Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year

Tenement Kid: Rough Trade Book of the Year by Gillespie, Bobby. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781474622066.

ROUGH TRADES BOOK OF THE YEAR Gillespie is rock and rolls Oliver Twist. A punk rock fairytale, razor sharp on class struggle, music, style, and a singular view of the world resulting in one of the worlds great bands. Couldnt put down Courtney Love Born into a working-class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, TENEMENT KID begins in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heaths brutal slum clearances. Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers apprentice, Bobbys rock n roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynotts mirrored pickguard at his first gig at the Apollo in Glasgow. Filled with the holy spirit of rock n 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 Primal Scream. Building like a breakbeat crescendo to 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 nations consciousness, TENEMENT KID closes with the release of Screamadelica, the album often credited with starting the 90s. A book filled with the joy and wonder of a rock n roll apostle who would radically reshape the future sounds of fin de siècle British pop, Bobby Gillespies memoir cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house.