Primal Scream: The Heat Is On.

Evil Heat is in stores now.

With its shambolic combination of everything from House to Blues and Indy Rock, Primal Scream's seminal third album Screamadelica still ranks as one of the most important dance music albums ten years after its original release. Unfortunately, The Scream promptly veered off course with Screamadelica's too-rocky successor, the fittingly-titled Give Out But Don't Give Up. But while the London-based five-piece - Bobby Gillespie, Martin Duffy, Andrew Innes, Robert Young and Gary 'Mani' Mounfield - have never again tapped into the cultural zeitgeist as perfectly as they did back in 1991, they have since produced a trilogy of albums, Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR and the newly-released Evil Heat, which not only hark back to Screamadelica but also integrate The Scream's diverse punk and electronic influences into one distinct whole.

"With Screamadelica, we were making it in our own studios and then getting people in to mix it," recalls Duffy. "We'd give out the album and do it with one producer. We'd then go into a proper studio which didn't always suit us. With Vanishing Point, we built our own studio and did all the recording ourselves and the same went for XTRMNTR and now Evil Heat. It's the third album we've done ourselves. With this album, the songs were mixed by Kevin Shields and Andy Weatherall. We'd had enough of it by then so we gave it to them to do the final mix. But we're constantly changing and hopefully we're getting better at making music, as far as the technical side of how to make records goes. Every record we do, we don't like to repeat any formulas. The next one could be a skiffle record!"

With his classic mix of Screamadelica's stand-out track Loaded, Andy Weatherall played a crucial part in The Scream's initial success. Unfortunately, he and the band parted ways shortly after that only to reunite to record the film Trainspotting's theme song, included on 1997's Vanishing Point. Since then, Weatherall contributed some mixes to XTRMNTR and has played a more hands-on role on Evil Heat.

"Andy's brilliant," declares Duffy. "We've always been in touch with him. You'd always see him about in London DJing. We've always listened to the music he does as Two Lone Swordsmen, with Keith Tenniswood. He's a lot more left field than us but our musical paths really seemed to cross this time and he really enjoyed working on Evil Heat. We've done a cover of Lee Hazelwood's Some Velvet Morning with Kate Moss and Andy's done a mix of that. The version we've done is quite electronic. We're not trying to be like the original so we've done like an Electroklash version."

So how did The Scream manage to persuade the renowned supermodel to team up on the mike with Bobby Gillespie?

"Bobby's known Kate for years and she comes to see us play," explains Duffy. "We just thought a duet would be nice. Kate's great! I don't think girls like her because she can sing as well. Singing in your house is one thing but singing in front of a microphone in a studio is another."

Evil Heat also features former Led Zep main man Robert Plant, who contributes harmonica to The Lord Is My Shotgun.

"He lives near our studio," says Duffy. "One of his places anyway. We've always spoken to him. He loves his music. He's a great Blues harmonica player. He's still got the blues. When we were recording, he was playing harmonica and in between the bits he was playing, he was singing along, going 'Oh, baby!' We didn't use it but we've got it on tape somewhere. It was amazing to have him in there, just playing harmonica. It sounds like Physical Graffiti. Kevin Shields ended up mixing the song so it's really distorted. It's kind of like a Howling Wolf, Blues electronic dirge."

Autobahn 66, meanwhile, pays tribute to German electronic gurus Kraftwerk. "Autobahn 66 was the working title for the song and it just stuck," admits Duffy. "Obviously, it's tongue in cheek. There's the Kraftwerk influence coming out. We've been big fans of Neu, Can and Kraftwerk for a long time. Evil Heat is a really electronic album. I know there's some rock 'n' roll guitar on it but there's also a lot of electronic riffs and you always go back to what the Germans were doing in the '70s. Everyone else was doing long guitar solos, very prog rock. Even bands like Tangerine Dream were using electronics as a mood. It always goes back to that scene which was a big influence on people like Depeche Mode and New Order. Any bands that has relied on electronics always goes back to those bands."

Duffy's favourite track on Evil Heat is A Scanner Darkly which was inspired by the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, who also wrote Minority Report and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep, the literary basis for Blade Runner.

"Weatherall did his tweaking on that," says Duffy. "It's a kind of a disco/punk/electronic Throbbing Gristle weirdness with a bit of Rod Stewart thrown in! We're quite big on Philip K. Dick's strange, paranoid world of internal, altered states and imploding realities. He saw some strange things that bloke. I suppose Blade Runner made people notice him but he's really under-rated."