Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

Product Information

IW You’re finding out about the world through your parents, through the dynamics and changes in their relationship. Gillespie takes us through all the highs and lows of his career and he provides a good laugh along the way. There’s a load more I could say here, particularly on his sharp analysis of how movements like punk and acid house emerge, coalesce, expand and finally stagnate.

He also explains the massive part played by Andy Weatherall and his use of samplers, and how this transformed the group’s sound and vision, freeing them from the limitations of the guitar/bass/drums blueprint and making anything possible in theory. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Third Man Books is dedicated to publishing the best in poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, SF/F, and non-fiction with the same diversity and award-winning design that are hallmarks of our partner company, Third Man Records. Maybe the boy from Kings Park is hugely well read and self educated but it came across to me as a deliberate attempt to appear smarter than the reader.His memories of his days as a music fan from the mid-70s onwards are fascinating and his description of the magnanimous support offered by people such as Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin and Peter Hook are heart-warming. Though at times, the band started to believe that they would never break through; they and their sound got a re-boot thanks to the Acid House movement which completely changed their direction. Much like the Brett Anderson split autobiographies, this ends where things are about to really take off but it doesn't feel anticlimactic. For many people, the decade started to come into its own on Monday, September 23rd, 1991, when two game changing, youth-culture defining albums were released on the same day.

His writing is frequently evocative – before redevelopment, Springburn is full of “dead spaces with strange energy – spirits of the past were trapped there” – and, occasionally, something peeks out from behind the public image. Throughout the book, he also displays an astonishing depth of musical knowledge and passion and an endless curiosity for anything that’s real and intense.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. Unlike a lot of musician's autobiographies, the parts about music - the creation, the inspiration, the process - are fascinating and revealing. View image in fullscreen Bobby Gillespie photographed for the Observer New Review by David Vintiner, October 2021.

I’d been doing promo in France for the record I just did, Utopian Ashes, with Jehnny Beth, and I had to self-isolate… Making Utopian Ashes felt very vulnerable, country soul. I guess the number one trait of any "rock" musician is self belief, and Gillespie has this by the bucketload. I bought the original black cover of Anarchy in the UK and played it incessantly, driving people nuts. It also holds great weight in the narrative with two works that, for me, are fundamental in contemporary music: "Psychocandy" and "Screamadelica.This idea that, if Scotland gets independence and becomes a more social democratic, left, liberal country, maybe people in England will finally wake up. 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. The resulting track, Loaded, became Primal Scream’s debut hit and the gateway to the Screamadelica album, 30 years young and still a classic.

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. 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. Gillespie generously gives credit to pivotal personalities such as Alan McGee, the Reid brothers, Andrew Weatherall etc.

Although there are a few instances of repetitiveness with certain words or phrases, the overuse of the word ‘shamanic’ in particular, and is at times needlessly descriptive, his articulate and intelligent summary of the political climate, his warm recollections of his relationships, and honest anecdotes surrounding his experiences as a musician leaves me with the impression of Bobby’s writing to be insightful, humorous, and full of raw beauty and humility. As he shares stories of life on tour, in the studio and especially when he meets his various music heroes, he comes across as genuinely excited to be in the music business. Building like a breakbeat crescendo to the Summer of Love, Boys Own parties, and the fateful meeting with Andrew Weatherall in an East Sussex field, as the '80s bleed into the '90s and a new kind of electronic soul music starts to pulse through the nation's consciousness, TENEMENT KID closes with the release of Screamadelica, the album often credited with 'starting the '90s'. As a Glaswegian myself so much of this is familiar to me, from school aggro, to city centre clubs, and a thoroughly enjoyable read.