“This is a mental interview,” Bobby Gillespie astutely notes at one point in an hour-long conversation with The Herald.
The Primal Scream man is sitting in his car – there are workmen in his house – and after brief pauses to sign for a package and chat to a passer-by, the conversation has moved from his band’s new album, Come Ahead, to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and the theories of Antonio Gramsci.
“I’m a big fan of the post-Marxist theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and he essentially says in his books, ‘you can’t beat capitalism’,” Gillespie expounds.
“They have huge armies, they own the media, they’ve got a powerful state.
“Berardi says all you can do is secede, just don’t take part. Desert.
“But that takes guts, you’ve got to work for a living, I’ve got to work for a living – so we work within the system.
“Whatever the system is, whether it’s the music business for me or the media for you, we work in a factory of sorts. You might not like the factory owner, or the CEO, or the f*****g shareholders but we have to work there to earn a living.”
Despite his reservations about the industry, the 63-year-old is speaking ahead of the release of the 12th Primals album, a record which at one point looked like it may never be made – at least according to the notes sent ahead of the interview.
Gillespie shrugs: “I was interviewed by a press agent to create some kind of narrative.
“What I meant was, I guess, that in early 2020 I sat and wrote a list of things that I wanted to do and things I didn’t want to do that year and top of the list of things not to do was write another Primal Scream album.”
The years since the band’s last effort, 2016’s Chaosmosis have seen Gillespie write a book, Tenement Kid, release a duets album with singer Jehnny Beth and endure some vehement and very public criticism of both he and bandmate Andrew Innes.
Keyboard player Martin Duffy died of a brain injury after a fall in his house in December 2022, his son telling a fatal accident inquiry that the band’s “tough love” approach to his alcoholism contributed to his “sudden and rapid decline”.
The band say there were “a lot of untruths” directed at them, that they paid for counselling and Duffy rejected the offer of paid rehab. Gillespie says he was supported by the band financially until he died.
That followed the death of Robert ‘Throb’ Young, who also struggled with addiction issues, in 2014. Gillespie himself has been sober for 16 years.
One song on the new record, ‘Circus of Life’, sees its narrator witnessing the slow unravelling of an alcoholic, while another, ‘Heal Yourself’ features an addict saved from the depths by the power of love.
You could be forgiven for thinking his late bandmates were on his mind as he was writing.
Gillespie insists: “To be honest with you these songs just come to me. Sometimes something pricks my consciousness, but other times they just come from nowhere.
“I chose the character of an alcoholic, it’s about somebody in Hell, really, somebody who is suffering spiritually – and maybe mentally and physically too. It’s really a portrait of somebody who is disintegrating.
“I didn’t… I guess I’ve got experience of that. I’ve seen other people disintegrate. But it’s non-judgemental.
“’Heal Yourself’, is about opening up. The thing about taking drugs for me was to give distance from people, distance from the world, and to numb my feelings. I guess self-medicating is the fashionable term.
“But, in my experience, if you build walls to keep the world out you also keep yourself hemmed in – you build yourself a prison and you miss out on some of the finer things in life, such as love.
“The song isn’t a morality tale, but it’s saying that you have to reach out to other people, you have to open up and be vulnerable.
“Drugs were like a form of psychic self-defence for me. It was like this sword and shield, and drugs have their uses, you know?
“But in the end it’s a young man’s game. It’s OK to be nihilistic when you’re younger, but as you get older – if you can get older – you have to, I guess, grow up and assume some kind of responsibilities and also open up to other people and make connections.
“Those connections might save your life.”
Album opener ‘Ready To Go Home’ was the first song completed after producer David Holmes sent over a funk beat onto which Gillespie moulded a song he’d written some years before.
He explains: “I sang it to my dad the night before he died, but it was written a couple of years before.
“The character in the song is at peace with himself, he’s tired and he’s ready to go.
“It’s about being at peace with yourself and accepting your place in the universe.”
Does Gillespie feel more at peace with himself these days?
“Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Obviously years of taking drugs points toward somebody who wasn’t at ease with themselves but… I’m more at peace with myself now. That’s a good place to be.”
That’s not to say he’s lost the fire. Final track ‘Settlers Blues’ takes in the ongoing situation in Palestine, a cause about which the singer has long been outspoken.
In a 2019 Newsnight interview with Kirsty Wark he described Madonna as “a total prostitute” for agreeing to play in Israel, something he tells The Herald he “kind of wishes” he hadn’t said as he is a fan of the singer.
He says: “History proves that the victims become the victimisers. There’s a verse that says ‘they’ll stab shoot and persecute/the boot now on the other foot’.
“We’re seeing that in Gaza with this genocide and ethnic cleansing.
“Scots and Irish were people who had hundreds of years of war with the English – disease, famine, the Highland Clearances, constant f*****g colonial wars – and when America was discovered people from Ireland and Scotland would go to the New World and do the same thing to the indigenous people there – they became the colonisers, you know?”
Elsewhere, such as on ‘Deep Dark Waters’, Gillespie addresses the political situation closer to home.
He says: “Look at AfD in Germany, Meloni in Italy, Le Pen in France. Sweden, Denmark, Nigel Farage here… Things are looking bad, don’t you think?
“The political system is completely f*****g broken. I mean, who believes in it anymore?
“Hardly anybody voted in the last election, people are completely disillusioned with politics and I can completely see why. That’s dangerous, because that then leaves a void which I think could eventually be filled by a charismatic leader – and it won’t be a charismatic leader from the left.
“Where is the left? The left has been f*****g expunged from the Labour Party.
“What does Keir Starmer stand for? No-one knows. I don’t know, man, it just feels hopeless. I had hope in Jeremy Corbyn, but not anymore.
“I think the left should leave parliamentary politics. The so-called democratic system is set up to keep the British state and British elites in power. Whether it’s the Labour Party or the Tory party, what they do is manage capitalism – they don’t change it.
“Starmer was the establishment’s choice, he is of the establishment. He was a QC, he was the Director of Public Prosecutions – you can’t be a DPP unless the establishment have okayed you.
“He’s seen as a safe pair of hands to be in control of the British state for a term or whatever, because he’s never really going to change much. Corbyn was a danger, because he really did want to change things.
“I just think parliamentary politics is not the way forward. You look at the grip Starmer has – there’s a really good book called The Starmer Project by Oliver Eagleton and it tells you how when he was appointed head of the DPP he changed the culture from the inside and put his people in place.
“He’s like a Leninist, in a way, and he’s done the same with the Labour Party. He’s ruthless, he’s recreated it in his image.
“I don’t know, I’m just a singer in a band, but I just think parliamentary politics… I’ve given up on it.”
Gillespie has made clear in the past his disdain for what might loosely be termed the Westminster establishment.
The singer went viral in 2018 following an appearance on This Week which ended with host Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and Labour’s Caroline Flint doing the ‘Skibidi’ dance challenge as the Primal Scream frontman watched on stony-faced.
“They were all just best mates with each other, you know? I was disgusted by it. It was just like, ‘f*****g hell, they’re a different breed from us’.
“It’s fascinating to observe, and read about, and watch – but I’m also f*****g repulsed by it.
“When I was younger I looked at my dad, who was a trade unionist and did a lot of good work for people – I thought that’s what politicians did. But they don’t. Maybe some of them do, but the ones close to real power, who are in cabinet and stuff, they just manage capitalism.
“It’s like Gramsci said, there are so many trenches before you can reach real power. The establishment and the state has so many battlements in front of working people before you can get anywhere near power. Corbyn tried it and look what they did to him, they made an example of him: ‘this is what we’ll do to you if you try’.”
Come Ahead is out now on BMG. Primal Scream will play Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on April 3 2025 and Glasgow’s 02 Academy on the following two nights.
