Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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BG There’s Andrew Weatherall’s quote: “Ecstasy is a great drug but it’s also very dangerous because you find yourself on the dancefloor, punching the air to Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh. PO Box, Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Argentin The struggles, the insane nights you can picture happening to yourself back in the day and the feelings that we all felt in that era. 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. 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.

One of my favourite aspects of the book is the detailed description of his early years in the Glasgow tenements and how that shaped his strong socialist belief.

Gillespie’s vivid articulation was a big surprise to me… I found his celebration of drug culture rather unpalatable (small wonder he had depression for a good part of his life), but his passion for music was inspiring. It's an entertaining if somewhat bloated read, a good social history of the 1970's and 1980's and the music scene as it transformed. Bobby Gillespie several times refers to himself as a Romantic – not in the soppy “Hallo trees, hallo sky! What makes Gillespie interesting is that Screamadelica still sounds amazing today - even contemporary in some ways - while Nevermind and Nirvana sound like some relic of a bygone age. The book ends with the release of Screamadelica, which I never realised had been released on the same day as Nevermind.

I reminded myself, while reading this book, what a marvellous band Primal Scream are, playing the tracks in parallel to reading about them. The evolution of Screamadelica itself makes a great story, as we see how gradually the diverse components like Gospel, acid house, ambient sounds, sampling, classic Stones type rock ‘come together’, just like the song said. Their looser set-up eventually pays dividends when Gillespie relocates to Brighton, experiences an acid house epiphany, and commissions DJ Andrew Weatherall – a Scream believer when no one else would touch them – to remix album track I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have. That aside its a perfectly good social history of a particular time in the popular musical continuum, maybe 300 pages rather than 400. The accounts of the early JAMC riot strewn, alcohol crazed gigs are great at capturing the impact the group had in giving the UK indie scene a much-needed kick up the backside, mixing punk attitude, full-on psychedelia and sheer anarchic noise.

For the moment, Tenement Kid is a thrilling read laced with copious laugh out loud moments, This is a riveting account of how a tenement child of the Cold War era, and his friends, created a soundtrack for the hopes and dreams of a generation. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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”.