Project Description
Interview with
ANDREW INNES
from
PRIMAL SCREAM
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PRIMAL SCREAM
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Primal Scream guitarist Andrew Innes seems to be in a pretty good space right about now. With the release of the Glasgow rock outfits 11th studio album Chaosmosis in 2016 propelling them back into the spotlight once more, Primal Scream have once again cemented their reputation for being absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the creative process. Now Innes and Co are heading back to Australia to tour for the first time in five years, and the guitarist is naturally excited to be returning to our shores for a number of reasons.
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“Where we are right now it’s just gotten cold and the leaves are all off the trees, so we’re dreaming of an Australian tour” Innes says down the phone, “and to be perfectly honest haven’t really looked at the setlist for the tour yet. I think we’ll be changing it up a bit each night to keep things fresh and give each city something special. But we haven’t been back since we released Chaosmosis so we’ll definitely be including a few songs from that as well. Actually the last time we were out there More Light hadn’t even been released and we played some songs off that and people were just standing there going ‘what is this?’ so we’ll chuck a few songs in off both of those albums and see what happens”.
Having thirty years worth of music to choose from, it’s a challenge to pick a setlist that encapsulates an entire career and gives the band enjoyment as well. “Basically there are songs that we know we have to play, and there are songs that I love that I know e can’t play as well. You still have to keep it so that it’s a good night for everyone, but it’s weird because there are certain songs that you do get a bit sick of playing but for some reason I never get sick of playing Rocks. There’s been ones over the years that I’ve been sick of doing but Rocks I just never get tired of, it’s still a fantastic song to play. It goes down well and it’s just good glam rock to me”.
The band have never been one to repeat themselves when it comes to each successive record. Reinvention, it turns out, can be challenging sometimes too. “It’s definitely not a conscious thing” Innes says ” I mean when you’ve made the last record you generally end up with ‘a sound’. So when you start the next one you don’t really want to start rewriting the last one. Like for Chaosmosis I bought a whole heap of plug-ins, if you’re familiar with music software, and they’re basically emulations of old synthesisers. And so with the first few songs like Where The Light Gets In we came up with things like that because we had all these new things to play with. And so that sort of lent a sound to the songs that came after, and so by the time you’re about three songs in you realise you’ve got a sound. And so from there you just think that maybe it should go in that direction. And we’ve been writing some more songs recently and so consequentially you don’t feel like reaching for those same plug-ins because you’ve kind of used them already. So I find myself reaching for something like an acoustic guitar or something that wasn’t on the last record. So more than us setting ourselves a manifesto of ‘we mustn’t sound like the last record’ it tends to just naturally evolve. You just have to try and find a way of making music that wasn’t like the last one.”
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PRIMAL SCREAM frontman BOBBY GILLESPIE
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Having embraced a whole range of musical styles over the years, from indie pop to shoegaze, dance and electronica to straight out rock, I had to ask Innes if there were any styles that he thought Primal Scream could embrace on future releases? “So much of it comes from what you’re listening to at the time” he says “I wish it was that well worked out. But we never sat down and said ‘let’s make a dub record’ it’s just that we were listening to a load of dub records so, especially around the time of Vanishing Point, it just came out in the music. And it felt good because it was different.”
Over years Primal Scream have released some iconic albums, most notably 1991’s Screamadelica which seems to have a timeless resounding quality to it, but does Innes have any other albums that he’s especially proud of? “That’s a hard one because I don’t tend to listen to our records that much. I had to listen to the first side of Vanishing Point recently for a film and I remember thinking that we had some really great ideas on that one. But by the time you’ve made a record you don’t really want to hear it because you’ve spent so much time listening to every minute detail that by the time it’s done you’re just glad it’s finished. I watched a Scott Walker documentary and at the end of it he asked the studio guy to play it once through the big speakers and the guys asked him why and he said “because I won’t ever listen to it again”. It’s been such a process making it and you become so close to it you just have to leave it be”.
And lastly, with the last couple of years seeing a big resurgence in popularity of some of the bands that Primal Scream played with, and indeed shared labels with, does Innes see it as a good thing having bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, Slowdive etc around and playing live again? “Well it’s stopped us from getting gigs!” Innes said jokingly “I wish that they’d stayed broken up because we never did, we kept going. But I’m joking of course. The boys from Ride are great and obviously we were on Creation together, so yeah we get along well. And their new album is fantastic, so I think there’s room for us all out there. But yeah in the last couple of years all the shoegaze stuff does seem to have become very popular again. It’s probably more popular now than it was back then.”
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