Loaded

Of all the post-Manchester crossover bands, Primal Scream were most successful in merging rock’s Romanticism and rave’s drug-tech futurism.

Like fellow Scots The Shamen, Primal Scream began in the early eighties as psychedelic resurrectionists attempting to distill the child-man innocence out of The Byrds, Love and the softer Velvet Underground. By 1988, the Scream’s testicles dropped catastrophically, and they veered off in an unconvincing blues direction, complete with raunchy on-the-road excess. During 1989, the band and other people on their label, Creation, started going to acid-house parties. “Contemporary rock ceased to excite us,’ singer and spiritual leader Bobby Gillespie said later. ‘At raves, the music was better, the people were better, the girls were better, and the drugs were better.’

The first recorded evidence of these realigned allegiances emerged when Primal Scream asked their friend DJ Andrew Weatherall of the Boy’s Own posse to remix the Stonesy ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’. Using rhythm guitar, piano vamps, horn stabs, and other elements from the original, Weatherall built a new track over a chunk-funky, mid tempo Soul II Soul style rhythmic undercarriage. Samples of Peter Fonda from Roger Corman’s bikersploitation move The Wild Angels - ‘We wanna be free. We wanna get loaded and have a good time!” - gave the song its new title: ‘Loaded’. At once sepia-toned retro and state-of-art-imagine a dub version of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’-‘Loaded’ got to Number Sixteen in early 1990, selling over a hundred thousand copies.

Excerpt from Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds