Is there anyone in rock music more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie? The rawk’n’roll leather-jacketed self-mythologiser. The affected drawl. The shameless pillaging of every hard rock album made between 1969 and 1972, but especially the Faces and the Rolling Stones. The moronic lyrics. The hard-left radical chic posturing and condemnations of Israel from a man with all the geopolitical understanding of a nipple-clamp.
The desperate, pathetic, yearning to be cool.
Trawl back through those Primal Scream albums and show me a moment of true originality. There isn’t one, is there? Which isn’t to say that — annoyingly — they’re devoid of fun and the occasional good tune. Occasionally a pleasing song surfaces: ‘Country Girl’, ‘Cry Myself Blind’ (which sounds more like the Faces than even the Faces ever did), ‘Call Me’ and his very brief dalliance with real hipdom, ‘Loaded’, for example.
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