Bobby Gillespie felt “boxed in” by Primal Scream’s recent work.
Bobby Gillespie needed a new way of working
The 63-year-old singer admitted he wasn’t sure if the group would make another record but he had to find another way of working in order to do so, leading to their latest LP ‘Come Ahead’.
He explained to Record Collector magazine: “I wasn’t considering jacking in the Primals, it was more that I really needed to do something different.
“At the beginning of 2020, I sat down and wrote a list of what I did and didn’t want to do. One was write a book so I focused on that.
“Another was that I thought the working method Andrew Innes and I had built exceeded itself, that I had to find another way of writing songs.
“Since 1996, we hadn’t been a band in the way Suede or Blur or other bands from back in the day were.
“We worked more like hip-hop producers, it was studio-based, we’d mess around with electronic loops and drones, then I’d write the words to that piece of music.
“But this time I wanted to start with the words, for it to be more lyric-driven, so I wrote these long songs with stories at home on my own.
“I felt boxed in by the way it had been.”
And Bobby admitted the album could have been a solo record.
Asked what role producer David Holmes played, he said: “When he got involved, he had the idea of adding funk and disco rhythms, so I adapted my songs to those rhythms and it worked perfectly.
“This could have been a solo record, to be honest, but when I told Andrew I was making a record with David and I’d love him to play guitar on it, he said yes.
“And when I sing and Andrew plays guitar, that’s a Primal Scream record.”
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