Primal Scream release their twelfth studio album ‘Come Ahead’ next month - the band’s first new album release in over eight years.

A lot has changed in lead singer Bobby Gillespie’s life over that time with the Springburn-born frontman excavating his memories of Glasgow in his autobiography ‘Tenement Kid’ and then losing his father last year.

We spoke to the Primal Scream frontman to find out about the Glasgow influence on this album and whether he was thinking about his upbringing when creating Come Ahead due to events in recent years.

Speaking about the album title, Gillespie said: “That’s why we called the record Come Ahead. The photograph of my dad was like ‘this is where we come from’. This is a lineage. My dad was a working class rock and roller and a trade unionist. He was a very proud Glaswegian and a proud Scotsman. I’m just saying this is where we come from. It’s an attitude. A Glaswegian attitude, a working class attitude and a rock and roll attitude. It’s us and we are unapologetic about it.

“There’s humour in it as well. I always say Miles Davis had Miles Ahead as an album title and we’ve got Come Ahead which is a Glaswegian version of it. That’s my wee sort of riff I’ve had.

“It’s got a gallusness to it as well and swagger to it. A wee wink of the eye and tongue in cheek, but also proudly soul.”

The album cover features a photograph of lifelong socialist Bob Gillespie and we wanted to know whether Bobby had previously thought about using this particular image of his late father.

“No, when I was looking for photographs for my Tenement Kid book, I went up to my mum’s and she’s got loads of photos. She had a couple of big photo books and I was looking through them. There was a lot of pictures of her mum, aunties and all the rest. There was loads of pictures of me, and her, my dad and my brother in the sixties when I first sort of arrived in the world.

“I found a couple of photos of my mum and dad when they were in Dunoon for a works outing and they looked f****** brilliant together. My mum is really smartly dressed and my dad looks like he looks on the cover of the album. There is a full photograph of my dad head to toe and he’s wearing the suit and black winklepicker shoes - it’s a very sharp look.

“I just remembered it when we needed an album cover and I thought that might be great because my dad died last year. That picture embodies a lot of what Primal Scream is and where we are coming from. It’s a hard, working class rock and roll attitude that is very stylish. It represented something from our background and something that we are proud of.

“It’s a link to the early days of rock and roll because my dad in the year 1960 - which was the year before I was born - went to see Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran play at the Glasgow Empire. He’s got the quiff there and the whole attitude. The fashion detail is brilliant in it. I’ve got this thing about working class subcultures, it was the first time in history that young people had been able to differentiate themselves from their parents.

“I guess the incoming consumer society where teenagers had some extra pocket money and they could buy 45 rpm singles, go to concerts, and suddenly boutiques - clothing stores that where solely to sell clothes to teenagers and 20 year olds. That never happened before the sixties, or late fifties. You just had to dress like your dad or get the same haircut as your dad. So that the picture of dad on the cover represents all of that stuff I think.

“There’s a lot going on in that picture for me at least. I thought it represented the true spirit of rock and roll and also Glasgow because it’s very gallus.

Pre-order the new album ‘Come Ahead’ here.