View image in fullscreen Primal Scream c1990 (l-r, standing): Robert Young, Henry Olsen, Philip Tomanov; (seated) Andrew Innes and Bobby Gillespie. It is also the story of Western rock/pop and the roads leading to the explosions of grunge in America and BritPop in Europe.

Earlier this year, Gillespie released Utopian Ashes, an album of duets with Savages singer Jehnny Beth.No surprise when the posters on the kitchen wall were Che Guevara and the famous ’68 Olympics Black Power salute. Fizzing with an infectious passion for the magic of rock music, Bobby Gillespie’s vivid and evocative new memoir, TENEMENT KID: From the Streets of Glasgow in the 1960s to Drummer in Jesus and Mary Chain and Frontman in Primal Scream, traces the Primal Scream frontman’s path from a post-war Glasgow tenement to the release of Screamadelica, the band’s psychedelic award-winning masterpiece that helped usher in the 1990s. Tenement Kid is dedicated to influential producer/DJ/mixer Andrew Weatherall – who also died last year, of a pulmonary embolism – and Primal Scream guitarist Robert “Throb” Young , who succumbed to drink and drug addictions and died in 2014, aged 49 , several years after leaving the band. It is a tale of redemption, of how - through a spiritual and chemical path - rock and roll can truly save, taking you away from the suffering to your higher self. And if you ever needed a reminder of the inate decency of Joe Strummer towards his fan base, Gillespie offers an excellent example.

The book ends with the release of Screamadelica, which I never realised had been released on the same day as Nevermind. It kind of cements that unemployability, you dig yourself in, five years, 10, 20, nobody’s going to touch you for anything else. 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. Anyway, this popped up on my feed after the slightly disappointing bio of Jesus and Mary Chain (which was written by someone a lot younger who was not there).

And indeed of Gillespie himself, a man “out there on the perimeter, on the edge of consciousness, the dark, unknown regions of soul dread and psychic derangement where the straights are too scared to go,” as he puts it, in one of a number of lines you somehow imagine not in Gillespie’s voice, but that of the late Rik Mayall. At which point Tenement Kid concludes, with Gillespie basking in its success and the reader wondering what he’s actually like behind the posturing and hyperbole: a very odd way to end an autobiography. Really looking forward to the next one but am PRAYING that this doesn't wrap up the later period of his life after the mainstream success in a handful of pages like so many other artist's life stories. 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. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Third Man Books is dedicated to publishing the best in poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, SF/F, and non-fiction with the same diversity and award-winning design that are hallmarks of our partner company, Third Man Records.

Loaded, an Andrew Weatherall remix of a ballad from their unloved eponymous second album, puts them on Top of the Pops. Another recent biography I’ve read groaned under the pages of padding about the paucity of TV channels or how you could leave your front door open then and so on. But overall, a mostly positive read if you’re interested in the Glasgow / Indie bands / music scene of the 80s and 90s.The minutiae of the early Creation years is especially fascinating to me but his descriptions of the ecstatic nights that led to their embrace of house music brings it all back in full color.