Album of the week: revisiting Primal Scream's 'Vanishing Point' as the band reissue three key records

Through the past darkly with Primal Scream as the (mostly) Scottish band revisit three albums they recorded between the (as they saw it) dingy fag-end of the swingin’ Nineties and the grave new world of an allegedly fresh millennium. The Bunker Trilogy is the title they’re now giving to Vanishing Point (1997), XTRMNTR (2000) and Evil Heat (2002), named after the nickname they gave their North London studio and now grouped together in a set of expanded reissues being released between now and October.

First up, this week, Vanishing Point. Its predecessors were 1991’s Screamadelica, the epochal rock/rave/dub crossover album on which DJ/producer/remixer Andrew Weatherall helped them reinvent what rock music – and Primal Scream – could be. Then came 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up, the sound of a gang of pasty, leather-clad Brits who were in thrall to the rock’n’roll dream, immersing themselves in American blues, country, gospel and clobber previously inhabited by The Rolling Stones.

Then, after another three-year gestation, another seismic shift. The Scream let fans know that everything we knew was (again) wrong when they released as Vanishing Point’s lead track ‘Kowalski’, a song co-written with new member Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield, former bass player with The Stone Roses. Titled after Barry Newman’s single-monikered anti-hero from nihilist 1971 road-movie Vanishing Point, this was a mantric, dubby, grubby, Can-sampling, twisted electro-rock track that was lite on tune and even more lite on chorus. Despite a video featuring supermodels Kate Moss and Devon Aoki (and scripted by Irvine Welsh), it was also no one’s idea of a lead single. Which was exactly, presumably, the point.

The album opener drove that point home, too. ‘Burning Wheel’ was an unstintingly low-slung seven minutes, an extended blues jam with space-rock atmospherics. Ploughing a similar groove was the dubby ‘Star’, albeit this time with a remarkably pretty melody and an unusually affecting vocal from Gillespie, a singer not normally known for his, well, sweetness. Case in point: their pounding synths’n’riffs cover of ‘Motorhead’ by Motorhead, which Gillespie allegedly part-sang through a Darth Vader mask before going full sneer.

The connection with author Welsh, very much part of the dissolute Scream team back then, was further underlined in the track ‘Trainspotting’. Unlike Danny Boyle’s film, on the soundtrack of which it had originally appeared 18 months previously, the instrumental is far from propulsive. Rather it’s a stoned groove pitched somewhere between blissed out and zonked out.

The album tracks, then, are the sound of a band not so much choosing life as choosing to opt out of everything around them in that heady/headless era of Cool Britannia.

As for the extra tracks on this reissue: ‘Kowalski’ b-side ’96 Tears’ is a hammering, Suicide-influenced cover of the ? [Question Mark] and the Mysterians 1966 garage-rock anti-classic. ‘Star’ b-side ‘Jesus’ is a Velvet Underground-esque narco-ballad. Second ‘Star’ b-side ‘How Does It Feel to Belong’ is another Velvets-coded streak of ennui. Third 'Star' b-side ‘Rebel Dub’ is a remix of ‘Star’ that does what it says on the tin (with extra bongos). And ‘Hammond Connection’, the b-side to ‘Burning Wheel’, is a further triumph of nominative determinism, a contrarily energetic bit of Hammond organ-powered R&B.

All of which sounds like what Primal Scream fully intended: disruptive music made in the dark, in the shadows, as frequently claustrophobic as a bunker. As contrarian-in-chief Gillespie puts it now: “The albums constituting The Bunker Trilogy were the complete antithesis of everything that was going on in UK music in the 1990s. We were making uncompromising, aggressive, experimental pop and rock music with lyrics about psychic dislocation, addiction, alienation, depression, questioning our very existence and documenting the dark, sleazy underbelly of UK youth culture…”

While that is mostly true, Vanishing Point the album is perhaps best summed up by the tag-line on the poster of Vanishing Point the movie: “Tighten your seatbelt. You never had a trip like this before.” Certainly in the context of a band who, five years previously, had won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize for Screamadelica and refashioned British “indie” in their own image, their fifth album was indeed a wild detour.