Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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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. 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. Don’t be a spectator, be a creator – that’s what the message of punk was, and, to me, that’s also the legacy of acid house. I’m for Scottish independence as a mechanism for breaking up the UK, and I’m for English independence and Welsh independence.

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). 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. It kind of cements that unemployability, you dig yourself in, five years, 10, 20, nobody’s going to touch you for anything else.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.

He excoriates the “coked-out” performers at Live Aid: “They displayed nothing except an arrogant contempt for their audience. There was maybe a little too much made of how good the drugs were, and not enough of the long term effects on Bobby, but hey, that's rock 'n'roll and it was an integral part of the story so couldn't be ignored. 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.The book is Bobby Gillespie’s story up to the recording and release of the Screamadelica album in 1991. Trainspotting followed the lives of heroin-addicted youths (Welsh was himself addicted to heroin for a while).

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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. Having been a teenager in the 80s in East Kilbride then I of course particularly enjoyed the Mary Chain chapters.That aside its a perfectly good social history of a particular time in the popular musical continuum, maybe 300 pages rather than 400.

BG When I attempted to stop taking drugs and drinking, what helped more than anything was making a commitment to getting up in the morning, getting dressed and going somewhere, swimming, an NA [narcotics anonymous] meeting. Then there’s the likes of 1994’s “Give Out…” a bloated mess, which was like listening to a pub band doing half-hearted Stones covers. 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. You catch a momentary glimpse of someone else, a sensitive, melancholy, slightly damaged man, with thoughtful things to say about how social standing impacts music, or the links between the DIY mid-80s indie scene and Thatcherism. His obvious pride in his father's role as a union organiser is fascinating and helps to make this a valuable social history of Scotland in the post-war era.I had no idea that Gillespie was at school with Creation Records founder, Alan McGee (McGee was in the year above him) and the origin story of that relationship made for interesting reading.