Primal Scream release their ninth studio album Beautiful Future later this month. Their extraordinary self-reinvention as rave 'n' roll techno-gospel hybridizers began 17 years ago with "Loaded" and "Come Together," and The Observer's Simon Reynolds was there to ask prime screamer Bobby Gillespie all about it. -- Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director

The story of Primal Scream, whose second hit single entered the charts this week, encapsulates the last 14 years of British rock history. Bobby Gillespie, the group's 27-year-old singer, has followed the classic course of development for an indie pop star.

As an introspective and obsessive Scottish teenager, Gillespie had his world turned inside out by the Sex Pistols. He met kindred spirits through going to punk gigs. Among them was one Alan McGee, who went on to found Creation Records and discover the Jesus And Mary Chain. Gillespie was the Mary Chain's drummer for a while, before leaving to concentrate on his own group. By 1986, Primal Scream found themselves aligned with the "shambling" movement: an upsurge of lo-fi guitar primitivists which was briefly celebrated as "the next big thing."

By the time Primal Scream released their debut album Sonic Flower Groove in 1987, Creation Records had become curators of the Outsider Tradition, keepers of the faith during the Dark Ages of Plastic Pop, and Primal Scream's music was like a living archive of time-honored chord changes and classic rock 'n' roll gestures. Thereafter, Alan McGee went on to discover brilliant groups like My Bloody Valentine and the House Of Love, while Primal Scream began an unhappy dalliance with a bluesier direction.

For a while, it seemed like Creation had been outflanked and outmoded by the great upheavals in Eighties pop – rap and house – but this year, Creation and Primal Scream reinvented themselves. According to Gillespie, the process began early in 1989. "Contemporary rock music had ceased to excite me. Rock gigs seemed to lack excitement. McGee, myself and other Creation folk started going to acid house parties. At clubs and raves, the music was better, the people were better, the girls were better. Gradually, house began to seep into our unconscious, and eventually it began to come out in Primal Scream's music."

On a whim, they gave a track called "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have" from their second album to a DJ friend called Andy Weatherall and "asked him to do whatever he liked with it". The result was "Loaded," a bizarre cross between the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil" and Soul II Soul. It became Primal Scream's first chart hit and the cue for an extremely camp Top Of The Pops appearance. The single has now sold over 100,000 copies.

Primal Scream's metamorphosis from leather-clad rockers to clubland gurus has led to indignant accusations of "bandwagon-jumping" from dance purists and indie fanatics alike, but Gillespie can't see what all the fuss is about. "All the great white rock of the past has been influenced by black music, but post-punk music lost touch with that influence.

"'Loaded' taught us about rhythm and space. We've always been good at harmony, but learning how to use a sampler gave us a new palette of colors. The sampler opens up a whole new world of psychedelic possibilities."

Primal Scream's second hit, "Come Together," sees them venture further into dance terrain. The radio version is a classic 1967-type pop song, underpinned by a mantra-like dance-beat. For the club version, Primal Scream again gave Andy Weatherall carte blanche: the result is a techno-gospel devotional, complete with samples of Jesse Jackson heralding "a new day, a beautiful day."

"I see the song as a modern day 'Street Fighting Man,'" says Gillespie. "It's certainly not a statement of vapid New Age optimism. Rather, I see Weatherall's side as being tragic: like, 'if only the world could be as one...' but I know it never will be."

'Come Together' is Gillespie severing his ties with the Rock Outsider tradition. He's no longer fascinated by the frosty glamour of being alienated, he's swept up in the ecstasy of communion.

"All through my adolescence, I held apart from other people. Through being a punk, I met people with whom I could relate, but we still felt apart from everybody else. Now I'm through being cool. People are too unfriendly in Britain. Rock used to be a medium for people to talk to each other. But it's not anymore, and that's sad."

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