The Primitives

41. The Primitives ”Spin-O-Rama”(from Spin-O-Rama)

”The initial idea was for the song to be the theme tune to an imagined British 70s children’s TV drama. In fact I wanted to write a whole album of songs around this idea, but it didn’t quite come off. The title was originally ‘Backwards Roundabout’ but that sounded a bit clunky, so I changed it to ‘Spin-O-Rama’, which sounds more like a slightly dark kids TV program from when we were kids. The song is about returning to a less complicated, more innocent existence, via some metaphysical fairground or playground ride. I was thinking about the carousel in Ray Bradbury‘s Something Wicked This Way Comes, where people grow old or young depending on which way the carousel revolves, and also about a mad afternoon in the early days of the band, when we got a bit ”mystical” in a park, and Tracy ended up clinging to the underside of one of those spider web roundabouts, laughing her head off, as it spun faster and faster.

The arpeggio riff reminded me a bit of the ‘Rupert The Bear’ song by Jackie Lee, which, I guess, is where the kids TV theme idea started. We wanted the song to have certain classic Primitives elements; ‘Spacehead’ overdriven drums, layered jangle guitar, fuzzed bar chords etc, but also to sound like one of those big bubblegum glam pop hits from our childhood. When our bass player Raph heard the finished mix, he dubbed it ‘Bay City Stone Roses’, which I thought that was a pretty fair description of what we’d set out to achieve.”

– Paul Court