Bobby Gillespie needed an outlet from Primal Scream.
The Scottish rockers released their first album for eight years, ‘Come Ahead’, last week and the frontman thinks that taking some time away from the ‘Come Together’ band was a necessary move.
Asked if working on other projects had helped him, Bobby told Uncut: “One hundred per cent. I’m trying to work out what you do with a band that’s been going as long as we have. I just wanna make records and write songs that reflect how I feel at the age I’m now and the world in which I find myself living, and I’m very curious about the world.
“It’s not like you’re trying to be better than anyone else. I just wanna make a contribution to music.”
Bobby explained that he and guitarist Andrew Innes felt they were making Primal Scream music out of necessity rather than gaining any creative joy from the process.
The 63-year-old musician said: “We wanted to be creative, and also we’re workers. We didn’t wanna be lazy people. There was a period where that really did work, from ’96 to maybe 2002, and after that, I’m not so sure.
“We both started having kids and families, and I guess it was just keeping ourselves busy. It would’ve been maybe better to take a couple of years off, but we wanted to keep working because it was the way we were brought up. You know, our parents worked.”
Bobby revealed that the lyrics featured on ‘Come Ahead’ are a continuation of the work he did on ‘Utopian Ashes’ – the record he made with Jehnny Beth in 2021.
He said: “I wrote the lyrics for ‘Utopian Ashes’ just before I wrote my book ‘Tenement Kid’, and between those two releases something was unlocked and made free.”