What, me? Angry?

Primal Scream have survived drugs hell, bad reviews and even a stabbing to make possibly the best album of their 18-year career. With it all coming good for singer Bobby Gillespie, has he calmed down? We hope not
Bobby Gillespie
Bobby Gillespie Public domain

When the waitress asks him what he wants, Bobby Gillespie puts up his hand with a strange, timid determination, as though she were a teacher who had just asked what photo-synthesis was and, look, he's not trying to show off or anything, but he's positive he's got this one right.

"A cup of tea, please."

"Large or regular?" she asks.

"Small," he says. "I don't like regular. It's American."

"Look, I'm only doing my job," says the waitress.

"Yes, yes, I know," he beseeches to her departing arse, but she's gone, and in trying to aim a tiny kick against the Yankee overdog he has accidentally offended the underdog, which was never the point. This is Bobby Gillespie, for God's sake. If there's one thing that everyone knows about him - besides the fact that he's the lead singer of Primal Scream - it's that he's on the side of the little man.

Gillespie has just finished the album that he believes to be the best of his 18-year career - although, frankly, he always says that. Anyone with any sense would still have a very real fondness for the second disc, Primal Scream, which sold about three copies but, goddammit, made those three people very happy.

That was during the band's plangent, mournful phase, when they were full of titles such as You're Just Dead Skin To Me, and the little known vignette Jesus Can't Save Me. That was before they pretty much invented the indie-dance genre (along with the Happy Mondays and such) that gave the 1990s what the 1980s had conspicuously lacked - a definable sound about which people can reminisce with dignity.

This latest album, Evil Heat, is brilliant, and the band sound more singular than ever. The gritty, industrial crunch of Xtrmntr (the anti-vowel album, known as Exterminator) is still present, but some eerie, melodic twists make it darker and more accessible at the same time.

It all began in 1984, when Glasgow-born Gillespie did a 12-month stint with Scottish noise terrorists The Jesus & Mary Chain - a year that still ranks, with this one, 2002, as the joint best of his life. "I felt incredible. I thought I was the fucking Sex Pistols. I just thought, all the time, I belong with these people." He has quite an emotionally resonant turn of phrase.

Primal Scream already existed - playing his first gig with Mary Chain, he was supporting himself as lead singer of Primal Scream. You could forgive him for leaving: he was only the drummer, and to put a man with Gillespie's charisma on drums is like - well, I don't know much about football, but I imagine it's like putting David Beckham in goal. The band's first two albums followed in the dark indie-rock tradition, and then, in 1991, there was Screamadelica, an album that gave dance music a purpose in life.

Gillespie takes compliments very well; he is also unabashed by the notion of heaping praise upon his band, to the point where he often sounds as if he's talking about somebody else. "Unless you're going to play real hi-energy fucking music," he says, at the close of his first speech about how rubbish all rock is, "it's not fucking worth doing. And I think we do that. You should see us live - it's amazing. We're so powerful." This you can believe - the man was born to be on stage. In a cafe, he is slight and nervy, a bit of a klutz; in performance, he's a force of nature.

Discussing the shift in the band - between 1994, when they were off their heads all the time, and 1996, when Mani from The Stone Roses joined and turned the whole thing to "joy, pure joy!" - he says, "It's a different band. It's a different Primal Scream. There is nothing in common with this band and the one that did Screamadelica. There is no history."

The music is now certainly a lot darker in intent - the signature line of Screamadelica, after all, was, "We wanna get loaded, and we wanna have a good time". When Xtrmntr was released two years ago, there were songs such as Swastika Eyes, and an overall message that life is grotesque. But the main link between this Primal Scream and the previous one is Gillespie himself, which seems to have slipped his mind. His is a weird mix of arrogance and self-effacement, as you'd expect from the kind of rock star who raises his hand to order a cup of tea.

For the first five or six years, in the late 1980s, Primal Scream were pegged at the top end of indie, with a singer whom some wag named "the male Wendy James" (how dated is that?). When Loaded, mixed by Andy Weatherall, went into the Top 10, it was totally unexpected. It caught the mood of 1990, the meaning of dance and, above all, the point of E better than anyone else. It wasn't until later, another five years or so, that Gillespie got the "angry man of rock'n'roll" tag.

After Screamadelica, the band spent a while spawning funny anecdotes about how out of it they were. In 1992 they won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize, then lost the £20,000 cheque that night. (Martin Duffy, the keyboardist, tried to work out where it was from pictures of the event, but failed: "Supposedly, I went up on stage, but I don't remember, I was so pissed. There's a picture of me, and I've got the cheque, and I think that was the last time it was seen.")

The hiatus between Screamadelica in 1991 and Give Out But Don't Give Up in 1994 was explained pretty comprehensively by guitarist Andrew Innes: "There was a whole summer of 1992 where we'd open the studio at two o'clock and shut it at six and nobody would have turned up. People used to turn up to score and leave again."

In the past, Gillespie has said that the reason they went to Memphis to record Give Out... was because, if they'd recorded in London, New York or LA, two or three of the band members would have died. Anyway, no one did, and they released the album to mediocre reviews, which put a massive dent in their reputation as dance pioneers. The album sounded, everyone says, more like the Stones than the Stones.

Then, along with Vanishing Point in 1997, came a different Bobby Gillespie. He talked about the evils of drug culture, his abiding theory being that the state has an interest in keeping people on drugs, since it means they are controlled by their own addiction and thus neutralised. Add to this the news stories about his dad, the trades unionist ("I never told anyone that! They just found it out for themselves," he says, amused), and the image of Gillespie as rock leftie, a kind of Billy Bragg with musical credibility, was born.

This wasn't inaccurate - he is a leftie, and at that point he'd come off drugs and was disgusted by drug culture, and his dad was a trades unionist ("but very sunny - they were both very sunny," he says of his parents. "I think they think I'm a bit odd"). In keeping with the general thrust of the 1990s, this portrait of the revolutionary omitted all mention of the man's sense of humour.

In fact, there is nothing earnest about him. He has a lightness of touch, a sense of the absurd that is, if anything, overdeveloped and, above all, an incongruous charm that disarms criticism with a twinkly warmth, and a 1980s hairdo. And although he's still off them, he's not that puritanical about drugs any more, either: "When I read bands going, 'I was addicted to cocaine for six months, it was hell', I'm like, 'Shut up. We were rock stars. We didn't have a hard time, we had a good time.'"

Yet don't be fooled: Gillespie still thinks that modern life is rubbish. Its five most alienating features are: first, with no hesitation, "work", which is endearing in a man who's been following a vocation his whole life; and then "consumerism, media, TV, newspapers, drug culture. Is that five?"

"It's six, but media, TV and newspapers are all the same, so you still owe me one."

"Four's fine," he says, with authority. "If you look at the broader culture, it's like living in a science-fiction movie; it's like a cross between JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly." The Ballard yarn is about a man whose dreams are a pile-up of every violent image since imagery began. The Dick story is about a narcotics agent of the future who is assigned to monitor a lethal drug called Substance D and then becomes addicted to it. Gillespie doesn't elaborate as to why this should be the case, but the two things that seem to capture his imagination - apart from his own music and that of a small clutch of rock behemoths (Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison) - are graphic violence and drug culture. He launches himself at anything related to these twin evils with enormous energy, and when he's finished says, "You're not going to print that, are you?"

It's as if his subconscious is playing a bit too close to the surface. The violent events of the past 60 years are, Ballard-style, piling up in his mind. "Do you remember when they bombed Iraq in 1990, they had a lot of cameras, watching the bombing of Baghdad? They showed you the streets, but they never showed themselves blowing up the hospital with loads of kids inside. But I'm sure the fucking US government have got that footage and they'll be sat jacking each other off, watching it. They're just sick fucks. The world is controlled by sick fucks. It's always been that way. They're high on blood and power. They're vampires."

Here, he spreads his hands equably, as if to say, "But I'm not going to let it bother me", and laughs, because it is, after all, only five minutes ago that he said, "I haven't disengaged, I haven't been neutralised, but I am calmer. And that's not a bad thing, because I know that, if you spend all day getting really angry, you just become really bitter. And, you know what, you're no fun to be around."

There's no point arguing with a man over whether or not he's calmed down, but Gillespie appears remarkably unchanged by a combination of ups, downs, uppers, downers, money, stardom and nearly two decades in the music industry. He's got a fiery aspect that suggests not naivety, exactly, since he's pretty wry with it, but extreme youth.

When the truth is, he's 40. It could be his abiding weltschmerz that's kept his inner teenager alive. Besides the sick fucks that rule the world, all the ruled are pretty sick as well. "Everybody's like this; your next-door neighbour could easily work in a concentration camp. That's all that was, allowing a lot of people to live out their basest, sickest fantasies. That's why people join the army, put on the uniform. It's to mutilate and get paid for it."

"So you think everyone's having sick fantasies?"

He smirks at me, in the manner that a cat might smirk at a mouse if it had the facility. "Probably. Probably your next-door neighbour is that kind of guy."

"But isn't that just projection?"

"No, I don't want to go and torture someone. But I expect your neighbour would behave like that. Who do you think worked in these places?"

"But why does it always have to be that other person? Why can't it be you?"

He raises an eyebrow. "I'm not a sociologist, you know?" There is a tiny creature in his hair. If this were fiction, I could make it a louse, but I think it was an ant. "This is getting a bit crazy," he says, shaking his head as if I've just been incredibly cheeky - asked to borrow £1,000, or something. "Can I go to the loo?" asks the playful revolutionary. What can you say?

Upon his return, the brutality of the world is still the theme, and he's still taking it in a very skittish way. "Last night, I watched a bit of Big Brother, and thought, 'How close is it to brutality?' I wasn't watching, I was just walking past, you know? My girlfriend [the stylist and fashion muse, Katy England], was watching it, and the dog was sitting beside it, so I guess the dog was watching as well. It made as much sense to the dog as it did to anybody else in the house."

Minus the reality TV, this sounds like a charming domestic scene, and that's before he's even mentioned the baby. It's called Wolf ("You know, like a German") and is six months old. I dimly remember him saying he'd never have children. "Did I say that?" he asks, raising his eyebrows in deft conveyance of rue and pride.

"Well? Has fatherhood changed your life?"

There is a lake of silence. "What was the question?"

"You were telling me whether or not fatherhood has changed your life."

"Well, yes, it has, actually." He might not be about to enter a Who's The Next Tony Parsons? competition, but this looks a lot like a happy man.

And to think how wrong it might all have gone. The weird thing about Primal Scream is that they went through every kind of drugs hell, every conceivable disaster (disappointing reviews, mashed-up performances, Martin Duffy being stabbed by a mystery assailant), and the only thing that almost split them up was an 11-week tour of the US supporting Depeche Mode in 1994. "It wasn't druggie - it was the least amount of drugs I've done in my life. It was just really boring." They were playing to a Depeche Mode crowd that, while friendly, tended to picnic during shows.

After that, they took 1995 off, which didn't do much for their sense of purpose. Then, in 1996, they started again. "I thought, 'Well, I'll try being a musician again and see if it works, and if it doesn't I'll fucking quit.' And then Mani joined, and Kevin Shields [My Bloody Valentine guitar god] started, and we made Vanishing Point, and suddenly it was a great band again."

If it's tempting to see Primal Scream as sensible rock seniors now, that's not quite how it's working out. Gillespie is committed to the age-old idea of the rock god. He loves performing, hates nostalgia and loves nihilists and misfits. He is of the moment, as rock'n'roll should be. "The past and the future don't exist. Only the moment exists. In life, it's amazing when you're in the moment. Because you're not thinking, you're just being."

Oh, and he still likes to get really pissed, and so do the others. "Last time we were on tour, in Belgium, it was like the last scene in The Wild Bunch. It was carnage. It was like the retreat from Stalingrad - there were bodies everywhere." This is probably not a man who goes to bed each night thinking, "Another wonderful day tomorrow!", but it's clear that he's feeling lucky. "I could have been one of those ageing junkies who moves back in with his mum. I know people that's happened to, sitting there, nearly 40 years old, going, 'Can I have another cup of tea, please?'"

He sniggers. There is no possibility of his having to move in with his mum, ever. Everything's worked out just perfect.

· The single Miss Lucifer is out now. The album, Evil Heat, is released on August 5.