Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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We have a regular newsletter with the week’s new releases that goes out every Thursday or Friday too. As frontman of righteous indie rockers Primal Scream, Bobby Gillespie has always talked a good game but that gift of the gab is backed up by a passion for his subject, be it music, style, youth culture, politics, class struggle or football. And there’s quite a lot of political rants (given his dad was a leading trade unionist) which get repetitive after a while.

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. This idea that, if Scotland gets independence and becomes a more social democratic, left, liberal country, maybe people in England will finally wake up. 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. 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.

As a Glaswegian myself so much of this is familiar to me, from school aggro, to city centre clubs, and a thoroughly enjoyable read. And in the meantime I discovered what a thoughtful, compassionate and passionate band front man Gillespie is.

Tenement Kid is dedicated to influential producer/DJ/mixer Andrew Weatherall – who also died last year, of a pulmonary embolism – and Primal Scream guitarist Robert “Throb” Young , who succumbed to drink and drug addictions and died in 2014, aged 49 , several years after leaving the band. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. 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. And indeed of Gillespie himself, a man “out there on the perimeter, on the edge of consciousness, the dark, unknown regions of soul dread and psychic derangement where the straights are too scared to go,” as he puts it, in one of a number of lines you somehow imagine not in Gillespie’s voice, but that of the late Rik Mayall.I think it’s better to be governed by non-hierarchical nation-states that aren’t based on imperialist precepts and entrenched beliefs. 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. 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.

But when the Jesus and Mary Chain treat their audiences with drugged-out contempt, it’s the dernier cri in cool: he finds the violence it provokes hilarious until his girlfriend gets bottled. View image in fullscreen With his sons, Lux and Wolf, and wife, Katy England, at Paris fashion week in September 2019.

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.

At the beginning of last year, I didn’t want to make another rock’n’roll record, I’ve done enough of them. Tenement Kid is available as a standard hardback edition and Rough Trade in the UK have an exclusive “White Rabbit Collector’s Edition” which is SIGNED, hand numbered, has a lyric stamp, specially designed endpapers and comes in a bespoke slipcase.

I liked all the little touches, talking about the fashion and influences which made me wish I'd got into Primal Scream earlier. 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.