Interview
Stage Times
Bobby Gillespie thinks Primal Scream’s debauched tour with Depeche Mode was “a waste of time”
With Primal Scream set to take XTRMNTR on tour again, Bobby Gillespie revisits the band's hedonistic gig history
Primal Scream main man Bobby Gillespie has never been one to mince his words. So, expectedly, speaking over the phone a day after the FIFA World Cup 2026™ came to a close, Gillespie had a few opinions about the Closing Ceremony. The bloated, bizarre half-time performance curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and featuring the likes of Madonna, Shakira and Justin Bieber wasn’t to everyone’s tastes, let’s just say. Gillespie wasn’t having any of it. It was fairly easy to deduce that the crux of his expletive-ridden, largely unprintable rant was that of the artist’s hypocrisy. Not just those that performed, but contemporary musicians en masse.
“Everybody in rock music now is complicit. A bunch of pussies,” he punctuated, in his famously louche Glaswegian accent. “Every single one of them. They’re all part of the entertainment industrial complex. It was always a commodity fetishism, but it’s got no teeth anymore.”
Though their reputation as the most chemically-driven band of the 1990s might precede them, Primal Scream were no strangers to making political statements themselves.
There’s no better example than 2000’s XTRMNTR, the second in a trilogy of albums (retrospectively dubbed The Bunker Trilogy, all of which are being reissued this year) that rejected the veneer of optimism that was being pumped to the public via Tony Blair’s New Labour. Shaped by the scorched-earth guitar stylings of My Bloody Valentine‘s Kevin Shields – who became a semi-permanent band member at the time – XTRMNTR was a critically-acclaimed middle-finger to the state corruption and collective paranoia of the Y2K era, a sonic howitzer that fused an industrial techno pulse with punk rock fury.
Primal Scream are set to revisit the album with a forthcoming UK tour throughout September, where they’ll play through XTRMNTR in full. Despite the parallels between those in government today and those in power a quarter of a century ago, however, Gillespie’s choice to return to the album was more coincidence than any kind of political statement. “There are songs on XTRMNTR that, in many ways, anticipated the world we’re living in now,” he admits. “Looking back, they’re remarkably prescient.”
Ahead of the tour which will see Primal Scream take XTRMNTR to London’s Outernet Live, Manchester New Century Hall, and Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom amongst others, Gillespie took the time to dig back into the band’s hedonistic gig history: their drug-fuelled US tour with Depeche Mode, playing a random field in former Czechoslovakia, and the moment Screamadelica made its cultural breakthrough.
The gig that made you want to become a musician
I can’t really pinpoint one specific gig that made me want to make music. The first gig I ever went to was in October 1976, when I saw Thin Lizzy on the Johnny the Fox tour. The year after I saw The Clash, Richard Hell, The Jam, The Damned, Dead Boys, Steel Pulse, Buzzcocks and The Stranglers. I saw so many incredible bands between 1977 and 1979, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about becoming a musician. I was just happy to go and see great bands.
Then, around 1979, friends of mine started forming bands. Some were school friends, others were slightly younger, and seeing people my own age making music made it feel achievable. In 1980 I bought myself a guitar – not because I had plans to start a band, but simply because I wanted to learn to play. Whenever I’d visit my friends’ rehearsals I’d pick up a guitar or sit behind the drums. Someone would show me a Joy Division, Public Image Ltd or Siouxsie and the Banshees bassline, and I found I could play them quite easily. That’s probably when the idea of making music really began to take shape.
The first
The first Primal Scream gig, as a proper rock band, was on 12 October 1984 at The Venue in Glasgow. What’s funny is that it was also my first gig playing drums with The Jesus and Mary Chain. I played Primal Scream’s set first, then about ten minutes later I was back on stage playing drums with The Jesus and Mary Chain. I had loads of energy then. It’s easy when you love doing it.
The smallest
The smallest stage I remember was in Baltimore in 1994. It was literally cramped in the corner of the venue. We just about managed to squeeze the entire eight-piece band and most of the equipment onto it. My memory isn’t great when it comes to venues – I tend to remember the incidents rather than the places.
That would have been during the Give Out But Don’t Give Up era. What sort of response were you getting from American audiences at the time?
We did a six or seven-week American tour opening for Depeche Mode, with a few headline shows of our own in between. Looking back, I regret that we never returned to America properly to tour Give Out But Don’t Give Up. I think we could have built a really strong audience there because we were a really good rock band at the time. I always thought we should have toured with a band like Alice in Chains or someone similar. I don’t think our management or record company really saw it that way. Primal Scream opening for Depeche Mode was a slightly strange fit.
That Depeche Mode tour in 1994 was probably the strangest tour. We’d go on quite early in the evening, and the audience would mostly be middle-class teenage goths waiting for Depeche Mode. They’d just stand there looking completely bewildered while we played. It wasn’t that they were hostile – we just didn’t really belong on that tour. Our music didn’t translate to that audience, so it felt like a waste of time. Depeche Mode were lovely people. I’m still friends with Dave Gahan – he’s a wonderful guy and a fantastic frontman. I actually learned a lot about being a frontman just by watching Dave every night. But despite that, our audiences didn’t really overlap. We simply weren’t the right band for that tour.
The biggest
Honestly? I don’t know… We’ve played Glastonbury and all the major European festivals, so we’ve performed to some enormous crowds over the years. But I couldn’t tell you which was the biggest. After so many years and so many gigs, it’s difficult to remember individual Primal Scream performances unless something unusual happened…
The weirdest
One weird show was when we opened for Suzi Quatro somewhere in Czechoslovakia. It was literally a field in the middle of nowhere, and hardly anyone turned up. We were huge Suzi fans, so we were delighted to be playing with them, but the whole event just felt odd. It was sometime around 1994, during the Give Out But Don’t Give Up period. There wasn’t really much of an audience. It was just a strange experience. The whole thing didn’t feel quite right, although we were still happy to be there because we loved Suzi.
The worst
That one’s easy. It was around 1985 or 1986, at a club in New Cross, South London. We’d released a couple of singles and were getting good press, so expectations were fairly high. We walked on stage and started playing, but nothing sounded right. I couldn’t recognise the songs, and I couldn’t even tell what everyone else was playing. We somehow struggled through a couple of songs before I finally said, “Let’s get off the stage.” Afterwards we realised what had happened. The venue had been blasting records before we came on, and all three guitarists had tuned their instruments independently by ear. So everyone was effectively playing the right songs – but in completely different keys. It sounded like some bizarre experimental noise performance. It was pretty fuckin’ embarrassing.
The funny thing is, something very similar happened again in 1991. We hadn’t played any gigs in Britain since ‘Loaded’ and ‘Come Together’ became hit records. We played at The Wellhead in Buckinghamshire for a guy called Robin Pike, who’d been putting Primal Scream shows on since the mid-’80s. He used to put on a lot of indie bands. Lovely man, Robin Pike. Great guy. The line-up was basically me, Martin Duffy, Robert Young and a drum machine. We walked on stage and exactly the same thing happened. We all looked at each other thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ We stopped halfway through ‘Come Together’, came off stage thinking ‘fuck this’ and realised one of the guitars was tuned completely differently from the others. It was the same mistake all over again. Turns out, my brother insisted on tuning the guitars. He didn’t know how to tune a guitar. I says to Robert, ‘why did you let my brother tune the guitars?!’. My brother’s nickname is ‘Judge’ and he goes ‘you know Judge doesn’t take no for an answer…’ So there you go.
The best
Brixton Academy in ‘92 was a really good one.
A lot of people say that was the moment Screamadelica really became a cultural phenomenon.
It was the first time it felt like the band and the audience had completely connected. We’d finally found our audience, and there was a real sense of belonging between us and the people in the room. That gig meant something. It was one of the first nights that acid-house really exploded in London.
At that point, did you realise Screamadelica had become such an important record?
I was probably too involved to see it that way. What I did realise was that, for the first time in our career, we’d made a genuine connection with a large audience. We’d somehow brought together people who came from indie music and people who came from acid-house. Those scenes found common ground through the record. I understood that much, even if I couldn’t fully appreciate the album’s wider significance at the time.
Primal Scream’s 2026 XTRMNTR tour kicks off in Glasgow on 3 September. Find tickets here.
