Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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The most arresting passages are those in which he captures the febrile, incestuous activity of Scotland's underground music scene in the Eighties/early Nineties . Structured in four parts, Tenement Kid builds like a breakbeat crescendo from Gillespie’s working-class Glaswegian upbringing to the “Second Summer of Love” that saw the '80s bleed into the '90s and a new kind of electronic soul music starting to pulse through the Great Britain’s consciousness. And in the meantime I discovered what a thoughtful, compassionate and passionate band front man Gillespie is.

Fizzing with an infectious passion for the magic of rock music, Gillespie’s vivid and evocative memoir traces the Primal Scream frontman’s path from Glasgow tenement to the release of Screamadelica, the psychedelic masterpiece that ushered in the 90s. Slowly I went through their discography, although I stopped at Beautiful Future due to the fact that I saw them live and I was disappointed – lead singer Bobby Gillespie kept falling on the ground and the band were out of synch.

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. I found myself deeply impressed by his ability to tell us what the motivation behind Movin On Up was and numerous other songs.

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.All told, this is an enlightening source of information on BG himself, the JAMC, and Primal Scream, but feels like a missed opportunity to create something truly amazing. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.