

Come Ahead: Primal Scream’s 12th album, and first since 2016, features a photo of Gillespie’s trade unionist dad on its cover.

Perhaps in response, Come Ahead finds Gillespie’s songwriting more politically direct than ever: on Deep Dark Waters, he sings indignantly about Europe’s refugee crisis (“Our fortress continent, our values torn and bent”), and on the nine-minute closer Settlers Blues, he traces a historical line between British colonialism and the crisis in Gaza, a cause Gillespie has been vocal about for decades. In 2004, he volunteered Primal Scream’s services to a fundraising show for the Hoping Foundation, a charity founded by Bella Freud (the daughter of Lucien and great-granddaughter of Sigmund) in support of Palestinian refugee children.

“It was Primal Scream, Spiritualized, Nick Cave; I remember we sold out the Brixton Academy and made a lot of money for the charity, which was good because [Palestinians] were obviously having a terrible time then because they were going through another invasion,” Gillespie recalls. The pushback at the time was brutal, he says. “I remember even the NME hated us. We were called anti-semitic for supporting this cause. All that crap, you know?”

During an interview with the BBC in 2019, Gillespie earned further ire after calling Madonna a “total prostitute” for agreeing to perform at that year’s Eurovision final in Tel Aviv. “I regret saying that,” he says now with a wry grin. “I think Madonna’s a great musical figure who’s affected the cultural landscape in many ways. But I don’t regret saying that I supported the Palestinian right to self-determination.”

In this increasingly tense atmosphere, is he worried that a protest song like Settlers Blues might alienate some of the band’s Britpop nostalgia fans or be spun into backlash talking points? “No, because as we have seen in the last year, what I was saying was right all along,” says Gillespie. “Maybe I was an outlier in speaking out back then, but artists always are and they have to be. Artists are always ahead in seeing the way the culture is going to shift.”

Primal Scream’s Come Ahead is out now. They will perform at Melbourne’s Forum on January 10; Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on January 11; Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on January 13; Adelaide’s Hindley St Music Hall on January 14; and Perth’s Fremantle Prison on January 16.

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