Orion to publish 'celebratory' memoir from Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie

Orion will publish a memoir from Bobby Gillespie’s memoir, Tenement Kid, after White Rabbit publisher Lee Brackstone spent a decade urging the Primal Scream frontman to write one. 

Brackstone acquired world rights in the autobiography directly from Gillespie’s management. It will be published by White Rabbit on the 28th October 2021 in hardback, e-book, White Rabbit Collector’s Edition and audio. 

Gillespie is a singer, songwriter and founder member of the rock and roll band Primal Scream. They have released 11 albums including "Loaded, Rocks", "Country Girl" and "Kowalski". This is his first memoir.

Tenement Kid follows Gillespie's story up to the recording and release of the album “Screamadelica” in 1991. It explores Gillespie’s early life in Scotland including his first decade spent in a tenement. Orion said: “Born into a working-class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, Bobby’s memoirs begin in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heath’s brutal slum clearances.” 

“Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers’ apprentice, Bobby’s rock and roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynott’s mirrored pickguard at his first gig at the Apollo in Glasgow. Filled with ‘the holy spirit of rock and roll’ 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.” 

Structured in four parts, the book “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,” Orion said. “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.”  

Ending with the release of Screamadelica and the tour that followed in the autumn, Tenement Kid is “a book filled with the joy and wonder of a rock and roll apostle who would radically reshape the future sounds of fin de siècle British pop”. Orion said: “Published 30 years after the release of their masterpiece, Bobby Gillespie’s memoir cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house.” 

Gillespie said: “The publisher Lee Brackstone has been hassling me for years to write a book. I always rebuffed him with some excuse or the other. At the beginning of 2020 I wanted to challenge myself creatively and do something I had never done before. 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 10 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.” 

Brackstone said: “I have been trying to persuade Bobby to write a book for a decade because I knew he would write something that is so much more than your usual rockstar memoir. Tenement Kid is many things: the story of Primal Scream and the early years of the Jesus and Mary Chain, a paean to Glasgow in the ‘60s and ‘70s, long since disappeared, a work of social history and memoir that burns with political fervour and driven intensity. It is also of course a compelling account of punk, the acid house years and the Second Summer of Love.”  

He added: “After the year we have all experienced it is the tonic we all need: a joyful, celebratory and beautifully written book which will remind us of better times, just – as we hope – those better times might be returning.”