“Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” Primal Scream offer a cautionary warning about our troubled world with Deep Dark Waters
Primal Scream have released a second single from their forthcoming 12th album, Come Ahead.
Deep Dark Waters is a cautionary tale exploring colonialism, hardening attitudes towards refugees from war-torn lands, xenophobia, fanaticism, intolerance and political violence, which the band say is holding up a mirror to “the dark undercurrent of our times’.
One verse of the song runs:
“Our fortress continent
Our values torn and bent
We bomb and when they run
We tell them they can’t come“
In a statement about the song, vocalist Bobby Gillespie says, “Deep Dark Waters is influenced by the writings of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. It contains a warning from history. ‘Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it’.”
Watch a visualiser for the song, directed by Gillespie’s former Jesus And Mary Chain bandmate Douglas Hart, below:
Come Ahead, the follow-up to the band’s 2016 album Chaosmosis, will be released on November 8 via BMG. It was recorded in Belfast, London and Los Angeles with Belfast-born producer David Holmes. The album’s first single, Love Insurrection, was released last month.
“If there was an overall theme to Come Ahead it might be one of conflict, whether inner or outer,” Gillespie says of the record. “There is a message of hope in the record but it’s tempered with an acceptance of the worst side of human nature.”
“There is also a thread of compassion running through the album. The title is a Glaswegian term. If someone threatens to fight you, you say, ‘Come ahead!’ It’s redolent of the indomitable spirit of the Glaswegian, and the album itself shares that aggressive attitude and confidence.”