Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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The story of the band's transition from rock to dance music, to endless ecstasy-soaked raves, is descriptive of an era. It kind of cements that unemployability, you dig yourself in, five years, 10, 20, nobody’s going to touch you for anything else. Structured in four parts, Tenement Kid builds like a breakbeat crescendo to the final quarter of the book, the Summer of Love, Boys Own parties, and the fateful meeting with Andrew Weatherall in an East Sussex field.

More than once found myself switching from nodding along at his joyous enthusiasm for music, art and fashion, to shaking my head as he launched into another negative diatribe about some random topic. When it came to women, girlfriends, being angry and emotional, it was almost like I was a football and I’d been punctured. 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. Don’t be a spectator, be a creator – that’s what the message of punk was, and, to me, that’s also the legacy of acid house. Ever since Primal Scream unexpectedly crashed into the mainstream consciousness in 1990 – after six years, two flop albums and several dramatic U-turns in musical direction – their frontman has perfected a piquantly preposterous interview technique.

and some of the finer details to do with bands and music are inaccurate too, which feels a tad lazy. It’s amazing to think it’s now thirty years since the release of Primal Scream’s landmark Screamadelica album in 1991. Gillespie’s tribal response was to make his own scene as part of the collective which ran legendary Glasgow club night Splash One. As this is a pretty debauched – well a lot of drug use – I can’t wait to see what the follow up will be like. 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.

Gillespie likes to talk, and blags on and on a bit, we all know rock stars like and take loads of drugs, and it becomes a bit tedious page after page.

I understand that ending with the pinnacle of their career is an impactful way to conclude, but there is still a longing for an overview of their journey up to the present day. I'm older by a few years and we grew up in different parts of the city (Glasgow) but the interests we had, the music we loved and just the places / events we'd go to were pretty similar. 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. The editing could have been a little sharper, as this suffers from unhelpful repetition of phrases and description, there are also a few full page photos with zero descriptions?

The headline to this article was amended on 10 October 2021 to indicate that it was an abridgement of a quote from Bobby Gillespie.

There is a lot of good stuff in here, particularly about the burgeoning Indie music scene taking shape in Scotland in the late 70s and early 80s, with the likes of Altered Images, Strawberry Switchblade and the JAMC. 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.

The real fear of elites in England is that, if Scotland is independent, at a stroke, there’s no royal family, no House of Lords, no Eton. Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers’ apprentice, Bobby’s rock n roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynott’s mirrored pickguard at his first gig at the Apollo in Glasgow. A similar time shift from that date would have taken you back to the black and white days of Bobby Rydell, Adam Faith, and ‘Crackerjack’.Didn’t necessarily hate this, and it paints a more rounded picture of him, but did cause me to roll my eyes a few times when he went off on a music journalist style rant about some new random topic. I haven’t done therapy for a while but, when I did, I’d describe certain reactions and they’d say, you’re disassociating. We have a regular newsletter with the week’s new releases that goes out every Thursday or Friday too. Having been a teenager in the 80s in East Kilbride then I of course particularly enjoyed the Mary Chain chapters. 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.