Let's Scream Again

It's January 1992 and I'm at Heathrow with Primal Scream. Everyone is stylishly late, there is a rolling sense of pandemonium and airport security are in convulsions. Innes wears a huge furry coat and Jackie Onassis sunglasses and he might as well be wearing a sign around his neck that reads "Arrest Me". Duffy is still drunk from the night before, Throb is wearing the regulation cowhide while producer Andrew Weatherall is here with his girlfriend Nina, looking unsquare with his corkscrew hair. Wish me luck, kind friends, I am going to Amsterdam with the Scream Team.

The 'Screamadelica' album has been the most perfect soundtrack to 1991, but it sure sounds like the dance variations are giving way to American blues and soul. Hence the imminent 'Dixie Narco EP', doused in the spirits of Muscle Shoals, Alex Chilton, Dennis Wilson and Jim Dickinson. It sounds opiated, late night and just a bit wasted.

By this time, the band are getting paranoid and speaking in codes. A Q magazine feature has detailed the contents of their medicine cabinet and it's quite a story. At least one of the band members is in a sorry way and there are contrasting stories about Duffy's adventures in Memphis, when a friend noticed that he'd been bleeding copiously for many hours. One account claims that he had fallen backwards and been skewered by the stem of a glass. But another version says that the keyboard player had been shot at a party. Today, he still seems bemused by the havoc. He entertains himself by playing word games in his rich midlands accent. He shows me the shamrock tattoo on his leg. He repeats the word "skunk" over and over again.

In Amsterdam, we stall for an NME photo session by the canal. Bobby is wearing a Crombie coat, a silk scarf and some old chukka boots. He's quiet, reasonably friendly, and tends to get animated when discussing 'Aftermath' by The Stones, Gram Parsons and James Burton and Aretha's most beautiful 'Angel'. You would find it hard to dislike him.

The band go pinballing around town for a few hours but haul their talents together for a late night show at The Paradiso. They play it loose, but engagingly so. The audience are enthusiastically into the scene, Bobby is on his uppers and I am grinning, endlessly.