My favourite author or book
Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. A beautifully written dreamlike book about a character named Divine, a prisoner who tells stories about his former highly sexualised life in the criminal underworld. Genet subverts notions of “morality”, making betrayal and murder the ultimate virtues. The novel is populated with fabulously dressed transvestites, thieves, pimps and murderers and is a celebration of homosexual sex. It’s a book of anti-bourgeois provocation and poetic dream eroticism. Genet was actually incarcerated while he wrote it. A true outlaw artist.
The book I’m reading
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth – a prescient novel. It prophesied the presidency of Donald Trump and the dystopian political shift of tens of millions of American citizens’ willing embracement of contemporary fascism.
The book I wish I had written
Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet. The way Genet describes his time spent in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon with the young fedayeen is written with deep empathy and a Romantic poetic beauty. To be able to write this tenderly about the lives of these young men — most of whom were destined for a fate of self-sacrificial revolutionary suicide — is a feat of literary wonder. It was to be Genet’s last book. Oh, to be able to write like Genet.
The book I couldn’t finish
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford. I read a review of this in the LRB [London Review of Books] and it sounded really interesting. It was actually very disappointing. More or less a book detailing how Highsmith’s colourful love life mirrored the plots of her novels. I grew bored with the repetitiveness of the narrative.
My favourite film
My Childhood, directed by Bill Douglas. This film gave me the courage to write about my own Scottish working-class childhood. Douglas had an eye for the small details in life that makes for a powerful, understated, narrative style of film-making. The use of silence in Douglas’s films says so much more with their painful intimacy and his forensic eye for highlighting the tensions and traumas of a familial torpor. His films have inspired my approach to songwriting.
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My favourite play
Philosophy in the Bedroom (La philosophie dans le boudoir) by the Marquis de Sade. I saw this play at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow when I was 18 alongside plays by Bertolt Brecht and Genet. The way Giles Havergal, the Citizens’ director, staged this and other plays was mind-blowing stuff for the teenage me.
The box set that I’m hooked on
The Sweeney. It takes me back to my teenage years and gives me a warm, comforting feeling. I love the footage of 1970s London you see throughout the show. Especially during car chases.
My favourite TV series
The Sweeney. I can watch John Thaw as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman as Detective Sergeant George Carter until the end of time itself – total pleasure.
My favourite piece of music
The Internationale. I love that the workers of the world have their own national anthem – it’s a song of international solidarity, socialistic brother and sisterhood. I hate nationalism, such a divisive and dangerous concept. Fascism and racism always begin with this narrative.
The last movie that made me cry
Exterminate All the Brutes, directed by Raoul Peck. A fabulous three-part series exploring the savage brutality and murderous consequences of European colonialism and the genocidal legacy of empire.
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The lyric I wish I’d written
(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right, sung by Luther Ingram, written by Homer Banks, Carl Hampton and Raymond Jackson. This song deals with the dark subject of an adulterous, illicit love affair. Alongside Dark End of the Street by James Carr, it’s one of the all-time great “cheating” songs. Roger Hawkins and David Hood are the rhythm section on it and they both played on Primal Scream’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up album, which we recorded in Memphis in 1993. This song is one of the key reasons why we wanted to work with Roger and David. The band are so great on this. It’s such a dark record, but it was a huge hit in the US pop charts in the 1970s.
The song that saved me
God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols. A rock’n’roll record that slashed the screen showing the fake reality movie of so-called “British culture” and revealed the truly ugly face behind the mask of “good manners” and “fair play”. It shone a much-needed light on the ancient con of queen and country while detonating a fabulous youth revolution at the same time. Punk rock was my cultural revolution.
The instrument I play
Guitar, badly. I can play many songs by artists I love in a very primitive but soulful way. When you are a member of a band that has had players such as Robert Young, Kevin Shields and Andrew Innes you tend not to try and get in the way of those sonic assassins.
The instrument I wish I’d learnt
Piano.
The music that cheers me up
1970s pop soul, mostly on the Philadelphia International Records label. The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the Spinners, Delfonics, and Stylistics — any Thom Bell, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff production. Such glorious, joyful music. The songwriting, production, song arrangements, orchestration and musicianship on these records is astounding. As a songwriter and producer myself there is so much to learn from here. And they make me wanna dance.
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If I could own one painting it would be...
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, the triptych. A psychedelic motherf***ing trip through a warped medieval imagination come to life would be such a cool painting to hang on my wall and gaze at in wonder each day I wake up and need to be inspired.
The place I feel happiest
At home in London with family — my wife, Katy, my sons, Wolf and Lux, and my dogs, Reggie and Ivy.
My guiltiest cultural pleasure
Enjoying Rangers and England defeats.
I’m having a fantasy dinner party, I’ll invite these artists and authors...
Jean Genet, William Blake, Francis Bacon, the poets Thom Gunn and Anne Sexton, photographer William Eggleston, Huey P Newton from Black Panther, Karl Marx, James Connolly the Irish radical socialist, Raquel Welch (around the time of One Million Years BC and Myra Breckinridge), Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, the poets John Donne and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Claudia Cardinale, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lawrence, Angela Davis, Camille Paglia, Ash Sarkar, Diego Maradona, Klaus Kinski, Nastassja Kinski, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the actress Hanna Schygulla, Valerie Solanas, Hank Williams, Yuri Gagarin, Divine, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Philip Roth, the director Bill Douglas, Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx, the Cockettes (San Francisco radical multisexual dance and street theatre group), Germaine Greer, Lucian Freud, Anita Pallenberg, David Litvinoff (1960s cultural guru and underground facilitator), the film-maker Kenneth Anger, the director Nicholas Ray, the actresses Jane Russell and Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, the novelists Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, Slavoj Zizek, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht.
And I’ll put on this music...
The music would consist of compilation album CDs on the Soul Jazz label such as New Orleans Funk Volumes 1-4 and Saturday Night Fish Fry.
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Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth’s album Utopian Ashes is out now on Sony. Tour tickets can be purchased from utopianAshes.lnk.to/TourPR
Primal Scream celebrate 30 years of Screamadelica with three special releases available to pre-order from primalscream.net
