Michael Hann

The weakest link

Those looking for danger should avoid Bobby Gillespie and see instead the addled, horrible, uproarious Swedish punk band Viagra Boys

May was a cruel month for those middle-aged liberals who treasure their old alternative rock heroes. There was Morrissey, appearing on American TV wearing a For Britain badge. There was XTC’s Andy Partridge tweeting that ‘the holocaust is not holy writ, it isn’t a religion, it can be historically revised’. And there was Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream — the idiot inter pares of rock stars who foment revolution from the gates of their kids’ private school — appearing on Newsnight to say Madonna was ‘a total prostitute’ for performing at the Eurovision Song Contest in Israel (has he said the same to his friend Nick Cave, who has played Israel and called the cultural boycott ‘cowardly and shameful’?). Gillespie then refused to admit Israel’s right to exist, and said he couldn’t possibly be anti-Semitic because he liked Bob Dylan and Karl Marx (a fiver says he’s much more familiar with Blonde on Blonde than Das Kapital).

All this was in the service of promoting a new Primal Scream compilation called Maximum Rock’n’Roll, whose tracks formed the heart of the group’s show at the Scala in London. It wasn’t, sadly, maximum rock’n’roll; more 60 per cent rock’n’roll, getting up to 80 per cent in the best bits. The best bits, as always with Primal Scream, were when they sounded least like the Rolling Stones, when thundering electronics met insistent, unrelenting guitars: ‘Swastika Eyes’, ‘Kowalski’, ‘Can’t Go Back’. But even when they were good, there’s the perpetual problem of Gillespie.

Gillespie isn’t just the singer of Primal Scream; he’s the group’s embodiment. He’s also the weakest link: a reliably awful lyricist who throws together words in a jumble from the Boy’s Book of Rock’n’Roll Clichés — Junkie! Needle! Jesus! Mama! Sinner! — and a singer so feeble one fears he will run out of puff before the end of a syllable, let alone a song.

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