Preview: Screamadelica

LATER this week, Primal Scream will mark the 20th anniversary of their best-loved and most significant album with a gig in their native Glasgow. As part of the same birthday celebrations, a remastered edition of Screamadelica is released tomorrow in various formats, including a collector's box set edition in a cake tin.

Not many albums merit their own cake tin re-issue. Not many album sleeves are reprinted on a postage stamp either; Screamadelica's bold primary coloured design was selected for the Royal Mail's "classic album covers" series a year ago. But Screamadelica is a rare beast: an album which captured a moment, a scene, a lifestyle. Come Friday, we'll all be partying like it's 1991.

Its influence has also endured. Screamadelica has been described with typical hyperbole by the NME as "the album that changed music forever" and lauded by Q magazine as "Sgt Pepper for the E generation". Speaking at the time of its release, frontman Bobby Gillespie felt it was closer in spirit to The Beatles' White Album, citing the diversity of styles crammed into its double album running time (even if Screamadelica only manages 11 tracks to the White Album's 30).

It is interesting returning to Screamadelica as Beady Eye open for business with mulish confidence in their reheated classic rock references. Gillespie has never been short on rock star attitude himself, and always talks a good game. But in 1991 he had the goods to back up his belief in his band. Screamadelica delivered an ambitious, audacious masterclass in exploiting and updating classic influences with panache, fusing the most stellar elements of Gillespie's record collection - Beach Boys, MC5, Sly Stone - with the immersive club culture of the day.

Though still treated as local heroes in Scotland, the pre-Screamadelica Scream had been floundering creatively and commercially. Switching the bowl cuts and Byrdsian jangle of their debut Sonic Flower Groove for the leather and long hair heritage rocking of their self-titled second album had not gone down so well with a fanbase who were turning on to the Ecstasy-fuelled crossover sounds of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.

Fortunately, they had a fan in DJ du jour Andrew Weatherall, who accepted the band's offer to remix one of its tracks, the plaintive country ballad I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Had. Weatherall ditched the vocal melody, stripped the track down to the bare bones of a guitar riff and refitted it entirely using congas, righteous horns, languid, bassy backing, a gospel-style backing chorus and a Peter Fonda sample from the film The Wild Angels which also provided the new title. By the time Loaded was released in early 1990, Gillespie had cut his hair and gone clubbing in Brighton. The band bought a cheap sampler, immersed themselves in rave culture and made sure they had a ball in and out of the studio.

Loaded provided the key to the album but opening track Movin' On Up was the big pop hit. This lesson in how to rip off The Rolling Stones and get away with it was helmed by legendary Stones producer Jimmy Miller. Screamadelica was an ensemble effort but Gillespie was the casting director, assembling his dream team of collaborators to achieve the vision.

Gillespie ceded lead vocals to Denise Johnson on another single Don't Fight It, Feel It, the weird, compelling club track with the jittery bassline that will not be denied, and invited Jah Wobble, the ace on bass, and The Orb to put their stamp on ear-popping "dub symphony" Higher Than The Sun.

The druggy euphoria reached its peak on the slow-burning Come Together, but Screamadelica is not just about the epic mantras. Inner Flight, the pretty, trippy instrumental indebted to Pet Sounds, and the lysergic twinkle of Shine Like Stars both provide vital connective tissue.

Screamadelica went on to win the inaugural Mercury Music Prize in 1992. Eleven years later, it was placed at No 1 in The Scotsman's list of the Top 100 Scottish albums. Perhaps recognising that they had had their zeitgeist moment, Primal Scream have never made another album like it. The follow-up Give Out But Don't Give Up was a risk-averse exercise in retro rock. It would take them almost a decade to recapture that level of creative excitement with the pile-driving XTRMNTR. But one classic album should be enough for any band. Screamadelica had set Primal Scream up for life. v

FIONA SHEPHERD

Primal Scream perform the whole of Screamadelica at the SECC, Glasgow, on Friday. The deluxe edition of the album is released tomorrow

www.primalscream.net

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on March 13, 2011

Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Redferns