​Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie Readies New Memoir 'Tenement Kid'

It chronicles life in "a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house"

BY Calum SlingerlandPublished Mar 10, 2021

​Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie has announced a new memoir. The vocalist and former Jesus and Mary Chain drummer will deliver Tenement Kid on October 28 via White Rabbit.

Said to cut "a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house," Tenement Kid will capture the Primal Scream co-founder's life up to the recording and release of his group's revered 1991 album Screamadelica.

A press release for the book reads as follows:

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. As the '80s bleed into the '90s and a new kind of electronic soul music starts to pulse through the nation's consciousness, Primal Scream become the most innovative British band of the new decade, representing a new psychedelic vanguard taking shape at Creation Records.

"At the beginning of 2020 I wanted to challenge myself creatively and do something I had never done before," Gillespie shared in a statement. "I didn't want to write another rock record, I'd done plenty of those, so, I decided to write a memoir of my early life and worked on it all through the summer, Autumn and Winter of 2020 and here it is. It is titled Tenement Kid as I spent the first ten years of my life living in one. I am very proud of it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.'

Further details on Tenement Kid can be found here.

Primal Scream's most recent album remains 2016's Chaosmosis. Find out where Screamadelica sits in Exclaim!'s Essential Guide to Creation Records.

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