Vanishing Point

'Through my diseased eyes

I'm sinful; sly
I can't stop stealing
I will pay the price of being a thief
when I stop breathing’
From Burning Wheel, Vanishing Point

'I should be tired/and all I am is wired'

From Motorhead, Vanishing Point

I first understood and became acquainted with Vanishing Point during a time in my
life, at the age of fifteen, when I was in the midst of a compulsive ,but none the less,
rather enjoyable bong smoking period, whilst basking in the careless glow of that
age, that up until that point had been primarily soundtracked by the transgressive
strains of late sixties Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour and Revolver in particular,
Becks's Mellow Gold, Rage Against The Machine's Evil Empire and the Wu-Tang
Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang;36 Chambers. Then, I don't remember where exactly, I
procured Vanishing Point after reading a typically hyperbole laden review in the
NME.

One day after a particularly deranged session, listening to Vanishing Point with a
group of associates who tended to congregate around my house to smoke, one of
whom had never smoked bongs before, the utopic oblivion of being really young was
momentarily shattered. About halfway through Kowalski, my friend, who shall remain
nameless, started to look uneasy, shaking a bit and looking generally ill at ease. Then
paranoia and fear began to take to hold of him. “I feel weird...I think I’m hearing
things...’ he mumbled, his eyes full of madness and insecurity, as he attempted to at
least retain some semblance of being in control of his mind. At first everyone laughed
a bit, took the piss, like teenagers, who believe to be superior drug takers to their
friends, tend to do. Feeling disgustingly superior we put it down to his cone smoking
inexperience. After a while though our fundamental good characters took hold as we
realised this was different from a slight reaction to a savage bowl. His brother, who
was also feeling dauntingly blazed himself, had to take him home. My friend wasn’t
right for a month. He complained of suicidal thoughts, paranoia and depression for
the whole of the ensuing month and demanded never to listen to that album again
when he was round my house, which as it turned out was not often after that day.

Of course my friend could have been listening to Coldplay and at that particular
moment it would have put the fear of God into him, perhaps more so, but the fact
remains that the Scream’s Vanishing Point is an album of ferocious, focused
claustrophobia and menace. It never, with the possible exception of the Stones by
numbers karaoke of Medication, fucks around. Great albums, like great films or
novels, have no regard for pleasing, no intention of satisfying an audience, of shifting
units, but are rather an uncensored product of their creators state, of their fears and
frustrations, their anger and maybe, just maybe, their hopes for a slightly less
oppressive future, a utopic desire.

Primal Scream were at a crossroads when they recorded Vanishing Point. After the
MDMA induced psychosis of the late eighties and early nineties and the critical
mauling of their over produced, unintentional Exile On Main Street covers album,
Give Out But don’t Give Up, the Scream, though revitalised by the relentless dynamo
that is Mani Mounfield, were wounded and hungover, something that self-important
music journalists had turned into incessant soundbtyes like ‘the Scream are coming
down from the Ecstasy high of Screamadelica and the smack addled mess of Give
Out...’ To continue such simplistic hyperbole this would be, as Xtmntr is, their
amphetamine album. That kind of thought though is simplistic and redundant, a lazy
form of journalism, as is trying to associate a drug with the sound or essence of any
album. Before the recording and release of Vanishing Point the Scream were though,
like The Happy Mondays before them, in danger of becoming a victim of drug taking
mythology, of metamorphasising into a endless narcotic tabloid tale, some of which
was down to their honesty on the subject with the press, but perhaps more accurately
because of the declining quality of their music.
Vanishing Point would be the point at which the Scream re-discovered their punk
Mojo.

Vanishing Point manages to fuse dub, techno, punk, rock'n'roll and pop elements
without ever seeming contrived or artificial, something that is a reminder of just how
musically ambitious and progressive Primal Scream have been as a musical unit, and
how they have never settled on attempting to lazily reproduce past glories and suck
the allegorical cock of the corporate rock world like anomic MOR behemoths such as
Oasis. They were always more than the debauched beast that the British press has
built up over years. Bobby Gillespie, lead singer and true musical devotee, has often
been mocked in the music press for his political posturing and rock n roll
namedropping, his persona always seemingly at one with a certain period of rock n
roll iconography, whether it was Keef in 1991or John Lydon in the late ninties,but it
has always been authentic, never a charade catering to trends dictated by the
propaganda ministry in the Kings Reach Tower, like many bands who are either
attempting to remain relevant or breaking their first album do. Regardless of all the
tabloid Jack Daniels and cocaine clichés, of which there was by all accounts much,
and the often pedantic, pompous and downright pretentious ranting of Gillespie down
the years, for Primal Scream, I truly believe it has really, and as trite as this might
sound, always been about the music, the promise of redemption and laying waste to
their minds and bodies in the great rock'n'roll tradition ,and the comfort of
manifesting their frustrations, hopes and laments within the confines of a simple,
cathartic song. And most importantly, with a few exceptions, I believe they have
always known what they were doing.

Vanishing Point opens with Burning Wheel, a brooding, slow burning declaration of
intent that perfectly captures the ideology of the album. When Gillespie sings'
Through my bleeding eyes/I'm filthy, fly/I crawl with insects/I'm anaesthetized/I'm
demonised' he sounds like a man taking his last breaths of air before dying,
struggling with his own fucked up alienation, and painfully admitting his own
diseased existence for better or for worse, but just relived and content that he has
confessed, found some kind of completion. Meanwhile, Mani, the now central driving
force in the Scream sound, chops out a seismic baseline that never leaves the listener
in any doubt as to what awaits; namely a journey into the recesses of the mind that
are not generally recalled, the places we don't want to go. But we do. And this is the
fucking genius of Vanishing Point, we want to be there, to listen to the darkness and
remarkably ,it even feels good, almost comforting.

The second track, Get Duffy, is a atmospheric instrumental but the album really
begins with the incendiary ,transcendental speed psychosis of Kowalski, which opens
with the sample from the film from which the album title was taken, 'This radio
station was named Kowalski, In honour of the last American hero to whom Speed
means freedom of the soul. The question is not when he's gonna stop, But who is
gonna stop him' This immediately paints an image of an isolated anti-hero who has
given up on trying to conform, something that is an underlying theme, perhaps the
underlying theme, of the whole album, and is battling existential fears, travelling
through the dessert, refusing to accept the horrors of reality, whilst both
metaphorically and literally speeding towards the unknown, in order to give his
existence meaning., some kind of purpose. The moment that Mani's bass kicks in and
Gillespie whispers the repetitive mantra of 'Kowalski' , the desperation of the film
samples and the soaring and murderous guitar crescendos take hold, not relenting in
their stark and barbaric sonic assault, the first example of Krautrock influences such
as Can throughout the record. Finally we are left with a sense of doom and loss that
manages to be both poignantly uplifting and comforting even though the eponymous
Kowalski of the track is heading inevitably and irreversibly towards destruction. The
song oozes nihilistic defiance, and so it should. This truly is the sound of blissful
psychosis, a kind of descent into insanity that is perversely pleasurable and
exilarating, again perfectly demonstrating the essence of the album.

Readers, as we are at risk of drowning in sycophancy, I have to admit that than in my

teenage years I despised Star, to me it always sounded like benign MOR pop, even
80s synth music. This of course was an act of supreme naive ignorance that could not
be further from the truth, as Star in the ensuing years, has revealed itself to be an act
of subversive pop genius, a track that employs minimalism and simplicity to great
effect. The presence of dub melodica guru Augustus Pablo playing on the track adds
an element of gravitas to it and when Gillespie sings 'Everybody is a Star' he
manages to make this trite line take on a heartfelt integrity, his voice smooth and
innocent, at one with the tender strains of the music, whilst conveying the soulful
optimistic tone of the track. If They Move Kill 'Em is an instrumental speed-funk
workout in which Mani again underlines his importance within the new Primal
Scream. It comes on like a middle of the road 70s American Cop show theme tune
and then turns into an animal longing for relief from the relentless surge of breaks
and waa waa pedal loops.

On Out of the Void, Bobby G. sings 'I can't slip my skin/I'm full of dust/I'm chemically
imbalanced/I'm cancer' and 'I can't get out of the void into the light‘. His wounded
and damaged voice manages to evoke a sadness and tragedy whilst engulfed within a
swamp of swerving electronica and deviantly contrasting, organic guitar. ‘If I were a
child again...’ Gillespie sings, surrounded by the momentarily benign ambience,
sounding relieved and in search of judgement, almost praying, for another shot at his
life, a broken man, cynically reviewing his wasted, yet debauched, life.
Stuka is a cacophony of swirling abstract riffs and techno flourishes punctuated by
the sound of Gillespie singing, through a vocoder, his voice distorted, disconnected
and filled with menace. When he sings 'I got a demon my head...' we are again
reminded of the manifesto of this record, the disillusionment that fuelles and
underpins it at every turn. Stuka manages through its quiet complexity, to develop a
violence that is so abstract yet paradoxically succinct that to the casual listener, as
well as the acid drenched devotee, is capable of inducing the emotion that first
created it.

Medication is easily the weakest track on the album, a mid-seventies Rolling Stones
pastiche that serves as a painful reminder to the Scream's previous album. Gillespie's
wails that he needs 'medication to heel this wound' whilst Andrew Innes and Duffy
chop out standard, though at least filthy and primal, rock'n'roll riffs that would not be
out of place on one of the Stones lesser seventies albums such as Black and Blue.
Whether it is homage or, God save us all, postmodernism, it doesn't quite work.

Things pick up again with the relentless twitching, wired, robotic punk groove of
Motorhead. It is, something that the title in itself makes clear, a clear ode to
amphetamine, that contains the not very ambiguous lyrics 'Fourth day, five day
marathon/ We're moving like a parallelogram/Don't move, the mornin's not a pretty
sight /Don't move, the mornin's not a pretty sight/I guess, I'll see you all on the ice/
should be tired, and all I am is wired.' It's a pretty established fact, and something he
has admitted, that after a period of heroin addiction Bobby Gillespie was a speed
freak extraordinaire, a raving, ravenous amphetamine snorting beast caught in the
lust for the infinite and thus the track takes on the form of personal confession and a
celebration of debauchery all rolled into one. Speed though is a drug that offers no
respite, no neat conclusions; it induces no emotion or finite meaning and the song
reflects this disorder. Motorhead,with it's lyrics that speak of the desire of never
ending lust for avoiding the nightmare of sleep, and it's relentless drum beat and
motoric surge captures this with it's nihilistic fervour whilst conveying the ugliness
and intrinsic emotional violence that nihilism fundamentally contains.

Trainspotting, which was recorded for the film of the same name, is a sedated,
smacked out dance track that makes manages to be calm and reflective without ever
sounding like MOR dinner party dance filth like Groove Armada. It is the beginning
of the comedown from the hellish, brutal realities of previous half an hour. Finally
the blissful and reflective Long Life, a track of eerie calm and tranquillity, concludes
the record and we are left reeling and frayed, torn and pensive, starring into the
abyss, but feeling somehow joyous, the duality of the record manifesting itself within
us.

Let’s get this straight. Sycophancy is practised by class A wankers, reality TV Z-list
celebrities, tabloid socialites,wannabe Hollywood players at award ceremonies,
rock’n’roll hangers on-who pray to the altar of Pete’n’Carl and 1970s Led Zeppelin
groupies. It must though be proclaimed that Vanishing Point is a journey through a
diseased, disaffected mind, a cathartic meditation on a dark period within the lives of
it's creators, an album that has flaws, and for it to be utterly convincing it must be
flawed, just like Johnny Greenwood's bum note on the intro of Radiohead's Creep or
the chaotic and frenzied riffola of The Stooges’ Fun House, but that will ultimately
stand alongside Xtrmntr and Screamadelica as the Scream's best, most intriguing and
layered work, an album that understands the notion of kicking out the jams, not as
fake sloganeering, but a reason to exist.

'If you play with fire

you’re gonna get burned
some of my friends
Are gonna die young'
From Stuka, Vanishing Point

James Howard, 26th June 2005 for Vice Magazine