Primal Scream and Its Blasts From the Past : Pop music: Leader Bobby Gillespie says if his songs turn fans on to the bands that inspired him, that’s fine. The group is at the Palladium tonight.

Bobby Gillespie, the singer and prime mover of the British band Primal Scream, was a bit testy as he spoke by phone from a St. Louis hotel room on a recent afternoon. For one thing, he’d just been awakened--he’s been having a little trouble getting sleep as the band travels by bus on its first U.S. tour, which comes to the Hollywood Palladium on Saturday.

But he was also a bit ticked off at being asked to discuss some unflattering but frequent criticisms of his band’s 1991 U.S. debut album, “Screamadelica.” First, there’s the accusation that Gillespie’s specialty is plundering old pop styles, with a particular affection for late-’60s, gospel-soul-inflected Rolling Stones material.

“I think that’s a really bad thing to say about anybody,” said Gillespie, 28, in a thick, sleepy Scottish accent. “Anybody that does music, you’re really the sum of your influences. Anyone you mention.

“The Rolling Stones were shameless, used to take from everywhere, but eventually got a style that was really good. Even someone like the Sex Pistols, the music was the New York Dolls, completely, except the difference was that the Sex Pistols had Johnny Rotten.”

With Primal Scream, the difference may well be the application of modern techno-dance and house beats to the Stonesy riffs. In fact, the band’s shows are being presented in settings meant in some ways to tie in to the colorful underground “rave” phenomenon. The group’s set at the Palladium will be a part of an all-night extravaganza of deejays, laser lights and trippy video projections.

And that connection draws criticism that the band is merely hopping on a pop trend, a topic that really brought up Gillespie’s ire.

“We play music because we enjoy it,” he said, his anger growing as he spoke. “You want to accuse of us being techno, well, you can take (expletive) Depeche Mode. We write songs in an age when hardly anybody writes (expletive) songs anymore. Songwriting is a dying art, man!”

If both the seemingly obvious influences and modernization techniques are negatives to some detractors, Gillespie wears them like a badge of honor.

“I have a larger frame of reference than most people,” he boasted, using his song “Movin’ On Up,” a big KROQ hit, as an example of how his influences go back further than the Stones. “A lot of people know the Rolling Stones, but don’t know the influences of the Stones, like Bo Diddley or the Staple Singers or the Impressions.”

His own frame of reference, he said, started forming in the mid-’70s when he first heard David Bowie and T. Rex. By the ‘80s he was playing in local bands and on one night in 1984 he both debuted Primal Scream and made his own debut as the drummer in the Jesus and Mary Chain. In 1986 he left the Mary Chain and its dark, dense sound behind, focusing on assembling the elements of Primal Scream’s more varied style and relocating the band in England (Gillespie lives in Brighton, the rest of the group in London).

But the criticism remains that Primal Scream is more an impressive patchwork of influences than anything distinctively its own. Now a bit more awake, Gillespie took the criticism in stride.

“We’ve never been ashamed of telling people who we really like ‘cause we’re passing on information,” he said. “Someone who likes a Primal Scream record might check out Curtis Mayfield or the MC5, and also Chic or something. They may not have heard of them before, but they might check them out. It’s the same way the Rolling Stones did ‘Mona’ and said, ‘Check out Bo Diddley.’ ”