Credit: Found On Internet

In-store HMV Oxford Street
Reviewed by Hugh Platt

So Bobby Gillespie is on his knees and is busy burying his face in his erstwhile bass player’s crotch, while Mani sticks his tongue out at the crowd and gurns while his frontman simulates an oral sex act on him.

At the in-store album launch for “Riot City Blues” on Oxford Street’s HMV, it’s just been one of those nights.

Once a band has enough material out to justify a Greatest Hits, as Gillespie’s lot did last year, they often reach a turning point, go insular and just rehash what the loyal following want, and produce release-after-release of the same-old. Or it’s the flipside; they go berserk, and lay waste to all that’s gone before in sweeping concept albums of material that contradict all and everything that got them to where they are now.

But Primal Scream have already undergone a tidal shift in tone in their career already. The dancefloor-friendly psychedelic-gospel of “Screamadelica”, slowly warped through an MDMA haze to the seizure-twitches of 2002’s “Evil Heat”, before hitting the comedown from that buzz with a record of equal parts barbiturate bliss-outs and scratchy post-powder headaches.
With “Riot City Blues” they’ve stacked everything on an return to their rock roots, piling on the Americana and the big choruses.

They set tonight’s flavour right from the off, with Mani winking at everyone in the front row and quipping “no thieving!” before Martin Duffy starts the piano riff for “Moving On Up”. In the somewhat surreal situation of being squashed between racks of CDs, with a lighting rig that never seems to dip below Extreme Glare, Primal Scream launch into what must be their smallest gig in years to a crowd of competition winners, professional blag merchants and a throng of telephoto lenses.

But it’s the songs from “Riot City Blues” that the crowd are keenest for, and “Dolls (Sweet Rock And Roll)” is the first song from the new record they give the gathered fans. It’s something of a mis-step, as while I’ve no doubt that the grin on Gillespie’s face is real when he’s hooting, and a-hollering, and demanding we all “Just have a good time!”, there’s something forced and fearful about it, just behind his eyes,