Ready To Go Home

Album: Come Ahead (2024)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Ready To Go Home," the opening track of Primal Scream's Come Ahead album, is a paradoxical creation. It's upbeat yet contemplative, a dancefloor-ready anthem about, well, death. Bobby Gillespie, the band's frontman, described it as "a joyous acceptance of death. It's dark, but it's also up, full of humor." A statement that, if you think about it, could probably only come from a Glaswegian rocker with a deep appreciation for life's ironies.
  • Gillespie revealed that the song holds a special place in his heart. On the night before his father, Robert Gillespie Senior, passed away, he sang the lyrics to him in a quiet hospital room. "It was just me and him," he recalled. "His body had given up. I think, when you get old and tired, your body just goes, 'I've had enough. Time to go.' I was trying to write about that feeling, though I don't know why - maybe I was feeling tired myself. Sometimes I do."

    Gillespie added, "There must come a point in your life when you think, time to go home."
  • The album Come Ahead is the band's 12th, and their first in eight years following 2016's Chaosmosis. For a while, Gillespie wasn't sure he'd make another Primal Scream record.

    The LP began with the lyrics and marked the first time in a long while for the band where the words came ahead of the music. This shift brought fresh energy to the project, with Gillespie writing alone on an acoustic guitar and ideas arriving in exhilarating bursts.

    Encouraged by producer David Holmes, who also helmed Primal Scream's 2013 More Light album, the project gained momentum. Working with Holmes and the band's guitarist Andrew Innes, the sessions for Come Ahead unfolded across Belfast, London, and Los Angeles.
  • Gillespie described the album as grappling with themes of conflict - both inner and outer - but also laced with threads of compassion.

    The title, Come Ahead, is quintessentially Glaswegian. "If someone threatens to fight you, you say, 'Come ahead!'" Gillespie explained. "It's a term loaded with defiance and confidence, and the album shares that spirit. Up there, they call it gallus. The title is cheeky, too."
  • The video for "Ready To Go Home" is an extension of the Come Ahead album artwork, which features a photograph of Gillespie's late father, created by Turner Prize-nominated artist Jim Lambie.

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