Bobby Gillespie - Tenement Kid: From the Streets of Glasgow in the 1960s to Drummer in Jesus and Mary Chain and Frontman in Primal Scream

Tenement Kid

From the Streets of Glasgow in the 1960s to Drummer in Jesus and Mary Chain and Frontman in Primal Scream

https://www.thirdmanbooks.com/tenementkid

password: bobbygillespie

Tenement Kid: From the Streets of Glasgow in the 1960s to

Drummer in Jesus and Mary Chain and Frontman in Primal Scream

2021 by Bobby Gillespie

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in case of brief
quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

For more information:

Third Man Books, LLC, 623 7th Ave S,

Nashville,Tennessee 37203

A CIP record is on file with the Library of Congress.

FIRST USA EDITION

ISBN 9781737382904

Cover design by Jordan Williams & Gigi Hull

Additional layout by Gigi Hull

Front cover photo by Richard Bellia

For A.W. and R.Y.
Thanks for the trip.

When we go onstage, man, its a war between us and the audience.

-Robert Young

I do not want the world to change, I want to be against it.

-Jean Genet

(1961-1977)

A Springburn Boy and Proud of It

I grew up in spectral places. My playgrounds were an abandoned locomotive factory, a sprawling graveyard and ghostly streets of evacuated tenements. Springburn was torn down during Edward Heaths Conservative Governments slum clearance programme of the late sixties; street by street the houses were evacuated, until the district resembled the photographs of German cities bombed by the allies in a World War Two history book my dad owned. It was scary but exciting. It became a wilderness. An older boy would help us break into the boarded-up flats and houses on Vulcan Street. Where once had lived the families of the hated Vulcies (our street gang enemies) was now a void. Some people had left behind tables, chairs, beds, there were plates in the filthy sinks, and curtains were left hanging, collecting dust and dirt that would never be cleaned again. It had the feeling of flight and abandonment, as if the former tenants had fled an enemy army. In some ways they had. What had been a thriving working-class community was destroyed and replaced by a motorway.

Whatever happened to those people? What became of them? Where did they go? Heres what happened to me.

I was born on 22 June 1961 in Rottenrow Maternity Hospital, Cowcaddens, Glasgow, in the heart of the old medieval city. Its a couple of streets away from Provands Lordship, the oldest house in the city, built in 1471, overlooked by the twelfth-century cathedral where the citys patron saint St Mungo originally built his church. Nearby is the Necropolis cemetery Glasgows Pre Lachaise - where the citys Victorian-era industrialists, sugar merchants and tobacco barons, some of whom made their vast fortunes from slavery, are interred. On top of the highest hill of the Necropolis stands the statue of the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, John Knox; his cold, pious, concrete gaze ever-vigilant, passing judgement on the wanton sinners below. There, also, on Cathedral Square, stands the statue of King William of Orange. My gran told me that drunken Catholics would come to throw bottles at King Billy on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne every summer. Religion, violence and alcohol are inextricable in Glasgow.

The Gaelic translation of Rottenrow is Road of Kings. It is also traditionally an old English and Scottish street name given to a place where rows of rat-infested cottages once stood. You could say that I was born on a rat-infested road of kings.

I was born a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the year the Berlin Wall went up. My mother, Wilma Getty Gemmell Gillespie, was young when she had me. She told me that she was terrified Russia and America were going to annihilate the entire planet in an apocalyptic nuclear war when I was a baby. I was a child of the Cold War. The paranoia of imminent nuclear annihilation was ever-present in those days. She was twenty-one, and my father, Robert Pollock Gillespie, was twenty-three. They met when they were both working for Collins, the book publishers. Dad was a print labourer and member of the National Union of Printing, Bookbinding and Paper Workers; they were both members of Springburn Young Socialists. Dad was involved in a strike in the late fifties to reduce working hours from forty-five to forty hours per week, essentially introducing the five day week. Until the unions won that dispute employees were expected to work on Saturday mornings as part of the working week. Experiencing the power of class solidarity and the change it could bring politicised Dad. He had joined the army at seventeen the usual story of a largely uneducated working-class kid with no real prospects being lured into the armed services by the promise of travel and adventure. He was a Lance Bombardier in the Royal Artillery and was stationed in Hong Kong during the Cold War, taking part in reconnaissance missions, positioned high on a mountaintop waiting for Mao Tse-tungs Red Army to come storming over the mountains. He told me that the army made a man out of him. It also gave him insight into the workings of the British class system. He would entertain my brother Graham and me with tales of his army days: huge barroom brawls with American GIs who the British lads thought were so soft and spoiled they couldnt fight a war without a Coca-Cola machine on the front line. Dad has the words HONG KONG tattooed on his knuckles. He also has a black panther on his upper right arm (imagine my surprise when I saw the same panther tattooed on the upper left arm of my future wife, Katy, in the Hudson Hotel in New York in 2000), a Chinese lady on his upper right arm looking coy behind a fan, and the name Jim Surrey, his best mate in the army, on his lower left forearm. Back in the fifties, way before the current fashion for tattoos, only soldiers, sailors, Hells Angels, gangsters, criminals, felons and gypsies had their skin pierced by the tattooists needle. Tattoos were strictly for outlaws and outcasts, not straights. Tattoos were taboo.

We lived on the third floor of a tenement building in a one-room flat bought for 100 at 35 Palermo Street in the district of Springburn. These flats were known in Glasgow as a single-end. Ours consisted of one room, with a sink and a cooker. We shared an outside toilet on the landing with two other families. The only vivid memory I have of the single-end was when, still a toddler, I threw a full tin of Heinz baked beans out of the window. My mum was freaked out and rushed over to see if the can had hit anyone, but luckily it was daytime and everyone was at work or school. I just had an overwhelming urge to do it. I think I enjoyed the feeling of being bad. I also noticed the effect it had on my mother. My first ever transgressive act.