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. 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. 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. This, as his enjoyable memoir Tenement Kid confirms, is a true believer steeped in politics and pop culture .

The book ends with the release of Screamadelica, which I never realised had been released on the same day as Nevermind. It was quite amazing how often his musical tastes matched mine and how we discovered certain genres around the same time in our lives. Tony Wilson claimed the 90s began on November 30th, 1989, when Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses appeared on the same episode of Top of the Pops. His happy times on the Boys Brigade football team taught him the value of teamwork and organisation, while Jock Stein’s strategy in the 1967 European Cup influenced Primal Scream’s approach to playing live, where every gig should be “a commando raid on the soul”. A couple of years after a Clash gig changes his life, he refuses to see them live because they have become “too big, too normal”; shortly afterwards, he’s berating the music press for treating the Clash like “has-beens”.A couple of times you might question how accurate his stories are (his fan interactions on the punk scene especially), but they’re not enough to spoil the read. Gillespie certainly has a high enough opinion of his music, but of course excess and indulgence are good ways of disguising or distracting from largely mediocre music. He draws a firm line between the Scream’s rock’n’roll heaven quest and the competition, in the form of all the ’80’s plastic pop like Wham, Spandau etc, or the limper House of Love type indie groups. 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.

But I didn’t know about his time playing bass with Clare Grogan’s Altered Images or his involvement with the Wake on Factory records. Filled with 'the holy spirit of rock n oll' 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.PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

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. 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. 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.When it came to women, girlfriends, being angry and emotional, it was almost like I was a football and I’d been punctured. 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. He talks up Primal Scream as the sole inheritors of a decades-old mantle of rock’n’roll greatness and himself as the possessor of a uniquely deep subcultural knowledge beyond the ken of mere mortals; he rages about revolutionary politics; he discusses the band’s fabled drug use in unflinchingly heroic terms. Structurally, it's a good place to end but I'd love to know about the George Clinton/Memphis/bad drugs era and up through Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR. Primal Scream were many things, but so much of their music is derivative to the point of pastiche, their debut, although it has some lovely songs on it like “Gentle Tuesday” and “Silent Spring”, it still sounds like a group of young boys trying to sound like their heroes from the 60s West Coast.

same garage compilations and bands like the 13th Floor Elevators (The first Primal Scream song I ever heard was their cover of "Slip Inside this House" on the Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye compilation album). In recounting formative gigs and experiences, Gillespie displays a great gift for storytelling, description and deploying a simile, writing evocatively of an audience at a Clash concert: “It was as if Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights was people with inmates who had escaped from a seventies lunatic asylum.

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