Loaded

Album: Screamadelica (1990)
Charted: 16
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the song that introduced Primal Scream to a mass market as one of the most innovative UK acts of the early '90s by merging rock music and dance music.
  • This song was originally called "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Had" and it became a hit in the UK after being re-mixed by DJ Andy Weatherall, who was a friend of the band. Weatherall completely reworked the song, adding a heavy bass groove echoing dub reggae, and a drum loop from an Italian bootleg mix of Edie Brickell's "What I Am," deleting most of the original instrumentation (even the layers of guitars), and interjecting layers of samples. Among the samples included are the central introductory sample from the Peter Fonda B-movie The Wild Angels and also a sample of Gillespie singing a line from Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues."
  • Primal Scream are a UK rock group formed in Glasgow in 1984 by Bobby Gillespie (vocals), the only constant member of the band. They evolved from a metal band to a dance-fusion act and enjoyed their greatest success with their 1991 album Screamadelica, which won the first ever Mercury Prize, a music award given annually for the best British album of the previous 12 months.
  • Gillespie recalled in NME February 5, 2011: "We just did 'Loaded' as an experiment. There was nothing in it for us anyway, so we had nothing to lose, you know? There was no game plan with Weatherall at all. We didn't think 'We're going to get famous and rich' or 'We're gonna get a hit.' It was just us trying to make a record that could ply in this scene and that people could dance to. But I remember when we finished it sounded f---ing amazing. We'd done it."
  • Asked by NME how all the samples for this song and the other Screamadelica tracks were cleared, Gillespie gave a curious response. "I don't know what you're talking about," said the singer grinning. "Imagine if we hadn't got the Fonda one though. We wouldn't be sat here now. I don't know where we'd be but we would not be sat here talking to you. The gods were smiling on us that day."

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