Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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Despite this, an interesting read for those interested in Scottish culture and British music- everything from working class life in 70’s Glasgow, to the Stones, Beatles, Pistols, Roses, Mondays, the Chain, McGee and Noel Gallagher. Bobby was born in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built and Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Personally I was a fan of JAMC, my interest in Primal Scream was peripheral, coming late to the dance and acid house scene. Born into a working-class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, TENEMENT KID begins in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heath’s brutal slum clearances. I guess all nationalism is exclusive, not just English nationalism… When it happened, I thought, well, maybe this is English nationalism, which is, for me, frightening.

Although there’s plenty of boyhood and teenage street life and football action, he avoids the usual clichés about first love/sexual/drug experience etc.I’m for Scottish independence as a mechanism for breaking up the UK, and I’m for English independence and Welsh independence. Published thirty years after release of their masterpiece, Bobby Gillespie’s memoir cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house. A punk rock fairytale, razor sharp on class struggle, music, style, and a singular view of the world resulting in one of the world's great bands. 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 in Primal Scream.

The mask rarely slips over 400 pages, telling of Bobby Gillespie's life from childhood in Springburn until the release of Screamadelica. I hadn’t done anything since 2019… It was like being a football player who hadn’t been in training and suddenly you’re playing a game. The caption for the photo of Primal Scream in circa 1990 was also amended as the given positions of Robert Young and Andrew Innes were transposed in an earlier version. I was very unruly and non-academic, so, it was, wow, great, these are my people and they’re making records. This runs to over 400 pages and yet even then it only gets as far as the anticipated release of “Screamadelica” in 1991, which almost certainly means that we are in danger of getting a follow up, in keeping with the recent, cynical trend of publishers where they realise that they can squeeze out two or three books, from the one life story, as seen with the likes of Moby, Flea and Jimmy Barnes et al.

You catch a momentary glimpse of someone else, a sensitive, melancholy, slightly damaged man, with thoughtful things to say about how social standing impacts music, or the links between the DIY mid-80s indie scene and Thatcherism. The story of the band's transition from rock to dance music, to endless ecstasy-soaked raves, is descriptive of an era. In this book, Gillespie takes us through the release of Screamadelica and the tour that followed as Primal Scream become the most innovative British band of the new decade. For him, being a Romantic, even a cynical Romantic, means that on balance one tends to see the human glass as half full. Then the wild-eyed, seditious lone wolf on the last bus out of nowhere city shoves him out of the way and starts crowing that he was into Big Star before you were.