By Sarah de Sainte Croix, Senior Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In its most ambitious campaign to date, the Rio de Janeiro based crowdfunding website, Queremos.com, has succeeded in bringing one of the most eagerly anticipated shows of the year to one of Rio’s favorite live music venues, Lapa’s own Circo Voador. Fans throughout the city and abroad have already marked their calendars – Friday, September 23rd – Primal Scream is coming to town.
The show forms part a massive world tour to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the band’s classic album ‘Screamadelica.’ The release was the Scottish rock band’s first commercially successful album, and it marked a clear departure from their earlier indie rock sound.
The album took it’s new direction from the emerging UK rave scene and the drugs that went with it, infusing the lyrics with hedonistic mottos and giving birth to a litter of classic, feel-good dance anthems that mirrored and amplified the sweaty euphoria that was blazing through clubs and warehouses at the beginning of the 90s.
“I honestly felt we were redeeming rock’n’roll,” said 48 year-old frontman Bobby Gillespie in an interview with The Guardian. “I know it sounds ridiculous, right? But my attitude was that rock’n’roll should be a celebratory, euphoric, ecstatic experience…I felt that what we were doing at that point was what rock’n’roll should be, except it was modern, it was futuristic.”
The public apparently agreed and the album was received to wild critical and popular acclaim, earning Primal Scream the inaugural Mercury Music Prize in 1992 and a regular place in the “Top 100” lists of a host of major music magazines and media outlets, including the UK’s Channel 4, the NME and Q magazine.
Since the anniversary tour began in November last year, the album that Ink Blot magazine called “of its time and timeless” in the 1990’s has again been doing the rounds and again garnering rave reviews, with Primal Scream playing sold-out shows across the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
But when it comes to talking about the particulars of the Rio show, the organizers are playing their cards close to their chest, leaking only that it will feature “psychodelic backdrops, choirs and more besides,” and confirming that the band will play all the tracks from the original album.
“[This is a show that] will be featured at the biggest festivals on the global circuit and now it will be possible to see it in a small venue, as it has never been seen before. This gig is sure to be legendary,” says Circo Voador.
One fan commented, “It says something about the force of will of the fans in Rio that Queremos managed to get such a huge band to play here on such a covetted date, [the exact anniversary of the album’s original launch],” referring to the website Queremos.com that helped organize the show.
The site works on the innovative principle of “crowdfunding.” In other words, every so often it pitches an idea to bring a particular band to Rio and then it crosses its fingers and hopes that enough fans are prepared to buy (fully refundable) tickets to cover the cost of the show.
Tickets are available from www.ingresso.com.br.