ISSUE 30 Primal scream-5th febuary galway leisureland: not being too familiar with the 'screams work ,myself and c. decided to go along, purely coz there were no better gigs in town that night. so, armed with a passing knowledge of their "hits", we ventured up to leisureland from the guesthouse we were staying, about 10 minutes down the road. leisureland was one of the strangest gig venues ive ever been in, no bar, no smoking in the main hall, and , because the place was being used by swimmers, etc, they took yr whole ticket off ya when u went in,and when u went out for a piss/smoke/whatever they gave ya a whole ticket back. pretty strange. also, the house lights were on all through the gig, so any light show was partially wasted. some dj was on before them, nothing too impressive, he was playing loads of real chessy music, jazz etc. the place was only half full (half empty?) when bobby and the lads hit the stage. i cant really give a disseretion of whether they played loads of new stuff, or old stuff, i recogni sed a few, like "rocks", and "star", "i see, i feel". i dont think they played "loaded" (i might be wrong, we left a song or two early.) "kowalski" was distorted beyond recognition, theres so much going on in that song, but all ya could hear was a wall of fuzz, mainly from mani's distorted bass. yeah, thats another thing, there were loads of "roses heads" there purely coz mani (formerly of the stone roses) was playing bass. so loads of "mani, mani,mani" football style chants, and all that. as far as chat to the crowd went, mani lead it, with some indistinguisable manchester accented babble. the crowd still went wild tho. i couldnt help but get bored towards the end of the gig. if some new band came along and played some of the worse primal songs, they'd regarded as a load of pants. But, because they "are" primal scream, legends of madchester that they are, they get away with things.... *sigh* not that they didn't play well, or anything, the gig was good, the fans went wild, and all was well. fast and furi ous, almost verging on cliched indie/rock/dance. just not my kind of thing, really, which is suprising, coz i like far more indie-schmindie stuff compared to yr average S@E contributer :) the main problem i had was that most of their dancey numbers were good, and a lot of the rock tracks were shit. and they played too many of the latter. not bad, but not good.