呐喊症候群 (1991)

Screamadelica is the third studio album by Scottish rock band Primal Scream. It was first released on 23 September 1991 in the United Kingdom by Creation Records and on 8 October 1991 in the United States by Sire Records. The album marked a significant departure from the band's early indie rock sound, drawing inspiration from the blossoming house music scene and associated drugs such as LSD and MDMA. Much of the album's production was handled by acid house DJ Andrew Weatherall and engineer Hugo Nicolson, who remixed original recordings made by the band into dance-oriented tracks.

Screamadelica, featuring Manchester-born singer Denise Johnson, was the band's first album to be a commercial success, peaking at number eight on the UK Albums Chart upon its release. It received wide praise from critics, and has been frequently named one of the best albums of the 1990s in various polls. It won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992 and has sold over three million copies worldwide.

Background and recording

Drawing inspiration from the acid house scene, which was blossoming at the time, the band enlisted house DJs Andrew Weatherall and Terry Farley on producing duties. Weatherall and Gillespie bonded over "Thin Lizzy, dub-reggae, Mott The Hoople, disco music" and they were both attracted by "industrial, experimental funk". The band loved the fact that Weatherall was a DJ who had never been a producer at the helm in a studio before. Gillespie commented on: "It was just this natural talent to make this music and structure and arrange music in a way that we’d never heard before. So he could take our songwriting and our instrumental [...] And the melodies and the gospel singers and the strings and the slate guitars, we played a lot of synthesisers as well. [...]". Weatherall selected the parts he liked and rearranged it: "he was really great at taking all this stuff and rearranging it and making it into this fantastic music". Acid house gave him an opportunity to work with the band.

"Loaded" was the first track on which Weatherall took part. He began remixing "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have", from their previous album, and the resulting track disassembled the song, adding a drum loop from an Italian bootleg mix of Edie Brickell's "What I Am" and a sample from the Peter Fonda B movie The Wild Angels.

Although the band wrote a track also called "Screamadelica", it does not appear on the album. The ten-minute dance track was also produced by Weatherall and sung by Denise Johnson. It appears on the Dixie-Narco EP, released in 1992, and is featured in the opening credits of the now rare Screamadelica VHS video tape.

Music

When asked what his influences were for Screamadelica, singer Bobby Gillespie said that Primal Scream were like a rock'n'roll band who had quite diverse taste. Many genres interested them like free jazz, funk, soul, country, blues, electronic music, post-punk, ambient music and psychedelic music from the 1960s. When naming the post-punk bands he listened to during his formative years, he explained: "a lot of those ideas are entrenched in Primal Scream, and maybe the last great rock bands were Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks and Joy Division. [...] The ideas in the music and the lyrics for those three bands completely influenced Primal Scream". Screamadelica was also influenced by the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds (1966). Gillespie says that after discovering the album, their songs became much softer. Gillespie has also cited Nico's album The Marble Index as a major influence when they were making Screamadelica, claiming he "listened to [it] all the time." The band were also "big fans of '70s reggae and dub. These 12” sounded like dub records". Ben Cardew of Pitchfork assessed: "Its ragtag bag of influences meant Screamadelica sounded a lot like many people, but no one sounded quite like Screamadelica, an album both ahead of its time and light years ahead of the rock/dance curve."

Artwork

The album cover for Screamadelica was painted by Creation Records' in-house artist Paul Cannell. Cannell was inspired by a damp water spot he had seen on the Creation Records offices ceiling after taking LSD.

Screamadelica was among ten album covers chosen by the Royal Mail for a set of "Classic Album Cover" postage stamps issued in January 2010.

The artwork also inspired a Fender Stratocaster for the album's 30th anniversary.

Release and commercial performance

The lead single "Loaded" reached the top 20 in the UK Singles chart in early 1990.

Screamadelica was released on 23 September 1991 in the UK. It reached number 8 on the UK Albums Chart, and was later certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry. The album has sold 715,000 copies as of September 2020. The single "Movin' On Up" was the band's breakthrough hit in the United States: as it was heavily played on alternative rock radio, it peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. It also reached number 28 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart as it was played on rock radio stations.