Friday, October 10, 2008

Friday Fun: Primal Scream, 'Loaded'


You know, I remember reading somewhere that the whole pre-millennium tension thing burst a decade too early in ’89-’90, what with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism and in culture the whole acid-house fad that had every band worth their fashionable salt going dancey on us all of a sudden.

Primal Scream were a fair to middling rock band who oscillatated between C86 jingle-jangle guitars and stonesy riffs before they started messing around with synthesisers and employing house DJs Andrew Weatherall and Terry Farley for production duties.Now the primals can never be accused of doing anything by half, so when they went dance they made sure to include the female soul vocalist, the drum loop and the extensive remix, on their watershed album ‘Screamadelica’.

Just one of the albums many (and it has to be said varied) delights, is that shambling baggy anthem ‘Loaded’. The track started life when Andrew Weatherall began remixing ‘I'm Losing More than I'll Ever Have’, from their previous album, with the result of stripping the song back to its skeleton, adding a wicked percussion line from an Italian bootleg mix of Edie Brickell's ‘What I Am’ and a sample of Gillespie singing a line from Robert Johnson's ‘Terraplane Blues’. Now you would think that too many disparate elements would spoil the broth, but added to the already heady brew is an audio sample from the Peter Fonda film The Wild Angels that gives the track its intro and some would say notoriety.

So we get an impossibly floaty bass, a classic guitar figure cutting through the audio fog and barmy samples all over the place… never too much of a good thing apparently.

Where to find: Screamadelica (1991)

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