It is 14 years since Primal Scream won the Mercury Music Prize and 22 years since the group, led by the Glaswegian singer Bobby Gillespie, played their first gig. But the recent radio-friendly single, Country Girl, has been their biggest hit yet, flagging up the album Riot City Blues, which marked a confident return to rock’n’roll basics.

Ten thousand fans showed up at a homecoming gig on their latest British tour. Despite being able to pull a bigger crowd than many mainstream stars and deploying all the presentational firepower of a classic, arena-rock show, Primal Scream somehow retained the edgy alchemy of a cult band. Gillespie, now 42, remains one of pop’s perennial outsiders. A feral rock star who trades his celebrity for the right to say and do exactly as he pleases, he is the anti-Bono. Dressed in a beautifully tailored dark suit, he was a picture of rakish, delinquent cool, although his voice was even thinner than his figure, an enduring handicap that has nevertheless become a defining characteristic of the group’s sound.

They began with the rousing gospel chorus of Movin’ On Up, Gillespie’s vocals shored up by two formidable female backing singers. From there they tore into Dolls, from the new album, followed by Jailbird from the 1994 album Give Out but Don’t Give Up.

Although separated by 12 years, these two songs with their shamelessly upfront mixture of Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground influences, sounded virtually interchangeable. Other songs from the new album included Suicide Sally & Johnny Guitar and When the Bomb Drops, with the guitarists Andrew Innes and Barrie Cadogan chopping out interlocking riffs while Gary “Mani” Mounfield underpinned the sound with his heavy, loping bass lines and drummer Darrin Mooney hammered away at the back.

Primal Scream are a band with a bipolar musical personality and it wasn’t long before the darker, dance-fusion side of their repertoire came to the fore. Kill All Hippies and Burning Wheel gave way to a heavyweight Kowalski and a dramatic version of Swastika Eyes that forcefully recalled the era of hardcore rave music. They reverted to trad-rock mode for Country Girl and a closing Rocks, which did what the title promised and duly left the crowd baying for more.

Rock City, Nottingham, tonight; Hammersmith Apollo, London, November 24.