Screamadelica

BY Richard Hebden

The year is 1989. A band of greasy Glaswegian rock pigs, tired of aping The Stooges and The Velvet Underground, dive headfirst into ecstasy and Acid House, and stumble round the globe on a wave of pulsating, dub-fucked euphoria known as Screamadelica.

One balmy evening in 1991, the wave hits the Metro nightclub in Melbourne. In the crowd, 16-year-old future Snout guitarist Greg Ng, under the weight of the Exploding Screamo Inevitable and a strong tab of acid, feels his neatly split conceptions of music come crashing down around him. “It’s rock’n’roll, but… it’s house, but…it’s… it’s… IT’S ALL THE SAME THING!”

Screamadelica is the antithesis of musical divisionism. The song titles say it all. “Come Together”. “Don’t Fight It, Feel It”. On “Higher Than The Sun”, as old punk crony Jah Wobble pulses out a tripletty dub bassline, house diva Denise Johnson spills gospel transcendence, and Dr Alex Patterson of The Orb makes it all glow and throb, Bobby, floating disembodied and unfettered, declares, “I’m beautiful, I wasn’t born to follow”.

And they don’t. Following Screamadelica, Primal Scream went to Muscle Shoals and recorded a soul album, much to the chagrin of their newfound dance music fans. Since then they’ve strode a multitude of styles, with varying degrees of success. But with Screamadelica, they found a sound that allows them basically to do whatever the hell they want, ‘cause it always sounds like Primal Scream. And with Screamadelica, they opened up a generation to the idea that they too could do whatever they wanted.

Of course, it’s not all good. All this wilful eclecticism and bit-of-everything flakiness we have today can be a slippery slope, more often than not leaving us with groups like The Cat Empire, who stretch themselves over jazz and salsa and hip-hop and god-knows-what-else, but don’t do a very convincing job of any of them. On the other side of the coin, attempts to dislocate oneself from all musical influence, as exemplified by the New York NoWave scene of the late seventies, tend to prove often interesting but rarely musically pleasing.

For me, The Roots and The Clash are fine examples of groups that started out with a solid base in their respective traditions of hip-hop and rock’n’roll, then built their sounds into flares of stunning diversity, crossing genres without ever losing their identity.

There is no formula for what makes a great group, but the virtues of Individuality and Adventurousness are a fine start. While it may be hard to see through the hail of Stones and Sabbath carbons falling from the sky at present, the spirit of adventure is alive and well in this town. For a taste, the Is Not team recommend checking out: Midnight Juggernauts, Hot Little Hands, Labjacd, Richie and The O.G.’s, Curse Ov Dialect and The Presets.

In the end, we, the Crusaders of Music, cannot afford to be divided, for only in Unity can we hope to prevail in our war against the foul Legions of Architecture.