The Wonderful Wrongness of Primus
On the music that found me in a Canberra share house in 2008
I first properly met Primus in a share house on Boddington Street, Canberra, in 2008. I say “met” because that is how the experience still feels. Some bands arrive as a recommendation, a single on the radio or a name on a poster. Primus arrived as a couple of physical CDs, passed from one person to another at an unusually formative point in my life. I was living at 55 Boddington Street, getting to know my housemates Andy and Rhys, and trying to find a sense of direction after an incident involving my time in the Army. I did not know then that I was about to discover a band I would carry with me for the next eighteen years.
I already had some musical landmarks. I had known Tool since 2001 and Alice in Chains since 2004, and both had helped broaden my understanding of what heavy music could communicate. They showed me that there was room for complexity, unease, eccentricity and a certain refusal to behave. Even so, something was missing from the picture. I had not yet found the particular combination of technical brilliance, absurdist humour, angular rhythms and sheer personal stubbornness that Primus seemed to embody. I did not have the vocabulary for it in 2008. I just knew I was drawn to artists who sounded like nobody else.
One day Andy, having worked out some of the music I was listening to, asked a simple question: “Have you heard Primus?” Not properly, I told him. I had heard the name, but I had never really taken the time to go down that particular rabbit hole. He handed me two CDs. The one I remember most vividly was Sailing the Seas of Cheese. There was no elaborate introduction and no persuasive speech about why I ought to appreciate them. That was part of the beauty of it. Here was an album, in a plastic case, from someone whose taste I was beginning to trust. I put it on, and a new part of my musical life began.
It is worth remembering how tangible music felt then. You borrowed a disc, took it home, looked at the cover, read whatever you could find inside and listened until the record began to reveal its peculiar internal logic. You were not being offered a thousand other artists after thirty seconds. The album had space to make its case. I remember playing Sailing the Seas of Cheese at full blast while driving around Canberra, letting those songs fill the car as the streets passed by. It was an everyday, unceremonious setting for something that has stayed with me for most of my adult life.
Those drives are inseparable in my memory from another part of that year. I was approaching what I now recognise as a terrible decision involving my first girlfriend. I do not need to turn that private history into a neat lesson, or pretend I understood its implications at the time. I was young, I was navigating things badly in some respects, and I was still learning how to be myself. Yet there I was, moving through Canberra with this gloriously strange music playing at an irresponsible volume. The circumstances around me were complicated. The pleasure of hearing something completely new was wonderfully uncomplicated.
Sailing the Seas of Cheese, originally released in 1991, is a remarkably confident introduction to Primus. Les Claypool’s bass refuses to sit quietly in the place bass guitars are usually assigned. It snaps, burbles, lunges and practically leads the conversation. The guitar cuts across it at odd angles, the drums pursue their own restless geometry, and the songs remain recognisably songs despite appearing, at times, to have been assembled according to rules nobody else received. “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Tommy the Cat” have all the swagger of musicians who know exactly what they are doing, even while making the listener wonder whether they have gone completely mad.
That balance is what has always fascinated me. Primus can be funny without being disposable, virtuosic without feeling merely athletic, and weird without asking for permission to be weird. Their music never seemed designed to reassure everyone in the room. You could be baffled by it, irritated by it, amused by it or completely hooked. It would continue being itself regardless. I loved that immediately, although I probably could not have explained it as clearly back then. The strangeness did not feel ornamental. It felt structural, as though removing it would leave nothing recognisable behind.
Over time I came to recognise something personal in Claypool’s approach. He has always struck me as a man who is fiercely, almost cheerfully, himself. There is a freedom in that which I find deeply attractive. I have never wanted my taste, appearance or opinions to be determined by whether they happen to fit the prevailing expectations around me. I want to do things at my own speed, think my own thoughts, wear my own tattoos and follow my interests wherever they lead. That does not mean I have always done so gracefully, or that independence excuses poor judgement. It means I value the space to become a recognisable individual rather than a more convenient version of someone else.
There is a strong temptation to describe an outsider as someone who wants to stand apart. I think many outsiders are simply people who have found that their natural way of seeing the world does not line up neatly with the dominant one. That was my attraction to so much of the music I loved as a teenager and young adult. Tool offered one kind of intensity and interiority. Alice in Chains offered another, darker and more emotionally exposed. Primus came at it from a completely different direction, with bent humour, strange characters and a kind of muscular musical mischief. It was another missing link in a larger appreciation of people who make things on their own terms.
The title Pork Soda, from Primus’s 1993 album, captures that philosophy almost perfectly. Claypool has explained that the idea was an acknowledgement of Primus as an acquired taste, something as improbable and potentially unappetising as a meat-flavoured soft drink. I love that. It is a joke with an oddly precise understanding of the band’s place in popular culture. A group capable of tremendous musicianship was willing to package itself as something that might make people recoil. The joke was not that the audience lacked taste. The joke was that there was no sensible reason to expect universal approval, and no particular need to chase it.
I think often about how my relationships with albums have changed since that share house. Digital libraries make almost everything immediately accessible, which is a genuine convenience. But the memory of a friend physically handing me two CDs has a weight that is difficult to reproduce. It connected a place, a person and a set of circumstances to the sound itself. Whenever I return to those early Primus records, I hear them as music, of course, but I also hear a version of Canberra in 2008. I hear the car. I remember the house. I remember Andy and Rhys. I remember being uncertain about my future and completely certain that I wanted to keep listening.
Eighteen years later, the person who drove around Canberra blasting Sailing the Seas of Cheese is both familiar and distant to me. My life and responsibilities have changed, and my tastes have widened. Yet Primus still sound like Primus. They still make me laugh, listen carefully and appreciate how much more interesting a distinctive artistic identity can be than a perfectly presentable one.
Now, in December 2026, Primus are due to return to Australia, playing alongside Queens of the Stone Age. I hope to see them. There is something beautifully circular about the possibility of hearing this music live, so many years after Andy first put those discs in my hands. I have also been thinking that this may, perhaps, be my last concert. I do not mean that as a dramatic pronouncement, and life may well change my mind. It is simply where I find myself: increasingly interested in choosing experiences deliberately, rather than collecting them indefinitely. If Primus became the closing chapter of my life as a concertgoer, I could think of far worse ways to finish.
Perhaps that is also why I want to begin this new series here. I have a hundred musicians and musical acts in mind, a hundred opportunities to explain the sounds, stories and personalities that have accompanied me through different stages of life. This is not intended to be a definitive ranking or an attempt to write the final word on anybody’s work. It is a record of personal encounters. Some of the artists will be familiar, some less so, but each will have earned a place in my life for reasons I want to remember and share. Starting with Primus feels right because discovering them reminds me what this whole exercise is about.
Music can be a form of companionship across time. It can preserve a street, a car journey, a friendship and an entire younger self without requiring any of those things to remain unchanged. When I think of Primus, I think of the sheer delight of realising that there are people in the world who are proudly, spectacularly unlike anybody else. I think of Andy’s CDs, Boddington Street, those drives through Canberra and an unexpected invitation to hear things differently. I have loved these cats ever since. If you are joining me for the next ninety-nine entries, I hope you will find a few old favourites, discover something unexpected, and perhaps hear a little of your own life along the way.
