Tenement Kid

Critics Review

• Gillespie is rock and roll’s 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 world’s great bands. Couldn’t put down

  Courtney Love

• As hugely influential and inspiring as Bobby Gillespie’s music is, we now know his genius includes the telling of this story and reviving the ghosts that brought the music to life

  Mark Lanegan

• A righteous journey, an elegy for the transformative power of rock and roll told with heart and soul. The Gospel according to Bobby Gillespie

  Warren Ellis

• If they encapsualted the spirit of rock and roll in one person it would be Bobby Gillespie. The book is affirmative not just of a rockin’ life but the beautiful working-class culture that made it. I felt like shedding tears of joy reading it, but also enraged about what we’ve lost

  Irvine Welsh

• From Rottenrow hospital to the TOTP studio, this is the enthralling and vividly detailed story of a boy dreamed himself into a rock and roll star

  Simon Reynolds

• Readers will be astonished by the detail in his memoir, the extraordinary rolling energy of his prose, and his warmth, gratitude and performerly wisdom . . . The way Gillespie writes about music’s intoxicating buzz is inspirational . . . Tenement Kid’s joy is in its undeviating belief in rock iconography

  Mojo

• A fascinating story

  Guardian

• An impassioned, elegantly written tale of self-realisation through fandom, along with plenty of doubts and insecurities

  The Times

• An obsessive music fan who fulfilled his wildest rock star dreams, Gillespie has found an authentic voice to desribe his often hair-raising experiences, and the result is a rock ‘n’ roll epic

  Daily Telegraph

• I can’t recommend this book highly enough . . . the best music-related book I’ve read this year, and essential reading for anyone who loves and cares about alternative music

  Louder Than War

• Gillespie is a hypnotic writer and this self-aggrandising yet self-lacerating self-portrait is, on its own terms, brutally honest

  i Newspaper

• Tenement Kid is a thrilling read laced with copious laugh out loud moments. This is a riveting account of how a tenement child of the Cold War era, and his friends, created a soundtrack for the hopes and dreams of a generation

  Irish Times

• This, as his enjoyable memoir Tenement Kid confirms, is a true believer steeped in politics and pop culture . . . The most arresting passages are those in which he captures the febrile, incestuous activity of Scotland’s underground music scene in the Eighties/early Nineties . . . He also strikes an unforced yet tangible note of melancholy: we will never be so young and free again

  Big Issue

• Bobby Gillespie is a believer. A true disciple who, in his autobiography Tenement Kid, is going to take you on a spiritual journey through poverty and the struggles of a city at the end of time, in a country being dismantled by an evil overlord with all the might of the state behind her, and into the light and triumph of a band finding their identity. It is a tale of redemption, of how – through a spiritual and chemical path – rock and roll can truly save, taking you away from the suffering to your higher self. This is a tale of love; it is a tale of salvation . . . It does what you expect from a rock and roll memoir but also achieves something rare for the genre: it gives the sense that Gillespie is still one of us

  Concrete Islands