Primal Scream – Page 3 – My (life in) music lists

Best tunes of 2002: #29 Primal Scream “Miss Lucifer”

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Primal Scream’s “Loaded” as my third favourite tune of 1991. That particular ditty turned me on to the Primals and then, after buying and listening to “Screamadelica”, I quickly grew obsessed.

I got to see them live in 1994, when they opened for Depeche Mode at Kingswood Music Theatre, a show I saw with my friend Tim, my eventual wife Victoria, and her cousin Rosa. By this time, Primal Scream were touring “Give up but don’t give out”, a blues-rock hippie jam that I didn’t love quite as much as its predecessor but that had some great, great tunes. After that album didn’t perform quite as well critically or commercially, the band regrouped and dropped “Vanishing point” on all of us in 1997. I survived that bomb but 2000’s “XTRMNTR” almost killed me. In its wake, a handful of years needed to be taken before I was ready to dip my toe back in, eventually doing so with “Riot city blues” in 2006.

So yeah, I completely missed their 2002 album “Evil heat” upon its release. I only got to it after I warmed to the next few albums, building a lasting love rather than the meteoric lust and infatuation I suffered with “Screamadelica”. And only then was I able to revisit their back catalogue without such a black demeanour. I still don’t think it’s their best work but after the maelstrom that was “XTRMNTR”, Bobbie Gillespie and his cohorts really needed a bridge album and in that, “Evil heat” was successful.

“Miss Lucifer” is one of the album’s hot spots, the first single released off it, and it’s a real dancefloor razer. Don’t go looking for any witty or deep lyrics here because you’ll find none. It’s your typical femme fatale/evil woman motif and warning. It’s the drone and angry beat that’s special here, hoofing it like Saturday night’s leftovers from Prodigy’s Friday rave and tumble. Gillespie whispers and hisses and spits venom before getting to the chorus and turning admonitions into invitations to “shake it baby”, over and over and over again.

It’s not “Loaded” but it’s a trip nonetheless.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2002 list, click here.

Best tunes of 1991: #3 Primal Scream “Loaded”

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“Just what is it that you want to do?”

“Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time
And that’s what we’re gonna do.”

These are the lines, sampled from the film “The wild angels”, that kickstart a revolution.

Prior to this song and the album on which it appears, Primal Scream were just another holdover from the C86 scene that was quickly losing steam. The only discerning difference being that they were led by the former drummer of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Bobby Gillespie and his group approached DJ Andrew Weatherall to remix one of the songs from their self-titled sophomore album, a relatively forgettable track called, “I’m losing more than I’ll ever have”. After two aborted attempts, he came up with what we now know as that hit single and dance floor anthem “Loaded”. Weatherall’s remix essentially remade Primal Scream into a bunch of neo-hippies in the acid house age and set a template for the album that would be “Screamadelica”.

The video for this single would be my introduction to the band. Like so many other songs on this list, I first saw it on CityLimits. But this was one I didn’t record myself but my friend Elliott had caught. We watched it together over and over again, our minds literally blown.

The track is the embodiment of bombast, throwing together sampled horn blares, big bass and drums, gospel choirs and slippery bass lines, piano flourishes and funky guitars and granola crunching bongos, and shaking it all up in a gigantic mixing bowl. Yet somehow it all works as a song for closing your eyes and letting loose, for wiggling and waggling your fingers in front of your eyes and losing yourself in the neon trails, for losing control of all your bodily functions and not caring in the least. A song to replay over and over again as you write incoherent words in a drunken frenzy.

Whoops. Did I just write those words out loud?

No matter. We just wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time.