Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

Product Information

In recounting formative gigs and experiences, Gillespie displays a great gift for storytelling, description and deploying a simile, writing evocatively of an audience at a Clash concert: “It was as if Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights was people with inmates who had escaped from a seventies lunatic asylum.

Much like the Brett Anderson split autobiographies, this ends where things are about to really take off but it doesn't feel anticlimactic. The evolution of Screamadelica itself makes a great story, as we see how gradually the diverse components like Gospel, acid house, ambient sounds, sampling, classic Stones type rock ‘come together’, just like the song said. Filled with ‘the holy spirit of rock n roll’ his destiny is sealed with the arrival of the Sex Pistols and punk rock which to Bobby, represents an iconoclastic vision of class rebellion and would ultimately lead to him becoming an artist initially in the Jesus and Mary Chain then Primal Scream.Gillespie takes the reader on a step by step process of everything and explains the roles all the characters have and what they are doing now. His memories of his days as a music fan from the mid-70s onwards are fascinating and his description of the magnanimous support offered by people such as Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin and Peter Hook are heart-warming. Who knew that the drummer in the Jesus and Mary Chain would go on to enjoy three decades in rock'n'roll and surpass the Stones at their own game? It ends a little abruptly with the launch of Screamadelica, and suspect there may be more to come as he’s done lots of other things since.

Loved the story he tells where he finds that a song he's written is too high for him to actually sing at the recording session, but is unaware that you can change key, until a session player points it out to him. IW The scheme where I grew up was the Aids capital of Edinburgh, which was the Aids capital of Europe.The book is affirmative not just of a rockin' life but the beautiful working-class culture that made it. He draws a firm line between the Scream’s rock’n’roll heaven quest and the competition, in the form of all the ’80’s plastic pop like Wham, Spandau etc, or the limper House of Love type indie groups. One of my favourite aspects of the book is the detailed description of his early years in the Glasgow tenements and how that shaped his strong socialist belief. I wrote lyrics on acoustic guitar, then worked through ideas with Jehnny Beth and her boyfriend, Johnny Hostile. Gillespie leaves the door open for another instalment, as Tenement Kid concludes with the release of Screamadelica.

View image in fullscreen Bobby Gillespie photographed for the Observer New Review by David Vintiner, October 2021. When he talks about his experiences in the music scene, he comes across as such a fan of all that’s positive and uplifting in music. sense – but more in the word’s original Blakean sense – emotion recollected in tranquillity, as the saying went. I wanted to do something a bit different, something creative, challenging, something I’ve never done before.

Then, not only does it follow Gillespie's journey to commercial success with Primal Scream, it's also a very accessible history of the UK's post punk scene which I found really interesting. The story of the band's transition from rock to dance music, to endless ecstasy-soaked raves, is descriptive of an era.