Tenement Kid by Bobby Gillespie — from Glasgow to Screamadelica

Rock memoirs are often best early on, in the chapters about childhood and the rise to fame, before the cycle of albums and tours kicks in. Suede singer Brett Anderson’s Coal Black Mornings made a virtue of this imbalance by ending with the band’s breakthrough. The same approach has been adopted by another notable from the heyday of British indie rock, Primal Scream’s frontman Bobby Gillespie.

Tenement Kid starts with Gillespie’s upbringing in working-class Glasgow in the 1960s and ends with the release of his band’s signature album Screamadelica in 1991, not long after he turned 30. The next 30 years of his and Primal Scream’s life are left out, an unexamined realm of drug addiction, sobriety, marriage, parenthood and eight further albums. Longer and more picaresque than Coal Black Mornings, less thoughtfully written too, the result resembles a non-fictional rock Bildungsroman about a band’s struggle to establish itself.

The book’s title refers to Gillespie’s early life living in a cramped flat in a tenement building in Springburn, a deprived inner-city area of Glasgow. His father was prominent in the Scottish trade union movement. There were pictures of Che Guevara and Black Panthers on the walls, alongside a flag of North Vietnam and bookshelves with literary classics and Marxist writings. With both parents working, Gillespie spent much of his daily life in the streets outside. “I put myself in danger a lot. I was always drawn to transgression,” he states, detailing perilous scrapes in a landscape of disused factories and semi-demolished buildings, peopled by warring gangs and football hooligans.

The music press dismissed them as leather-trousered chancers living out clichéd rock and roll fantasies and called them “Primal Tap”

His parents’ increasingly argumentative marriage added to the stress. But Gillespie keeps emotional analysis to a minimum. He mentions feelings of anger and dissociation without digging too deeply into their consequences. Notwithstanding the privations, his account of growing up in Scotland’s biggest city is lively. Some of his most powerful memories are reserved for the songs he heard and the clothes he wore, from the Motown record of Diana Ross and The Supremes that was the most spun disc at home to the black Harrington jacket that he wore on the cusp of his teenage years.

Style is crucial to him, a tribal act of identification. Seeded by Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Thin Lizzy, his attachment to rock as glamorous rebel music was sharpened by punk. He formed Primal Scream in 1982 before briefly becoming the drummer for The Jesus and Mary Chain, which he left a few years later. The latter was a chaotically inspired outfit that provoked punk-like riots at gigs in the mid-1980s. “We were a conduit of hate,” Gillespie remembers of the bottles raining down around him at the drum kit. “To be honest I loved that.”

He switched to being frontman with Primal Scream, a lank-haired, whip-thin singer with a fey voice that belied his fierce desire to insert himself into his obsessively imagined, highly romanticised version of rock history. Their first album, 1987’s Sonic Flower Groove, was a jangling pastiche of 1960s psychedelia. Its follow-up, 1989’s Primal Scream, turned the volume up. The music press dismissed them as leather-trousered chancers living out clichéd rock and roll fantasies and called them “Primal Tap” — a snide reference to the parody heavy-metal band Spinal Tap. A volte face came with Screamadelica’s release two years later.

Under the guidance of Andrew Weatherall, the freethinking DJ Gillespie calls “our Guru”, the album fused rock with the dance beats and utopian imagery of rave culture. Primal Scream found themselves lionised as far-out visionaries uniting different eras of countercultural music — although there were lingering suspicions that Weatherall was the album’s real alchemist. Gillespie depicts it as a triumph of collectivity, fuelled by chemistry of both the artistic and narcotic variety: “‘Creative Communism’ would be a term for it, I guess.”

As Tenement Kid progresses, its pharmacopoeia of pills and powders gets more profuse. Gillespie mostly treats his band’s druggy reputation as an excuse for Hunter S Thompson-style gonzo anecdotes. The dangers of addiction lie outside the book’s ambit. “But that’s another story and not mine to tell,” he states of the early death of guitarist Robert Young in 2014 aged 49.

The narrative is rife with inconsistencies. One moment Gillespie rails against “the disease of class elitism”, the next he sneers that the “masses are stupid”. Transgression is celebrated without much thought being given to what is being transgressed, like the “Hitler Youth” haircut that he and a friend request from a barber in the 1980s, which causes people to point and laugh: “This way we knew the cut was good because ‘if it upsets the straights it must be great’.” Tenement Kid is an entertaining read, but it proves that posturing is a more useful skill for the frontman of a rock band than a memoirist.

Tenement Kid by Bobby Gillespie, White Rabbit £20, 432 pages