Tenement Kid

‘Tenement Kid’ is Bobby Gillespie’s story up to the recording and release of the album that has been credited with ‘starting the 90’s’, Screamadelica. 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 n 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 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 in Primal Scream.