Joey Beltdrives’ Bumpy Backspins: Screamadelica – Primal Scream – 1991

Screamadelica – Primal Scream – Released September 23rd, 1991, Creation Records

Screamadelica is the third album from Scottish rockers turned rave generation icons, Primal Scream.

The decision to incorporate dance music elements represented a major departure from previous work and was a turning point in the band’s career.

The result was a rare breed of album, one that merged two musical styles yet felt doubly authentic, enjoying huge crossover success at the time, while retaining cult status to this day.  

The album won the first ever Mercury Prize, beating out big stadium bands like U2, not to mention Bobbie Gillespie’s former band, The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Screamadelica is one of those records that seems obvious in retrospect but at the time the idea of merging dance music with rock and roll was as revolutionary (and in some circles deemed as sacrilegious) as Darwin or Copernicus.

Such revolutions rarely occur in a vacuum, of course, particularly since we’re talking peak Madchester era here.

But, although Primal Scream was hardly the first band to mesh dance music with rock and roll, I would argue they were they were the first to do so in a way that elevated both styles, setting a high bar for other artists to aspire to.

Screamadelica was an album where all the elements came together perfectly; a team of talented musicians, producers and engineers, excellent songwriting backed up by Gillespie’s undeniable charisma, everything right down to Paul Cannell’s iconic cover art.

But the overarching vision of what the album could be, and its subsequent flawless execution, was all down to one man – Mr. Andrew Weatherall. 

So, since today marks four years since the Guvnor’s death, let’s revisit the album which changed British music forever while establishing Weatherall as one of the most in-demand producers of the 90s. 

Guvnor At The Controls

To reiterate, Primal Scream was hardly the first British band to incorporate dance music elements into their music, in fact, they weren’t even the first Scottish band to do so.

The Shamen for example, another indie Scottish band from the mid-80s, began life playing psychedelic rock but the band had already completed its transformation to dance act by the time of 1990’s En-Tact.

Around the same time but much further south, Underworld were busy recruiting Darren Emerson to help refine their sound. (I’ve covered both groups in recent posts and will be returning to them again quite soon.)

Screamadelica therefore, was the culmination of changes which swept the British music scene at the turn of the 1980s, a period which saw the acid house explosion, Madchester and the birth of the rave scene.

By the beginning of the 1990s, meanwhile, Primal Scream were staring down the barrel of obscurity, their second eponymously named album had been universally panned so, from their perspective, they had nothing to lose.

Weatherall, meanwhile, was already an established DJ, gradually building his reputation as an equally inventive remixer despite not having much studio experience.  He also moonlighted as a journalist writing for NME (under the pseudonym Audrey Witherspoon), which is how he met the band.

This unlikely pairing of leather-clad Scottish rockers and an up-and-coming London DJ turned out to be one of the most serendipitous meetings in music history.

The band had already grown enamoured with raving by this point and had grown equally interested in sampling technology, while Weatherall, though generally labelled a house DJ, was always a rock and roller at heart.

Weatherall made such an impression on the band that he was brought in, first as a remixer for the track that became Loaded (more on this in a bit), then later as producer for Screamadelica.

Joining Weatherall in the studio was Hugo Nicolson, who worked with Julian Cope, Happy Mondays, That Petrol Emotion, and, in later years, Radiohead.

Other notable albums on his CV include Bjork’s Debut, as well as the debut by David Holmes, This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash The Seats (on the track with Jah Wobble, if memory serves.)

Nicolson agreed to help with the engineering work and programming having no idea of how successful and influential the album would soon become.  

As a producer he took his cues (pun intended) having watched with the legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood at work. And this hands-on, screw-the-rules approach to manning the mix console proved precisely the approach Screamadelica required.

These experimental dub sensibilities certainly gelled with Andrew Weatherall’s aesthetic and though both men were relatively inexperienced at the time, and rightly found the prospect daunting, they none the less had the confidence to push forward into new, unexplored territory.

Balancing this was veteran US producer Jimmy Miller, whose work included several of the most popular Rolling Stones albums, along with Chicago, Jimmy Cliff and Motörhead.

His two contributions represented the more traditional, rock and roll tracks on the album.

Also joining in on production duties for the track Higher Than The Sun was The Orb’s Alex Patterson.

That’s quite a lot of cooks stirring the broth.

And we’ve yet to discuss the actual creation process of the album itself, which consisted of the original band recording sessions and the secondary “remix” phase, both of which happened in isolation.

The band elements were all recorded first in studio. The resulting tapes were then sent to Weatherall in another, who was empowered to take a freeform dub/remix approach to the material with as many liberties as he deemed necessary to guarantee the requisite groove.

Only after this process was complete would the band get to hear the final results.

A process which included cutting and splicing elements of the original sessions into samplers, synching live recordings up with newly sequenced elements and generally pushing the studio’s equipment beyond its factory-intended limits.

Nowadays anyone can load up their laptop with a DAW like Ableton and build up a remix in seconds with sample packs and stems.

But keep in mind this was still 1991, when cutting and splicing meant physically cutting rolls of tape with a razor, samplers ran on 1.44mb floppy discs and most studio computers were still made by Atari.

But such limitations can often help focus greatness, by forcing us to become even more creative.

Audio nerds can certainly find fault here if they want to, but nobody can deny the organic feel of the album, one that doesn’t march in lockstep to a perfect digital metronome, but instead seems to breath, snuffle and snort like a hot-blooded rock and roll beast, albeit one that sounds completely unlike anything before or since.

The result is an intricately layered album of rich, cumulative talent. A timeless record that also perfectly encapsulates the age. A celebration of rock and roll culture that’s also perfect post-clubbing listening and a dance record that fucking rocks.

Screamadelica proved, once and for all, that labels like rock or dance no longer mattered, freedom of expression had won the day.

Speaking of the album years later Weatherall cited an interview with Orson Welles discussing the confidence that comes from ignorance, because when nobody tells you what is or isn’t possible, you’re free to let your imagination soar.  

Too often the creative process gets constrained by meddling, myopic stakeholders and narrowly defined “results”.

The problem is, trying to attach results to art is like having that dickhead housemate trying to put passive aggressive post it notes on the shower tiles, it just turns into an unintelligible sticky mess.

But when you get talented people together and give them a mandate to be as creative as they want and follow their instincts, instead of rules and trends, that’s when you get true art.

It’s a philosophy espoused by other top producers like producer-turned ubiquitous podcast guest, Rick Rubin, who literally wrote the book on how experimentation and free expression will always win out over (safe/predictable) clinical perfectionism.

It’s only by being truly daring that true authenticity shines true.

Weatherall shares that same freestyling approach and, though still green and somewhat unnerved by the process at the time, had the courage of his convictions to hold fast and helm the good ship Screamadelica through uncharted waters.

Fail we may, sail we must.

A Loaded Statement

Honestly? I shoulda been all over this one from day one but the truth is I didn’t discover this album until much later in life.

I do need to be mindful of my phrasing, however, since for me the phrase “quite recently” encompasses the 25 years and counting since the 90s.

So, for the sake of accuracy, despite being a huge Weatherall fan with a love of rock and rock, I’ll just say that, however inconceivable, this one genuinely slipped by me at the time.

And unlike the bulk of albums I cover in this series, I didn’t imprint on this album until the 90s were well and truly over when I was, for lack of a better word, an adult.

It’s also fitting that my first proper introduction to the album was when I was suitably loaded.

I mean, sure, I’d heard bits of it before, it had always been there in the background, but I’d not taken the time to sit down and actually listen to it. And I might never have done so were it not for the fact that a close friend of mine insisted on playing it while I just so happened to have a difficult time standing up.

Sometimes music arrives exactly when you need it.

Why I’d never properly listened to Screamadelica prior to this is hard to explain.

Why I was in the absolute state I was at the time, well, that’s easier to explain and can be summed up in two words, “woman problems.”

A true mate is someone who will happily donate his ears and his couch in such dire situations, no questions asked.

And when that friend has the taste and talent to recognise exactly what record to play, well that’s the best kind of mate in my opinion.

Skipping the specifics while slicing through the slurred speech and swearing, just for the sake of a more efficient and coherent narrative, I may have at some point mentioned once (or perhaps several times stuck in a loop) that I was finally moving on. (From those aforementioned woman problems.)

I may even uttered the exact phrase, “moving on up”, which invariably triggered my mate’s immediate Primal needle drop.

The reality was likely much messier, but this abridged version makes it sound seamless with less drunken mumbling and clattering of empty beer bottles as I rummaged about trying to reassert verticality.  

“Listen to the lyrics” is usually a phrase that might buy you seven seconds of silence, if you’re lucky. But then there are those times when your drunken ego convinces you the lyrics were written specifically for you to hear.

“I was blind now I can see, you made a believer out of me…”

And so, a remarkable thing happened. I stopped ranting in a loop and fell silent, my brain now busy trying to absorb the vibrant pallet of musical influences that were being thrown at it.

I should mention, also, that I soon forgot what we were listening to and began asking repeatedly, “who’s this?”

“It’s Screamadelica”, came the inevitable reply.

But by the next track my brain would go a few more cycles before the chain fell off once more, and, thinking, hmm, this is a rather eclectic playlist, “who’s this?”

“I told you already, it’s Screamadelica.”

Oh yeah, of course it’s Screamadelica. I knew that. I’m not some sort of drunken idiot who’s incapable of basic recollection I know exactly who… hmm.. loving the gospel vibes on this one…. “who’s this?”

And so it went, until his patience finally ran out, prompting the now-immortal parting shot, “LOOK, UNTIL I TELL YOU OTHERWISE, IT’S SCREAMADELICA!”

At which point he gave up and fucked off to bed, while I lay plastered across the couch with my brain and Screamadelica both running in concurrent loops.

He left the album on loop deliberately, whether out of kindness or spite one can debate, but knowing full well that it was exactly what the situation required in either case.

So I lay there, listening to it over and over, absorbing it though my pickled brain, before eventually passing out, his cat snoozing on my chest gently kneading my chest with its claws as it purred contentedly, drifting off to beer-blanched oblivion but still absorbing the music in my sleep. #Sublimadelica.

And it was still playing in the morning as I woke up on the couch, in a crunchy V-shape, head throbbing violently and gradually unfolding into a symphony of searing back spasms, tshirt sliced to shit and coved in cat hairs, a cacophony of clinking bottles at my feet, slicing through my nerves like a jittery xylophonic jumpscare, wincing, gritting my furry teeth, oozing cold sweats of regret and trying to figure out who and where I was and what I was doing with my life…

But Screamadelica was still playing and gradually, with its assistance, I was soon ready to start a whole new day.

Ah yes, now I remember, I was temporarily incapacitated but now I’m Movin’ On Up.

I had been converted, joining the ranks of sinners saved by the church of ecstasy, awakened by dub scriptures of Weatherall and ready to preach the gospels of Saint Gillespie.

Until I Tell You Otherwise (It’s Screamadelica)

Movin’ On Up, is the first of Jimmy Miller’s two contributions to the album and you can certainly hear echoes of the Rolling Stones in there alongside the blues guitar riffs, barrelhouse piano and upbeat gospel singing.

Screamadelica may be a genre chameleon but it opens with some good ole fashioned rock and roll.

The contrast with track two, Slip Inside This House, couldn’t be more jarring. We go from traditional rock sounds to a pitched down Amen break packed with percussive skull-dubbery. And when that bassline drops you know you just know – pure Weatherall wizardry.

I’m a sucker for an Amen break me, always will be, but I find they can be overused and yet under utilised.

Not in this case, however, as the subtle interplay between the Amen loop and the bassline provides the funky forward momentum that drives the track along.

From this rich soil, acres of strawberry fields start to grow, sprouting 60s sitars and Hacienda house pianos. So much going on here, but we keep getting back to that core groove.

Weatherall has always been a proponent of getting the bass and the drums right first, the essential groove that runs through it like a spine. Once you get that right, everything else falls into place.

Screamadelica is where this practice went from theoretical to fully practical.

And by sticking to this principle, Weatherall was able to become one of the most prolific and venerated remixers/producers in the business.

Don’t Fight It, Feel It is one of the album highlights for me and one of the first Primal Scream tracks I’d heard, despite not being aware it was Primal Scream at the time.

Which is understandable given that it’s as far away from the rock blueprint as it’s possible to get with a four to the floor house beat, deep wobbly bass, funky guitar, signature Weatherall timbales, more cheesy hands-in-the-air pianos and Denise Johnson’s deep diva vocals soaring on top.

Sums up the entire album right there.

Higher Than The Sun is yet another anomaly on the album as it’s the only track to have been produced by Alex Patterson, credited as The Orb.

It’s another one of my favourite tracks from the album and actually I can probably get away with including it in my list of favourite Orb tracks also.

This is a perfect morning after song and it always gives me shivers when I hear it. Close your eyes and you can practically teleport yourself to some hazy after party.

The dust has yet to settle, tiny particles of it still dancing in the air as those first tenuous sunbeams come creeping through the curtains…

As the sun stretches out its glowing tendrils ever further we get to Inner Flight, a brief but glorious psychedelic fairground ride. It’s mostly instrumental, in that there are no lyrics and what vocals are there sound like they’ve just Tardised in from the 1960s.

Pretty sure this was one of the tracks that prompted me, once again, to ask my friend, “who’s this?”

But can you blame me? It’s still mindboggling to think of how much musical diversity exists on a single album, especially nowadays when all music seems bulk-baked from the same basic set of templates as sacrifices to the Almighty Algorithm.

Come Together starts is an assembly of gospel church organs, dub sirens and snippets of samples from (I’m reliably told) Jesse Jackson speaking about music.

A big fat clap comes slaps us across the head with a discombobulating pan delay and we get another signature Weatherall sound, those ping-pong delay timbales, also used to fine effect on the Sabres of Paradise track Tow Truck, and when the kick drum finally drops you realise you’ve been nodding along to the beat, foot tapping… here we go.

Lovely little chill out track this one, timelessly positive and uplifting, especially when the gospel vocals drops, “together as one”, soaring high and drenched in reverb, elevated further by those happy house pianos… pure bliss.

And so we get to Loaded – top of many lists of 90s anthems this one and I think this was probably my first introduction to the band if truth be told.

I’m probably not alone on this one either. Primal Scream were on a career downswing before this album came out and this turned out to be the surprise chart hit that reinvigorated their careers.

Loaded is actually based on a track from the band’s previous album, I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have. The track was a Weatherall favourite, and he told them as much. Something which delighted the band, given that the second album had generally received bad press.

The band felt they hadn’t much to lose at the time prompting Andrew Innes, the band’s guitar player’s famous instructions to Weatherall, “just fucking destroy it!”

But the result was more deconstruction than demolition, with Weatherall dissolving various elements in a powerful chemical solution to create pure dancefloor dynamite.

It all hinged around a sample of Peter Fonda from the 1966 Roger Corman motorbike movie, The Wild Angels.

And it is with those immortal words that Primal Scream was born again.

The track finds its stride with a lazy electronic beat, snippets of bass and piano, a little bluesy guitar riffing on top and that epic sample returns.

I imagine Weatherall’s cut and paste approach, as well as the general groove of the track in general, was at least partly inspired by Coldcut’s epic Paid In Full remix for Eric B and Rakim.

The difference being Eric B apparently hated the remix (calling it “girly disco music”) whereas Primal Scream’s reaction was so positive we might never have gotten Screamadelica without it.

Damaged is an amazing piece of song writing, all about being too much in love with somebody and regretting it later. (We all been there, right?)

It’s the second and final track produced by Jimmy Miller where, once again, the electronic elements are stripped away in favour of a more traditional piano and guitar driven ballad.

You can tell, also, that this track was barely touched during the aforementioned, “remix phase”, maybe some light effects processing here and there but otherwise this stands out for being the one track on Screamadelica that’s closest to the original band recording sessions.

Track nine, I’m Comin’ Down – to be fair I imagine most people were when they put this album on and this track was always waiting for them like a fizzy packet of aural Alka Seltzer.

It’s a suitably sloshy piece of sluggish psychedelia full of woe and chemical lamentations.

There’s also a saxamaphone, which ordinarily would be the last fucking thing I’d want to hear in a writhing state of twitchy twists and gnashers but clearly that’s the whole point.  

“Highs and pills won’t heal my ills

But they make me feel better for a little while“

– I’m Comin’ Down, Primal Scream

As the saxamaphone subsides and your nerves catch a breather we get to Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts) – a reprise you might say.

This is Weatherall’s dubbed out remix and it’s got all those Guvnor hallmarks in abundance, including a big Jah Wobble-style bassline and again that ubiquitous timbale sound he used so often throughout the 90s.

It takes the Orb-produced original, adds new bits and stretches the whole thing out for a glorious seven and a half minutes.

In fact, thinking about it now, Weatherall might be the only person in history to have remixed an Orb track and actually made it longer. He also builds on those spacy Orb vibes by adding some scifi Theremin sounds.

The final track, Shine Like Stars, is another playful piece full of childlike Bontempi beats and music box melodies. There’s snippets of sitars too, adding further credence to claims this album was Sergent Peppers for the 90s.

Don’t Fight It, Feel It

It’s ironic that the rave era’s ultimate “spirit of the age” album was made by a Scottish rock and roll band.

And not just any band, but one the music press had previously written off as dinosaurs after only two albums.

But rather than dwell on it, the band opted to take a daring new approach, squeezing those industry sour grapes and bitter lemons through the Weatherall dub juicer to create a deliciously refreshing rainbow-coloured punch spiked with optimism and more than a few pinches of raw MDMA.

Bobby Gillespie previously described Screamadelica as “ecstatic blues” and I’ve yet to find a more fitting a description.

It’s drenched in the dayglo, smiley face sweat of the acid house era, though it’s certainly no hands-in-the-air cheese fest.

There are moments of sadness, too, of heartache, loss and regret, moments of raw vulnerability but also moments of simplistic childhood glee.   

Even the albums most wide-eyed upbeat moments have a poignancy to them, naive yes, but also authentic, despite all those 90s house those piano chords they don’t feel like a fleeting sugar high, but rather flashes of clarity, reigniting all those interconnected dancefloor epiphanies that helped shape our view of the world. 

There’s a thick vein of blues running through this album, too, and the gospel congregation is similarly strong.

Jimmy Miller’s influence ensures echoes of the Rolling Stones and you’ll also hear more than a nod or two to The Beatles throughout.

All that in a single album, no wonder my sorry drunken ass was so confused. Who wouldn’t be?

Nowadays it’s a mandatory requirement for every music festival to have at least one guy wearing a Screamadelica shirt per stage, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised I’ve started giving them subtle approving nod as they go flailing past.

Yes, I was late to the Screamadelica party than most people and when I got there I was pretty much falling down drunk, but then that’s just me, cuz sometimes I just like to get loaded.