CHAPTER 4

 

#97: PRIMAL SCREAM

"Higher Than The Sun (American Spring Mix)"

from the 12-inch single "Higher Than The Sun"

Released: June 1991

Blinking through the trees, grinning like a knowing but permanently concealed Cheshire cat, stood the tower at the centre of power.

“This is a BEAUTIFUL day…a NEW day…”

There were many days of this nature in that year. A flawlessly blue sky, everybody acknowledging each other, talking with each other, statues, parks and the occasional taxi all co-mingling in closed acceptance of their combined need and purpose.

The egg-white sun dazzling all who chose to neglect its existence.

It felt to her like a new city. A different city. A better one.

“We are to-GETHER! We are unified, and of one accord!”

How privileged and inspired she felt to bear witness to the beginning of the end of the world.

*

 

 

Many argue about the nature of hauntology but usually the real thing makes itself known. It is the late spring or early summer of 2018 and I am immobilised in hospital, dazed and, due to a combination of repeated anaesthesia - I needed to return to the operating theatre some thirty times during my admission for dressings changes alone - antibiotics and morphine derivés, tripping, unmistakeably and unavoidably tripping.

 

 

Then I would hear the deepest inner breathing that anyone could hope to hear, the distorted perspectives, the angular volume balance. Later, back at home - had I really been away, in all senses, for nineteen-and-a-half weeks? - it struck me; Bobby Gillespie's slowed-down breathing at the beginning of, and intermittently punctuating throughout, Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson's mix of a song which had once spoken to me of defiance and promise, that warm Westminster ten-month summer of 1991. It was thr reproachful ghost of the past materialising more meanginfully in my then-present.

In 1991, the writers of the New Musical Express voted “Higher Than The Sun” that year's best single, ahead of both “Unfinished Sympathy” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That would mean the record had to be really special, and for a lot of people in Britain “Higher Than The Sun” was “our” “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; a declaration of anti-principles, a gigantic NO! in the face of post-Thatcher/Reagan conformity. But where Nirvana screamed out their message with great joy, Primal Scream had a subtler, more gently disorientating approach.

One is invited to overlook the clunkiness of using the word “hallucinogens” in a lyric and the song's scratch mix of clichés (“experience and innocence,” “state of grace,” “wasn’t born to follow”). Actually the clichés might be part of the song’s point, since the words elope from Gillespie’s mouth only semi-clearly; this is not the exuberant beyond-phonetics tongue-talking of fellow Glaswegian John Martyn’s “Outside In” but more an A.R. Kane-ish swoon (“I live just for today/I don’t care ‘bout tomorrow,” "fanta...stical places...").

The song as such barely exists beyond that statement; the Orb mix which is the song's main feature on the album Screamadelica foregrounds the song, with only a hint of the John Barry harpsichord (or possibly cimbalom) melancholy and weeping dervishes which stream through Weatherall and Nicolson’s 12” mix. There is an upward whooping of something approaching liberation, and then the spirit of (of all people) Tears For Fears (“Shout”) peers through the instrumental bridge, before the song mutters itself into fading vaporisation. You get the feeling that it could go on forever, and in a lot of ways it has.

 

Weatherall and Nicolson treat the song as tantric. They delay expressions, murmurs and climaxes and render the song - or piece of performance art, as I suspect Gillespie would prefer you to view it - darker, scarier and more radical. Their sense of structural symmetry is peerless and emphasise the possibility that you are bearing aural witness to a scared child's prayer. There isn't very much of American Spring (as the duo was only known in Britain, to avoid confusion with the Leicester progressive rock band Spring, whose drummer Pick Withers later turned up in Dire Straits) about the mix - the most remarkable thing about the Spring album is the cheerful lightness of its radicalism.

Yet this mix of "Higher Than The Sun," as it stood to and for me in the approaching summer of 1991, was at the time and in itself an indicator of what had not yet even been thought of as hauntology, from twenty years before, when pre-teen Bobby Gillespie was growing up in East Kilbride, just across the A725 Expressway and Bothwell Bridge from where I was growing up. The residual memory that our brains were, in their own ways, different. The veering voices, the steel cube anomalies - my childhood haunts of Uddingston and Bothwell crouched in the prowling shadows of the Birkenshaw Industrial Estate - the need for escape. I didn't do drugs, so any revelation was necessarily second-guessing. Or at least was until I awoke, or did I remain lucidly asleep, in the centre of 2018, knowing that I had also seen those "fanta...stical places" though, for reasons I will go into later, bore no wish to see them ever again.

I did always think that the American Spring Mix should have been included in, or supplanted the Orb mix actually on, Screamadelica. Its inviting darkness passes to us a hint of the direly ecstatic nothingness in which side three of that record culminates (despite the latter's absurd payoff). As Weatherall and Nicolson view it, however, like stout DJ Cortez in sight of the Pacific Aquaclub, the song proposes a grandeur which far exceeds record collectoritis, a benign infinity capable of embracing us all.

The song escorted me through that other door and reminded me that the other world I had always feared could be palpated and extolled.

 

 

(Author's Note: the opening italicised section was previously published as part of a Then Play Long piece on, of all benign infinities, Fleetwood Mac's Behind The Mask. I altered it very subtly for this piece.)