If Bobby Gillespie were just another moody frontman in eyeliner and leather pants, his memoir Tenement Kid might’ve landed with the thud of a tambourine dropped on shag carpet. But instead, it reads like a Molotov cocktail lobbed from a Glaswegian rooftop—lit with poetry, rage, and the kind of hard-earned clarity that makes your ears ring.
“I just wanted everyone to be good,” Gillespie says, both as confession and explanation. It’s a mantra that could be laughably naive if it didn’t come from a guy who grew up under the literal shadow of coal-dusted postwar Glasgow and the metaphorical one of anti-fascist idealism. His childhood was steeped in union meetings and national tragedies, and, as he recounts, a primary school where your classmates’ dads might’ve been among the 66 crushed to death in the Ibrox football disaster. “Death was real and close,” he tells me, like he’s shrugging off a cigarette ash.
The book lays it all bare, a document of growing up on the tailpipe fumes of World War II. “All the comics I read were still about fighting Nazis. The British were always clever and brave, the bad guys always ugly and stupid. It was propaganda for six-year-olds,” he says, before launching into a tangent about Hogan’s Heroes, M*A*S*H, and the eerie permanence of Churchill cosplay in British culture. “They still wrap themselves in the Union Jack and pretend they beat Hitler on their own,” he says, disgusted. “It’s a lie. A big one.”
But for Gillespie, punk wasn’t born out of boredom—it was born out of bloodlines. “My dad was a trade union organizer and a proud anti-fascist. That’s where I come from,” he says, slamming a metaphoric pint on the table. And that upbringing bled into everything. “I never thought women were less than men,” he says, dismissing any self-congratulatory feminist back-patting. “It wasn’t about reading feminist literature. It was just basic human decency. My dad helped women in factories get equal pay. I guess I just picked that up.”
Still, Gillespie’s brand of equality wasn’t some neutered kumbaya. He’s got a soft spot for what he calls “good macho”—think Phil Lynott and Wayne Kramer, not the back-of-the-tour-bus creeps. “You gotta let Wayne Kramer be Wayne Kramer,” he says. “Most women I know love Thin Lizzy. They thought Phil was hot.” And Gillespie’s own vibe is somewhere between mascara-smudged vulnerability and a sneer full of teeth. “I liked wearing blouses, makeup. Looking a little fey, a little tough. Leather pants but with a heart,” he grins.
It’s that swagger-meets-sensitivity that defines Primal Scream at their best. He admits he never had Paul Rodgers’ voice—“Only Paul Rodgers has that voice”—but found a way to carve himself into the mix of screaming Les Pauls and Marshall stacks. “I had to find my place in that structure,” he says, like a man who built a house out of distortion and eyeliner.
And he’s still looking for that high. Not the narcotic one (though there’s plenty of that in the book), but the spiritual jolt of hearing the Ramones or Thin Lizzy for the first time. “I was 15. Everything was new. I don’t think anything will ever hit me like that again,” he says, half-eulogizing his own innocence. He does give credit to current artists like Kelly Lee Owens and Kurt Vile (“When Kurt plays guitar, I really feel it”), but he’s not chasing the teenage fix. “It’s not about high-energy rock anymore. It’s about poetry. About voice.”
The man who once yelped “Rocks” now swoons over Warren Zevon’s Hasten Down the Wind. “The lyrics are just fabulous,” he says, and you can hear the hush settle in his voice, like he’s lit a candle for every lost cowboy poet.
As for the possibility of a second book? He laughs. “I wasn’t planning on it. But I accidentally wrote 250,000 words.” Tenement Kid stops in 1991—“I wanted to leave it hanging,” he says, referencing the final line about Nirvana like a dropped mic. But the ‘90s are calling, and Gillespie has more to say. “I started questioning my behavior and everyone around me. Creatively, politically… it all led to XTRMNTR.”
He hints at the connections between UK drug culture, Black revolutionary writing, and the intentional corrosion of working-class communities. “Maybe the easy availability of hard drugs wasn’t just by chance. Maybe it serves a purpose for someone,” he says, not so much suggesting a conspiracy as pulling back the curtain on the rot.
In the meantime, Primal Scream are touring Screamadelica again—“playing some gigs in the UK and Ireland. Hopefully America too,” he says, sounding hopeful but realistic. And while he might not be chasing that teenage high anymore, Gillespie’s still chasing something—truth, maybe. Beauty. A well-cut blouse.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
