The indie-rock stalwarts return to Nottingham in support of their most recent album, Chaosmosis...
They won't thank me for saying this, but a few years ago Primal Scream were in danger of becoming an institution. After several poor-to-average albums they'd resorted to Screamadelica nostalgia tours. 2013's More Light was seen as a return to form, it wasn't quite but it at least pointed in the right direction. It's only really with this year's Chaosmosis that it feels like the Scream are back in business.
Trimmed down to a five-piece on stage these days, the band rush straight into an opening Moving On Up. Bobby Gillespie, who still looks like the bastard offspring of Mick Jagger and Gram Parsons is far more lithe than a man of 54 has any right to be.
The band are as tight as you'd expect from one that has been together for so long - Gillespie has been in the band since 1982, guitarist Andrew innes since 1986, keyboardist Martin Duffy since 1989 and drummer Darrin Mooney since 1997. Even touring bassist Simone Butler has been around since 2012. Despite that, they still manage to mess up the start to Higher Than The Sun. Songs such as Shoot Speed Kill Light are also missing the depth and complexity that Kevin Shields used to bring to matters but still maintain a ferocious energy.
Of the newer songs played, recent single Where The Light Gets In sounds great as does (Feeling Like A) Demon Again. 100% Or Nothing could easily have been taken from Raw Power by Iggy & The Stooges if it weren't for the lines "So high we can't get over it/So wide we can't get around it" cribbed from Martha & The Vandellas.
Ironically enough, considering how fresh it sounded when it was released, it's the tracks from Screamadelica that have aged the worst. While the rest of the set sounds like it could have come out any time in the last 50 years, the Screamadelica songs sound very early '90s. Come Together, which features in the encore, sounds like a song that The Farm would have given their right arm for.
The highlight of the set is the penultimate song, Swastika Eyes. Live, the song has something of New Order about it, Darrin Mooney doing his best Stephen Morris impression and it has an anger that is sadly missing from so much modern music. However, it is a little bit rich hearing a man singing about the "military industrial illusion of democracy" after threatening to walk off stage after someone threw a beer - hardly the personification of the punk rocker sticking it to the man.
The set-list also acknowledges the band's fallow period - only one song released between 2001 and 2015 gets played, 2006's Country Girl, the band's highest charting single. It closes an excellent, high energy set and at one point Bobby comes close to blushing as the fans chant his name.
Then comes the obligatory encore, culminating with Rocks. The crowd go properly wild, belying the fact that the gig takes place on a Sunday night. The audience go home happy and it's great to see Primal Scream back on the top of their game.
Primal Scream were at Rock City on Sunday 11 December 2016.
Primal Scream website
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