This is likely going to be the reissue of the year. Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992, out on Friday via Cherry Red, serves up 3 albums from The Primitives along with another 2 discs of rarities. It is, without a doubt, the ultimate Primitives collection, and the sort of reissue that automatically makes previous compilations of this band unnecessary. And, of course, we are talking about one of the best groups of the Eighties, and an act that managed to bridge genres in a way that felt downright revolutionary in the second half of that decade.
Disc 1 here is called The Lazy Years and it collects the earliest recordings from The Primitives. The disc starts with a shockingly slow demo of "Crash", the band's biggest hit later, along with a few other early demos of familiar tunes from this Coventry-based outfit. The demos are revealing, but it's the early singles and EP tracks that still thrill. 1986's "Thru The Flowers" is the first masterpiece. Tracy Tracy cooing here, and Paul Court revving up the guitar in an approximation of the same sort of thing that The Jesus & Mary Chain were doing at the time. Still, for all that feels similar to JAMC here, the approach is certainly lighter. The Reid brothers might have nodded in the direction of girl group stuff but The Primitives embraced it without a trace of irony, and updated it for their own era. There's nothing that's not thoroughly engaging here among these early singles, and it seems extraordinary now to recall how refreshing and bright this all sounded way back when.
Still, "Really Stupid", also from 1986, is obviously in thrall of the Mary Chain vibe, even as the flip "We Found a Way to the Sun" indicates a more varied attack. This one, a down-tempo ramble, seems the most assured thing this group committed to vinyl in these formative years, with the sound entirely their own now, despite the obvious reference points. "Stop Killing Me" is all bubblegum joy, even as flip "Laughing Up My Sleeve" finds Court doing his best Lou Reed.
By 1987, the band had re-recorded "Thru the Flowers", and while the feedback is intact, the overall mood is a more commanding one, with Tracy Tracy as of this point revealing herself as one of the best front-persons in that era. The "London"-like racket of "Everything Shining Bright", a flip here of this new edition of "Thru the Flowers", obviously caught Morrissey's ear, and The Smiths singer (soon to be ex-Smiths singer) was an early champion of the group. The rest of The Lazy Years here on Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992 conveys that heady mix of yearning and youthful fire that propelled this band far past many of their peers, and all the rest of the tracks here remind again just how exciting this group seemed in those years.
1988's Lovely, the full-length debut, makes up Disc 2 of Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992, along with a lot of rarities. The record is flawless, and if you're only now just hearing this for the first time somehow, I envy you. It's the kind of record that instantly injects joy into the eardrums and sends tingles up the arm. Every cut works and all those early singles are here in subtly refurbished versions for the first album proper. "Things Get in the Way", a "Crash" flip, works surprisingly well, and it's not been overplayed so its inclusion here seems like a treat, while the single mix of "I'll Stick with You" remains an absolutely perfect musical confection. Roaring riffs, pounding drums, and Tracy Tracy's sweet-as-sunshine vocals on top of this brief number add up to a delicious package. If The Primitives had only recorded this single, they'd still be legends. The live version of "Really Stupid" here on Disc 2 reminds a listener at how aggressive this band could be, at least in the manner of inspirations The Ramones. It's not really punk, of course, but it's got all the flavor of the form.
Disc 3 of Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992 is 1989's Pure, the mainstream breakthrough. If "Secrets" indicates a sound that's similar to the earlier singles and first album, "Sick of It", the hit from Pure, is decidedly harder. It rocks, of course, but one can understand now why it seemed so different back in 1989. Still, "Way Behind Me" is nearly the equal of earlier singles like "Out of Reach" and "Nothing Left", and it counters the harder stuff on Pure, or the risks taken on numbers like "All The Way Down", for example. Disc 3 here is filled out with some demos and live cuts, with the most valuable being a fab cover of "As Tears Go By" from the "Sick of It" single. That the song sounds like something that Tracy Tracy and Paul Court could have written is only more praise at how assured this group's sound was in 1989.
1991's Galore makes up Disc 4 of Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992 and the record remains an odd one when heard next to the earlier Primitives stuff. If anything it sounds like -- dare I say it? -- material from era rivals The Darling Buds. Still, "Lead Me Astray", the first hit here, and one co-written with Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds, remains a strong number, even as "Slip Away" and "Cold Enough to Kill" remind again just what a fantastically intuitive singer Tracy Tracy was back then. The hooks are harder to come by than on the first releases from this band, but the musicianship is stronger than on earlier records. Still, this was the last release from the band before they broke up, and the last before a version re-formed nearly 20 years later. But with numbers like "See Through the Dark" buried amidst this disc, it's safe to say that Galore deserves a re-appraisal. Heck, I've barely played it and I consider myself a huge fan of this band. Buttressed by some live cuts here, Galore is spotty but it's a bit stronger overall than I might have remembered.
Disc 5 of Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992 is given over to radio sessions and live recordings from the era. And while one could have seen these radio cuts being sprinkled throughout the previous discs, the presentation here makes this a fitting way to end this magnificent set. The radio versions of "Really Stupid" and "Nothing Left", for example, pitch this band's material a step or two closer to that of Primal Scream or The Jesus and Mary Chain, while the radio version of "Crash" makes the song sound nearly similar to "Spacehead" more than the version we'd come to love. The live tracks here on Disc 5 were recorded in 1991 and the group's sound had necessarily progressed a bit. And with the maturity of the approach, the band was better able to make "Sick of It" a real rocker in its live version, and the light "Outside" a bit of chamber pop live compared to the teaser of a track that opened Pure (1989).
Chronicling the 7 or so years of The Primitives, Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992 is essential. As a record of how the sound of the C86 generation gave rise to styles like what's here, the set provides a valuable time capsule-like service. This is music that was decidedly not mainstream in 1987 and 1988, and that's a remarkable thing to remember considering how Pop the big singles here sound to our ears. A listener can remember hearing "Secrets" and "Crash" way back then and marveling that they were not Top 10 singles on both sides of the Atlantic. But even when an indie band pursued these sounds, the overall presentation, or lack of big label promotional efforts earlier on, doomed a band like this to flutter on the sidelines. And to acknowledge that is not meant to diminish how much The Primitives accomplished in those years but, rather, to force a recollection at how astonishingly good they were, and how powerfully they revitalized a sound that was relegated to indie chart followers in the UK, and college rock types here in the States.
Sounding then absolutely nothing like anyone else (despite the obvious contemporary rivals), The Primitives churned out pop hit after pop hit. It's only that the charts didn't entirely respond, even as (eventually) millions of listeners did. Like the bigger names of Nuggets era, or the many groups of the power pop boom of the late 1970's, The Primitives looked to the past to craft something entirely modern, and update traditional forms in a manner that was sharp, focused, and brilliant. There's nothing here that sounds derivative or lazy, for example, and it's almost shocking (though reassuring) that so much of this pop music is still so reassuringly inspired.
Bloom! The Full Story 1985-1992 is out on Friday via Cherry Red.
More details on the current adventures of The Primitives via the band's official Facebook page.
[Photos: NME cover by Stephen Speller; Band photos from Cherry Red Records]