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Innocent Money
by Primal Scream

Writers - Gillespie/Innes/Holmes
First released - 2024
Original album - Come Ahead (Primal Scream)
Subsequent albums - none
Other releases - none

"Innocent Money" is a song from Come Ahead, the twelfth studio album (and first in eight years) by Primal Scream, a Scottish band co-founded in 1982 by vocalist Bobby Gillespie and guitarist Jim Beattie. Beattie left soon after the 1987 release of their debut album, Sonic Flower Groove, leaving Gillespie to be the band's leader and lone constant in the wake of numerous personnel changes. Guitarist Andrew Innes joined shortly before Beattie's departure, however, and has remained with Primal Scream ever since. Innes collaborated with Gillespie and producer David Holmes to write many of the songs on Come Ahead, including "Innocent Money."

Primal Scream undertook a "remix project" for Come Ahead, with plans to reissue each of its songs in a newly remixed form. "Innocent Money" is the fifth song from the album to receive this remix treatment. Gillespie decided that the Pet Shop Boys would be a good match, telling NME that "the song's marriage of a socially conscious lyric over an ecstatic, discofied string-laden stomping rhythm track might appeal to Neil and Chris's sense of pop aesthetics." As he does so often on their remixes of other artist's tracks, Neil decided to add his own vocals to the chorus, which thrilled Gillespie. "I get to duet with him," Gillespie enthused, "Neil, of course, having one of THE iconic British pop voices. Truly honoured!" Neil's voice actually precedes Gillespie's in the remix, which debuted in March 2025.

The Boys tighten up the track a bit (their remix is nearly a full minute shorter than the original album version), moving the first iteration of its chorus to before the first verse, trimming some later verses, and adding a pronounced house-inflected rhythm expressed through additional bass, keyboards, and percussion. They accentuate (and perhaps even add to) some of the original track's usually more subtle background vocal cacophony. It even sounds, at least to these ears, that they may have changed the key of the song (though I concede I may be mistaken on that point). Early in the remix, from about 0:24 to 0:55, the Boys employ a background keyboard motif borrowed from the chord progression of the recurring main theme of Kraftwerk's 1977 classic "Trans Europa Express." It probably isn't an actual sample but rather a re-created interpolation.

Gillespie isn't overstating one bit when he refers to the song's "socially conscious lyric." In fact, it's a scathing indictment of government economic policies that pander to the wealthy while leaving the poor to suffer and struggle on their own. As a support vocalist declaims in both versions, "The bourgeois bastards just keep stealing and selling the dreaming of the lies, lies, lies that undermine our lives…. There's no trickle down, trickle down, trickle down…. They've tricked us to believe that our work is never done…." Indeed, it's an incredibly timely message.

Mixes/Versions

Officially released

Pet Shop Boys mixes only:

List cross-references

 

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