Primal Scream tear through XTRMNTR at the Barrowland

Primal Scream have played three nights at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow to open their XTRMNTR 25th anniversary tour. The Scottish band took the stage on 3 and 4 September 2026, with a third show on 5 September, putting the 2000 album back under the lights in the city where the group first formed.

The 4 September set ran hard through the parent album. Kill All Hippies, Accelerator, Pills and Keep Your Dreams all featured, alongside Swastika Eyes in a Chemical Brothers remix that incorporated Palestine drone footage. The band also reached outside the album for a cover of I’m Five Years Ahead Of My Time by The Third Bardo.

From Screamadelica to the bunker years

XTRMNTR marks a sharp turn in the Primal Scream catalogue. Screamadelica, released in 1991, had made the band a touchstone of the early-nineties dance-rock collision. Give Out But Don’t Give Up followed in 1994; Vanishing Point arrived in 1997, leaner and darker, already pointing away from the glow of the breakthrough. XTRMNTR, issued in 2000, pushed further into abrasive electronics and political charge. The single Swastika Eyes, also from 2000, carried a Chemical Brothers remix that bound the album to the big-beat wave Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands had helped drive since forming in Manchester in 1989.

The band started in Glasgow in 1982 under Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beattie. The current line-up centres on Gillespie on vocals, Andrew Innes on guitar, Simone Butler on bass and Darrin Mooney on drums, with Barrie Cadogan a regular presence on stage and on record since 2006 after the departure of guitarist Robert “Throb” Young. The run of work since XTRMNTR has kept the catalogue moving rather than frozen: Chaosmosis in 2016, the Original Memphis Recordings of Give Out But Don’t Give Up in 2018, Live at Levitation in 2021, Reverberations (Travelling In Time) in 2023 and Come Ahead in 2024, still their most recent studio album.

Bringing XTRMNTR home to the Barrowland places that confrontational chapter back at the centre of the live set. The anniversary framing treats the record as working material rather than a sealed artefact, and the decision to play the Chemical Brothers remix of Swastika Eyes underlines how tightly the album was bound to electronic production from the start. For a Glasgow audience that has followed the band across four decades, the three nights were less a nostalgic turn than a return to one of the group’s most uncompromising statements.

Dates still ahead

The Glasgow run was only the opening block. The tour now moves through England: Newcastle on 8 September, Nottingham on 9 September, Manchester on 11 September, Bristol on 13 September and London on 15 September.

The rest of the run remains. After three nights on home ground, the band take the same abrasive set on the road, with the Chemical Brothers’ stamp on Swastika Eyes still part of the live picture and the Barrowland shows already behind them.