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Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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Meanwhile, Primal Scream toil away in the indie underground to minimal impact, until Gillespie gloms on to the burgeoning acid house scene.

Er ego/reality check son…I think it was more the case that your drumming was so forgettable that you were so easily replaced by a drum machine. The narrative often has to change key rapidly, between crazy Jesus and Mary Chain adventures or the grinding slog of the early Scream days, to a considered look at the nature of the singer’s role in a group, or his careful study of songwriting technique, “literary songwriting, songs of experience” as he puts it, inspired by Southern Soul classics like Dark End of the Street.

Gillespie takes us through all the highs and lows of his career and he provides a good laugh along the way. 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. The book is Bobby Gillespie’s story up to the recording and release of the Screamadelica album in 1991. In fact, it’s his detailed account of his pre Scream musical activity that makes for some of the best reading in the book. Fizzing with an infectious passion for the magic of rock music, Bobby Gillespie’s vivid and evocative new memoir, TENEMENT KID: From the Streets of Glasgow in the 1960s to Drummer in Jesus and Mary Chain and Frontman in Primal Scream (Third Man Books), traces the Primal Scream frontman’s path from a post-war Glasgow tenement to the release of Screamadelica, the band’s psychedelic award-winning masterpiece that helped usher in the 1990s.

This, as his enjoyable memoir Tenement Kid confirms, is a true believer steeped in politics and pop culture . I think it’s better to be governed by non-hierarchical nation-states that aren’t based on imperialist precepts and entrenched beliefs.Reading Tenement Kid you can see just how that record was the outcome of an extraordinary synchronicity of people, places, drugs, technology and imagination which would be impossible to recreate again, a series of golden moments. 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. sense – but more in the word’s original Blakean sense – emotion recollected in tranquillity, as the saying went. About being on stage between Robert Young and Andrew Innes, blasting Les Pauls through Marshall stacks, all of us on speed, feeling like a god.

BG In August, we did the NHS frontline workers’ benefit gig at the O2, with Liam Gallagher headlining. It’s a nice touch too throughout the book how he makes a point of naming and thanking all kinds of people who helped or supported the group on the way up. There’s been a recent avalanche of books by musicians, including Sinéad O’Connor, Baxter Dury, Will Sergeant, Stevie Van Zandt, Carl Cox, Shaun Ryder and Dave Grohl, to mention just a few. The story of the band's transition from rock to dance music, to endless ecstasy-soaked raves, is descriptive of an era. This is an essential read both for the essential history of British music it provides and a scathing take down of the neoliberal political consensus.Back in 1994, when I was 15 years old, my only way of listening to new music was to listen to the radio on Sunday evening. When I saw the book’s length – over 400 pages – and then read that it only went up to Screamadelica I was a bit surprised, though I couldn’t help remembering the comment from a friend who’d spent some time around Primal Scream that Bobby G was always “very shrewd”. The mask rarely slips over 400 pages, telling of Bobby Gillespie's life from childhood in Springburn until the release of Screamadelica.

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