The Primitives

Certain Songs #1648: The Primitives – “Dizzy Heights”

October 4, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Pure
Year: 1989

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As the follow-up to an instant indie pop-punk classic, the second Primitives album, Pure, never really stood a chance of being held in the same esteem as their debut, especially as RCA stuck the fine stopgap single, “Way Behind Me,” on both the reissue of Lovely and the initial pressing of Pure.

So kudos to Paul Court and Tracy Tracy for mixing it up, and not even trying to replicate the debut. With producer Paul Sampson filling in for departed bassist Steve Dullaghan, Pure was weirder and more psychedelic, but also featured Court on more lead vocals than was strictly necessary.

Certain Songs #1646: The Primitives – “Stop Killing Me”

October 2, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Lovely
Year: 1987

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Of course, The Primitives didn’t form in a vacuum: in the mid-1980s, plenty of bands got their heads rearranged by Psychocandy’s mixture of horrendous noise and gummy pop, and suddenly the English countryside was crawling with bands like the Shop Assistants, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Darlings Bud, Soup Dragons and so on and so forth.

So this was the world in which The Primitives put out their ferocious third single, “Stop Killing Me,” the one that well and truly made their reputation (the story goes that Morrissey being photographed in a Primitives t-shirt helped them as well, believe it or not), and why not? “Stop Killing Me” is two minutes of glorious melodic noise.

Certain Songs #1645: The Primitives – “Crash”

October 1, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Lovely
Year: 1988

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Disambiguation: This post (and the next few) is about the late 1980s indie-pop group The Primitives. If you wish to read about the band that got Lou Reed and John Cale, please see yesterday’s post.

This, ladies and gentlemens, is the platonic ideal of an indie pop song. Fusing the Cars, the Jesus and Mary Chain and The Shangri-Las, “Crash’ is two-and-a-half minutes of pure pop bliss, and a song that I’ve heard countless countless times, each and every one an absolute pleasure. I was trying to figure out just how to explain that to you — though I doubt very few who are reading this disagree — and I figured I’d do what the journos call a tick-tock on how every single second of “Crash” is pure pop pleasure.

Certain Songs #1644: The Primitives – “The Ostrich”

September 30, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Single, 1964

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Disambiguation: This post is not about the 1980 jangle-pop band known as The Primitives. Please tune in tomorrow for a series of posts about them. No, this post is about something completely different: a fake band that spawned The Velvet Underground.

The year was 1964, and the kids were going crazy for that beat music, and a young songwriter named Lou Reed, who was working for an outfit called Pickwick Records, had an idea for a song. Actually he had three ideas for a song, all of which would serve him well in the future.