As an avowed socialist, Bobby Gillespie would be horrified by the notion that he and David Cameron have anything in common. One shared trait, however, is a reluctance to shedding light on any possible drug consumption in their younger days. The Leader of the Opposition says that he reserves the right not to answer any questions about his recreational get-togethers while a member of Oxford’s notorious Bullingdon Club. Latterly though, Gillespie has been suffering from an inversion of the same problem. In a recent book The Scream: The Music, Myths and Misbehaviour of Primal Scream, the author, Kris Needs, contends that while the rest of the band were at the back of the bus taking drugs, Gillespie was at the front, reading.

It was, when you thought about it, a claim that made peculiar sense. Has anyone ever written about Rimbaudian excess as unconvincingly as Gillespie? Even after 20 years’ practice, the best he could come up with on the group’s 2006 album Riot City Blues was Suicide Sally & Johnny Guitar: “She overdosed and crashed in her car / Amphetamine jab shot a hole in his head.” And so to Suicide Bomb from Primal Scream’s ninth opus – in which the substances coursing through Gillespie’s veins have him “going live like a suicide bomb”.

Exciting, huh? Alas, any doomed romance attached to the notion is undercut by a guitar melody inspired not by the Stooges or New York Dolls or any of the other nihilist icons Gillespie reveres but, um, I Will Follow by U2. It can’t be easy finding new ways to be an affront to the bowler-hatted, umbrella-wielding squares who, increasingly, exist only in the 1975 of Gillespie’s mind. However, the title track’s young subject is given an ad-hoc careers talk by Gillespie, all the better to avoid “living the dream of the dead heart of the control machine”.

Here, and around the Chic-like bassline of Uptown, some pop nous is detectable, but the tragedy of Primal Scream is that even when their singer has a hand in writing a good song, he ruins it the moment he opens his mouth. Over and Over isn’t one of his – it’s a cover of the Fleetwood Mac song – but the presence of Linda Thompson on it is a blessed relief, coming as it does right after what, even by Gillespie’s standards is one of his most dismal vocals. Enlisting poor Lovefoxxx from CSS to play along in the S&M electro-pulse of I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt), he sings, “Just like a junkie/ You’re safe in the fear.” Really, Gary Barlow could sing about S&M and sound more believable.

All of which returns us to our original question. Is Gillespie pretending to live the life he writes about or just plain bad at it? Asked by Q magazine about the allegations in Needs’s book, he moved quickly to rectify the misunderstanding. “Yeah, but I’d have been speeding out my brains while I was reading,” he said, before adding, “and, also I might be pacing myself as well.”

Well, quite. At 46, we’re looking at maybe ten more albums of this stuff.

And, to borrow from Zombie Man, “paying the devil the mortgage on your soul” isn’t going to take care of itself. There’s a recession coming, you know.

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