Primal Scream may belong partly to rave culture, and they have spent much of their career absorbing electronica, dance music and whatever else happened to be in the air, but at their core they remain a garage rock band. The songwriting still owes plenty to The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Funkadelic and early psychedelia. Chaosmosis finds a neat balance between those retro instincts and the band’s more modern experiments, but tonight the emphasis is firmly on the guitars.
Bobby Gillespie, now in his mid-fifties, still has the wiry frame and restless stage presence of someone half his age. Alongside Andrew Innes, he forms one of those classic singer-guitarist partnerships that gives a rock band its personality, less polished than glamorous and all the better for it.
The set reaches across most of the catalogue, with four songs from Chaosmosis alongside material from Screamadelica, Give Out But Don’t Give In, XTRMNTR and Riot City Blues. The stylistic jumps are considerable, but Primal Scream have always treated genre as something porous rather than restrictive.
They close with “Movin’ On Up,” and for the children of the nineties in the room, it is an irresistible final release. For all the electronics, loops and mutations accumulated over the years, after all the stylistic detours, that song brings everything back to the source.
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