Primal Scream - XTRMNTR

That trilogy of records that Primal Scream made – Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR and Evil Heat – fuck! They did something profound on those records. It was the height of experimental lifestyle choices as well as musical choices. I know them and I’ve been round their studio near Swiss Cottage and the keyboards they were using were fucking demolished. I mean, they’d been thrown around and that’s why they got some great sounds out of them. I love the complete destruction on that record and it just jumped off into transcendence, and they just jumped into the deep end. They made music about what was going on.

Has rock & roll lost its ability to get angry? There’s a perception of rock & roll that my generation grew up with that came from a completely different time. The time you’re given is how you respond, and the response now is different. Maybe it’s not about sticking your head over the parapet with one fist in the air and some righteous fucking statement from the podium. I’m seeing more and more people kinda going inward and expressing themselves through the internet.

There’s some pretty righteous things being said out there and there’s stuff being said out there that wouldn't have been said in the street or on stage back in the day. Now, people have individual platforms but in the end who’s actually listening to it? Your three buddies on your Facebook page? We’re in a very fragmented time and when the green light goes on, it’s like ‘Go!’ in any direction. I guess it’s about what you want to get out of it and a lot of critics say, ‘Rock & roll should be this, this or this’ but it’s not a case of one-size-fits-all any more.

Music’s always going to be at the epicentre of cultural change but maybe not in the way that we’re used to. Once technology was all rocks and arrows but people still fucking died, but warfare now is all guns, grenades and fucking lasers and it’s still people dying. There’s been a shift, and rock & roll can be equated to that chaos around a battlefield.