Smash hit

“If somebody says, ‘I don’t want you to play bass on this song’, I won’t throw my rattle out of my pram,” Mani explains. “If it’s better for the song, that’s okay with me. We’re not a demanding band. Egos are left with the ego-check girl. And you know you’ve got to please your bandmates before you can hope to please the wider populace.”

This open-door policy has led to some interesting collaborations, among them the presence of Kevin Shields as guest guitarist and noise-mangler over several years — the My Bloody Valentine leader belying his reputation as procrastinating and unproductive by his close involvement with the band. Guests on Beautiful Future include Queens of the Stone Age’s front man, Josh Homme, the folk singer Linda Thompson and Lovefoxxx from CSS. Homme features on the thumping rocker Necro Hex Blues, which was built up over samples of Homme and Innes jamming together. Lovefoxxx duets with Gillespie on I Love to Hurt (You Love to Be Hurt), the album’s most electronic track. Thompson adds her vocal to a pretty cover version of the Fleetwood Mac song Over and Over.

So, with a Fleetwood Mac cover underlining the band’s new pop sensibility, where did this sound come from? Was it a deliberate strategy? “We’re not in the business of repetition. We like to experiment,” Gillespie says. The band had finished touring their previous album, Riot City Blues, in December 2006 and reconvened in the studio in January 2007 to start work on the songs that would eventually become Beautiful Future. After about six weeks, Gillespie began to notice a new direction emerging.

“I realised that Andrew was playing guitar completely differently \ he ever had before,” he recalls. “It was more precise and machine-like. He started playing these choppy, angular licks. Almost severe.” Then the Primal Scream chemistry happened. “From what Andrew was doing, the drummer started playing differently, then Mani started playing bass differently and I started thinking about melodies differently. Basically everything changed because of a slight shift in the way Andrew played guitar.”

The new sound will be unveiled on Tuesday, when Primal Scream appear at the Festival Hall as part of Massive Attack’s Meltdown festival. They’ll be sharing a bill with one of their influences, the MC5. Mani says that he still gets frightened of letting himself and his band down when playing in front of his heroes, but he sees that as a positive. “Fear is a tremendous motivator, a great driver,” he says. “You should use it to the max.” But then Primal Scream do most things to the max. Except talking about the lyrics.

Beautiful Future is released on B-Unique on July 21, preceded by the single Can’t Go Back on July 14

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010