Primal Scream

Primal Scream came on stage at the Apollo on Saturday night for the first of their two Manchester Shows with Bassist Mani walking on with fist in the air & yelling to the crowd that the band was going to ‘kick their arse’. Unfortunately, for most of the show lead singer Bobby Gillespie seemed like the one who had been booted into submission.

Playing for almost two hours, the Primals had chosen their set list to cover the span of their long career, but whether it’s because their current LP release, ‘Riot City Blues’ is a return to the band’s more straightforward rock 'n' roll roots or because they saw the early to mid nineties as their heyday, there was a preference in the set list away from the more electronically influenced tracks off the last few Albums.


Songs early on in the set such as ‘Jailbird’ & ‘Movin’ on up’ had all the crowd, including those in the stalls up & dancing – not something you always see at the Apollo - but while the audience were enthusiastically singing every line, Gillespie seemed satisfied to leave the audience to it, as he sagged against the mic stand looking at the floor.

Unfortunately, several technical problems also impacted on the performance. For the first half of the show the stage was very dimly lit with a spotlight focussed primarily on guitarist Robert "Throb" Young instead of their lead singer who was often left centre stage in the dark. When the lights did eventually come on, the crew had a tendency to repeatedly become a little overenthusiastic with the strobes to the point where many in the audience were covering their eyes with their hands.

On several occasions too, the vocals were almost drowned out by the rest of the band with two backing singers that might as well not have been there & at others, Mani’s Bass was lost in a wall of noise & the overall sound suffered as a result - technical problems that would have been easy to rectify.



Happily, as the show progressed, everything eventually clicked into place & even Gillespie seemed to gain more energy & enthusiasm. By the end of the show, crowd favourites ‘Country Girl’ & ‘Rocks’ had everyone, including the singer, up & dancing & though the man moves like a drunken Grandparent at Christmas, at least he last seemed to be enjoying himself as much as the crowd were.

With a long recess before the band came back on stage, some members of the audience unfortunately assumed the band weren’t going to return & missed an impressively long encore that concluded with the brilliant ‘Accelerator’; leaving me with the impression that though the band have been around now for around 20 years, they’re still a great band... when they want to be.

FUTURE GIGS