Sweet soul music

Finding a couple of pound coins behind the sofa cushions that have slipped, unawares, from shallow trouser pockets is one thing, but discovering an entire album's worth of recorded music is something else entirely.

So, when Primal Scream's Andrew Innes uncovered tape boxes in his basement marked “Ardent Studios” his curiosity led to the discovery of recordings the band had made in 1992 that never saw the light of day. That is to say, the album Give Out But Don't Give Up was released in 1994, but sessions recorded at Ardent in Memphis as well as the fabled Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, overseen by legendary producer Tom Dowd, were never released. Quite why is a matter of regret by the band. On first glance, it might be easy to assume that the band, with their reputation for recreational substance enjoyment might simply have forgotten about working Otis Redding's producer, but the reality is somewhat more sober.

Give Out But Don’t Give Up was the follow-up to Screamadelica, that touchstone for the rave era with party classics like Movin’ On Up and the generation-defining Loaded. Although the Primals became associated with the hedonistic acid and E culture of the time, they were at heart a rock’n’roll band. Screamadelica had drawn on Let It Bleed-period Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as influences. But its considerable success only created pressure for the Primals to follow it up with a hit of equal measure, and the band found themselves obliged to get back to the studio, even though they were not in the best condition following a heavy schedule of touring and promotion. “We were in a state,” singer Bobby Gillespie recently told The Times’ Will Hodgkinson. “Screamadelica left us in a weird place. Everything we dreamt of since the age of 16 had come true. What do you do after that? We had a blank future. We had been on a huge high, living the rock’n’roll dream, and then, boom, it ends.”

With those around the band fearing that they’d already reached the end of the road, their manager booked them into a London studio with former Stones producer, Jimmy Miller. However, with Miller in a less than healthy state himself, the band toiled without any output, adding more to the depressive state they were in following the euphoria of the previous album.

It was here that their record company in the US intervened, and brought them together with Dowd, who would immerse the band further into American music culture via sessions in Memphis and Muscle Shoals - Southern locations steeped in blues, soul and R’n’B (Ardent had recorded Sam & Dave, Led Zeppelin, Isaac Hayes, The Staples Singers, ZZ Top, R.E.M., George Thorogood, The Allman Brothers, Joe Walsh and Stevie Ray Vaughan, while Muscle Shoals Sound Studio had an equally illustrious reputation, having hosted included the Stones no less, plus Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe Cocker, Levon Helm, Paul Simon and Rod Stewart, amongst many others). Working with top local session musicians like The Memphis Horns, drummer Roger Hawkins and bassist David Hood, Dowd teased out of the band a modern classic, a collection of Stones-like rockers and ballads, a hint of country here, a soulful vocal there.

However, the Give Out But Don’t Give Up that Primal Scream actually released, however, was somewhat different. Critics dismissed songs like Rocks as a poor Rolling Stones imitation, while the collection of sloppy remixes and what sounded like crude attempts to recreate Screamadelica’s dance rave vibe, met with dismissal. Significantly, any benefit of working in such historic studios with renown musicians appeared to have been removed or, at least, the band had allowed themselves to tinker and tamper with the work they'd done in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, losing the soulful beauty of what they’d committed to tape there. “I don’t know what we were thinking,” Gillespie, confessed to Hodgkinson. “We made a perfect album: three rockers, six ballads and a centrepiece. Then we replaced it with something patchy. We confused ourselves.” Innes was more forthright: “[the Memphis/Muscle Shoals work] was so slick, so nice, so well played that we panicked. It sounded too grown-up.” That’s one way of putting it. I would simply say 'authentic'. “For years, I felt bad about us going to Memphis and not doing what we set out to do,” Gillespie says in the release’s official publicity material. “Hearing these songs after all this time has made everything all right again. I feel redeemed.”

And so he should be. You can now hear for yourself how authentic the Dowd recordings are with the release of Give Out But Don't Give Up: The Original Memphis Recordings. Available as a single CD with the original nine-track running order, or a two-CD edition with multiple versions, takes and outtakes of the Ardent/Muscle Shoals sessions, it is - no exaggeration - like listening to a brand new album. I’d go further: despite being familiar with Rocks, Call On Me and Cry Myself Blind, the album reverses much of the criticism it received on its original release. Tracks that were slated for cloning the Rolling Stones actually sound as good, if not better, than some elements of Let It Bleed and Exile On Main Street. I’ll even go out on a limb and say this package is as good a ‘country-soul’ album as you’ll ever introduce to your ears, blending perfectly the work of Primal Scream’s late guitarist Robert Young and the Memphis rhythm players Dowd brought together. I’ll go even further out on a limb and say album this has probably cemented itself in my list of all time favourites. Listening to it the other day on a seven-hour flight to Dubai, I hadn’t realised that I’d listened to all 25 tracks in the deluxe package three times before taking a break. I think that says it all.