Gary "Mani" Mounfield is sitting in his hotel room of New York's Soho Grand, spouting off. He's feisty and fiercely political, this Primal Scream and former Stone Roses bassist, and he's using his time with various members of the American media to let 'em know about it.

"Britain's got a real drug culture," he says. "There's nothing much else for people to do but get completely out of their minds most of the time. So I wanna try and wise people up a bit and say, 'Well, yeah do it, but don't fucking hand in your brain, because governments like to have people disenfranchised and smacked up or cracked up, because it takes away people's will to fight.' So we've got nothing against people getting stoned and what have you, but be careful what they're trying to do to you surreptitiously."

"Mani" has spoken, and in the process (and in their own way) his band Primal Scream have just grown up. The same group that rose to success in Britain on the back of the legendary excesses, echoed in songs like "Loaded," "Higher Than the Sun" and "Medication," while straddling middle age, took up a call to arms for their sixth effort, XTRMNTR. Recorded substance teetotal, the band descended upon its London studio and churned out the kind of politically conscious and sonically challenging album that would leave many a young band salivating.

"For the Scream, it's the most lucid we've ever been," says Mounfield. "I think we all kind of recognized that the studio isn't the place to be getting off your wig. You can do that when you're out on the road...if you want to. We just wanna be true to ourselves and put the best performance that we can and make the best music we can, so I think we've kind of grown up in a way, a little bit. It sounds strange to say it because we're supposed to be the baddest-arsed-junkie-bastards in Britain right now, but I think we're just a bunch of pussycats, man."

Although the band had been around for years before, Primal Scream made their first big mark in 1991 with Screamadelica, an album, which in Britain at least, became the penultimate hybrid of Sixties flower-powered, skunk-driven idealism and early Nineties ecstasy drizzled higher-consciousness raving. Led by rock & roll icon-in-the-making Scotsman Bobbie Gillespie, Primal Scream developed a fan base that admired them as much for their musical sensibilities as their extreme lifestyle. They were labeled "indie," if only because they never stuck with one particular sound long enough for it to be their trademark. They moved from the indie-dance of Screamadelica to the Stonesy rock & roll of 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up to 1997's Vanishing Point, which played like a guitar-saturated, electronic-driven film soundtrack.

XTRMNTR is a matured sonic assault, cementing the Primal Scream sound as the cosmic paring of the guttural angry-young-man gusto of Iggy and the Stooges with the cerebral, electronic urban textures mapped out by electronica heavy weights Unkle and Sasha. And in the middle of it all, Bobby G takes on totalitarianism ("Swastika Eyes") and of course the almighty political scapegoat, capitalism ("Everyone's a prostitute...," from "Exterminator"), all while maintaining a state of being "groovy," according to Mounfield.

"Primarily our job is to make people dance," he says. "And we just wanna get people political again and get them on the streets so they don't take no shit."

But the war isn't about to be fought alone, sonically anyway. The Chemical Brothers show up on "Swastika Eyes" ("We wanted to make a really kitschy, gay disco tune," says Mounfield, "and no one does gay disco better than the Chemical Brothers".), while the film-scoring David Holmes pitches in on "Blood Money" and New Order's Bernard Sumner adds guitar to "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" ("It's good when you get to meet and work with your heroes"). It's the Scream's most definitive and cohesive record to date, and the one most likely to change their reputation from rock & roll drug casualties, to bona fide loud-mouthed hell-raisers.

"We've always had a feeling since we started recording the songs that it's time for Primal Scream at the minute 'cos music, especially in Britain, is really careerist and conservative and no one seems to have any opinions," Mounfield says. "But we're still a bunch of big mouths and we don't mind shooting from the hip when it comes down to it. If we get in trouble with things, then so be it -- but at least we haven't been quiet little mice."

Primal Scream kick off their U.S. tour this weekend.

JOLIE LASH
(May 27, 2000)