I wished I'd spoken to Bobby about music at school, I thought the only thing we had in common was a love of Glasgow Celtic. Funnily enough its the Primal Scream rock and roll stuff near the end that fades away, but a fascinating read from one of Glasgow's most archetypally dour exports. Gillespie’s early life story – traced in this memoir up to the release of Primal Scream’s breakthrough album Screamadelica – is not especially remarkable but this son of a trade unionist and Collins employee has inherited his parents’ erudition as much as their left-wing politics and taste in music, so his diverse vignettes and cultural side-bars are eloquently argued.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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. Those painful childhood memories we bury, that some of us try and drown out with sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, all the usual crutches and distractions. I wrote lyrics on acoustic guitar, then worked through ideas with Jehnny Beth and her boyfriend, Johnny Hostile. Bobby was born in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built and Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.To which a seasoned observer of Bobby Gillespie’s career might sigh and respond: well, of course he does. The editing could have been a little sharper, as this suffers from unhelpful repetition of phrases and description, there are also a few full page photos with zero descriptions?

Back in 1994, when I was 15 years old, my only way of listening to new music was to listen to the radio on Sunday evening. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.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.

As a Glaswegian it's always amusing to read about local places, bands and venues from someone else's perspective, and in this case from someone who was around for a while before my time. Then the wild-eyed, seditious lone wolf on the last bus out of nowhere city shoves him out of the way and starts crowing that he was into Big Star before you were. But if that’s the case, then the mask seldom slips throughout Tenement Kid’s 400 pages, which take him from his working-class Glasgow childhood through punk, Primal Scream’s lean years – first as Byrds-inspired indie janglers, then as purveyors of “greasy rock and roll” – his stint as the drummer of the Jesus and Mary Chain during their riot-provoking early days and ultimately to success.He also explains the massive part played by Andy Weatherall and his use of samplers, and how this transformed the group’s sound and vision, freeing them from the limitations of the guitar/bass/drums blueprint and making anything possible in theory. For him, being a Romantic, even a cynical Romantic, means that on balance one tends to see the human glass as half full. 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. Once it gets going though, this is a great read for any fan of Primal Scream - or even those with a passing interest - and it added to my knowledge (I had no idea he was ever in Altered Images or the rightly forgotten Factory band, the Wake for example). His experience was dutifully described as courtesy of John Peel in 1977, in the midst of the rising angst of his generation and was the ignition to the collective kindling of the working class discontent of a young man ready to challenge the Status Quo in a Thatcherite society.

In more succinct moments, he is wont to describe himself as a transgressive outsider, “a word that’s used too liberally these days,” he adds, rather inviting the response: well, it certainly is in this book. PO Box, Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Argentin Gillespie’s tribal response was to make his own scene as part of the collective which ran legendary Glasgow club night Splash One. Andrew Weatherall, the idiosyncratic sonic alchemist who produced their breakthrough album, Screamadelica, died suddenly last year, aged 56.Primal Scream are brilliant and this book captures Gillespie’s adventures in the music scene of the late 80s / early 90s! Primal Scream seize the moment, commissioning more remixes, and finally find their mojo with their superb, groundbreaking third album, Screamadelica. What makes Gillespie interesting is that Screamadelica still sounds amazing today - even contemporary in some ways - while Nevermind and Nirvana sound like some relic of a bygone age. 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. There is angry political invective aimed at “class traitors”, of a kind that makes people feel obliged to point out that Bobby Gillespie sent his children to private school.