Primal Scream finish XTRMNTR tour in London tomorrow

Primal Scream bring their XTRMNTR 25th-anniversary tour to a close tomorrow night at HERE at Outernet in London. The final date follows a September run that opened in Glasgow and moved through England, with the 2000 album performed in full each night.

The band's Barrowland shows on 4 and 5 September set the tone for the anniversary stretch. They played Newcastle on 8 September and Nottingham on 9 September. New Century Hall in Manchester on 11 September and Electric Bristol on 13 September completed the English leg before the capital. Those dates are now past; London is the last stop.

XTRMNTR and the Bunker years

XTRMNTR was released in 2000, arriving three years after Vanishing Point and nine years after Screamadelica. Screamadelica had made Primal Scream a reference point for the meeting of rock, dance and psychedelia in 1991. Vanishing Point in 1997 and XTRMNTR three years later took a harder line — denser electronics, a colder edge, and songs that carried political weight. "Swastika Eyes", issued as a single the same year as the album, announced that shift in plain terms.

Playing the record in full has been the point of this tour. Rather than folding a few titles into a wider set, the band have treated XTRMNTR as a single work, front to back, for audiences who know the sequence as well as the singles.

From Glasgow 1982 to the stage now

Bobby Gillespie formed Primal Scream in Glasgow in 1982 with Jim Beattie. The catalogue that followed runs from Sonic Flower Groove in 1987 and the self-titled album in 1989 through Screamadelica and Give Out But Don't Give Up in 1994, the Bunker-era trio, and on through later records including Chaosmosis in 2016, the 2018 Memphis recordings reissue of Give Out But Don't Give Up, Live at Levitation in 2021, Reverberations (Travelling In Time) in 2023, and Come Ahead in 2024, with the Ready To Go Home EP also landing that year.

The present line-up is Gillespie with Andrew Innes on guitar, Simone Butler on bass and Darrin Mooney on drums. Barrie Cadogan has toured and recorded with the band since 2006. That continuity matters on a full-album tour: the group on stage are not a pick-up cast reading an old set-list, but players who have carried the catalogue forward for years.

An anniversary full-album run is a familiar format, yet XTRMNTR still stands apart in the band's own story. It is not the celebratory glow of Screamadelica revisited. It is the abrasive, electronic record that followed, restored to the stage as a whole.

Tomorrow night's date at HERE at Outernet ends the September itinerary. No further live dates beyond London have been announced. For a band whose work has always moved between eras rather than settling in one, performing XTRMNTR in full is a clear statement of where that stretch of the catalogue still sits.