Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

Product Information

Gillespie leaves the door open for another instalment, as Tenement Kid concludes with the release of Screamadelica. The struggles, the insane nights you can picture happening to yourself back in the day and the feelings that we all felt in that era.

Published thirty years after the release of their masterpiece, Bobby Gillespie's memoir cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house. Anyway the reason behind this long-winded memory is because that Tenement Kid is Gillespie’s memoir and it documents his childhood, his stint in Altered Images and The Wake, the formation of Primal Scream , his drumming days with The Jesus and Mary Chain. His experience was dutifully described as courtesy of John Peel in 1977, in the midst of the rising angst of his generation and was the ignition to the collective kindling of the working class discontent of a young man ready to challenge the Status Quo in a Thatcherite society.

They have released 11 albums including major hits, ‘Loaded’, ‘Rocks’, ‘Country Girl’ and ‘Kowalski’. I’m pretty good, I’ll always take four months off at the start of the year and go back on drinks and drugs on April Fools’ Day, do it for the summer, and then October, November, December off again. and some of the finer details to do with bands and music are inaccurate too, which feels a tad lazy.

Gillespie takes us through all the highs and lows of his career and he provides a good laugh along the way. Although Gillespie claims to be a lover, not a fighter, he revels in the chaos and was ripe for punk, providing an ecstatic description of the explosive effect of hearing The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen.

Where Stuart has a sometimes overly simplistic and humble style, Bobby has a tendency to grandiose statements about the nature of music, politics and society, interspersed with lists of records he liked and clothes he wore. 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. Gillespie feels like an honest narrator, plainly describing the lows and highs without dishing dirt. At the beginning of last year, I didn’t want to make another rock’n’roll record, I’ve done enough of them.

The story is one of a working class upbringing in Glasgow and Gillespie’s “rock n roll epiphany” which would ultimately lead to him becoming an artist initially in the Jesus and Mary Chain then in Primal Scream.The story of the band's transition from rock to dance music, to endless ecstasy-soaked raves, is descriptive of an era. Primal Scream seize the moment, commissioning more remixes, and finally find their mojo with their superb, groundbreaking third album, Screamadelica. View image in fullscreen Primal Scream c1990 (l-r, standing): Robert Young, Henry Olsen, Philip Tomanov; (seated) Andrew Innes and Bobby Gillespie. I’ve had therapy: I once did it with a guy in Islington who actually made me lie down on a couch, which was fucking great.

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. When he was there, when he came up two or three times, he was on another planet, he was gone, he couldn’t play. 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. It certainly facilitated my own ruination and thank fuck as well… Work is the only thing that keeps me out of trouble. The book is Bobby Gillespie’s story up to the recording and release of the Screamadelica album in 1991.Later when I could finally afford music magazines, I started to learn more about Primal Scream’s importance to music, especially with their Screamadelica album. Bobby Gillespie has some great stories to tell about his life and his artistic journey up to the release of Primal Scream's album "Screamadelica. Much like the Brett Anderson split autobiographies, this ends where things are about to really take off but it doesn't feel anticlimactic. This idea that, if Scotland gets independence and becomes a more social democratic, left, liberal country, maybe people in England will finally wake up. Among his screenplays is Creation Stories, the 2021 biopic of Alan McGee, Gillespie’s lifelong friend, and cofounder of Creation Records, Primal Scream’s first label.