Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie: 'I had a young family – children and hard drugs don’t mix'

Bobby Gillespie was born in June 1961 in Glasgow. After playing in local bands and working as a roadie, he joined The Jesus and Mary Chain on drums in the mid-80s and played on their acclaimed debut album, 1985’s Psychocandy. He left the following year to concentrate on his own band, Primal Scream, who signed to Creation Records.

Indie success followed but the band really broke through with their third album, Screamadelica, which embraced the burgeoning acid house scene with the help of producers Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson. The album won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992. Primal Scream have since released an eclectic string of classic albums, including 1997’s Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR (2000). In 2021, Bobby Gillespie released his memoir, Tenement Kid, to critical acclaim.

Speaking to the Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Bobby Gillespie reflects on his schooldays, the perils of the rock’n’roll lifestyle and his relationship with his father.

At the age of 16, I was working in a print factory in Pollokshaws in Glasgow, and I was attending the Glasgow College of Building and Printing. There were lots of record stores that stocked punk music, and I’d just got into that, buying records by bands like The Stranglers, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Ramones. Luckily, the Glasgow Apollo wasn’t that far away from the college. So I bought the music paper Sounds every week and I would see the tour dates, and then at lunchtime I’d go to the Apollo and buy the tickets to see Dr Feelgood or Richard Hell or whoever. That was my life. 

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I never really learnt anything at school. I just think the way the educational system was set up in the ’70s wasn’t for people who were creative. It was set up to train people to do what they were told. I had to do woodwork and metalwork classes and I was fucking useless at that stuff. I loved the art class. But I didn’t know that I was creative. You were just expected, as a working-class boy in those days, to get an apprenticeship at best. I didn’t have the grades to go to university, so towards the end of my time at King’s Park Secondary School, I thought, well, I’m going to be leaving soon. I just stopped doing homework. I thought, what’s the fucking point? I would rather take the belt than do the homework. 

I hated the corporal punishment going on at school, the whole idea of these men or women actually attacking you with a fucking leather belt. It gave me an inbuilt hatred for authority. My dad had a hatred of authority too. He was bullied by teachers and abused by them and humiliated by them. So he didn’t hang about school too much when he was a kid. And he was clearly not a stupid man. He was a very clever guy. He rose to a very high, prominent position in the trade union movement. And he negotiated contracts with employers. He was well read. So really the school system failed both of us. And I think it failed a lot of other working-class kids. I guess there’s a residual anger in me. There were creative kids who ended up on the fucking scrapheap.

I remember just after punk, around about 1980, Paul Weller from The Jam started his own publishing company called Riot Stories. And he asked Jam fans to send poems or short stories in, and he might publish them. That inspired me to start writing poems. I’d write these wee poems, kind of influenced by Wilfred Owen and the war poets. I bought myself a guitar. The first song I wrote was called Valium Families, and it was inspired by The Fall. The only lyric I remember is ‘Valium families sit relaxed.’ I’d never taken Valium, but I knew what it was. I just imagined the scene.

The roots of Primal Scream started with a guy who lived down the street called Jim Beattie. Jim got into punk very early. I think when he was eight or nine, he got his mum to take him to see David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour. He was a couple of years younger than me but he had a guitar and a drum machine. So we used to just sit and play music together. And then we met Robert Young, who lived just a few streets away. Jim’s mother had keys for the Scout Hall so we got in there on a Saturday night. We would just make a noise. I’d get dustbin lids from the bin shed and put them on the parquet floor, and when I hit them with drumsticks, we realised it was a really great sound. And that’s the beginning to Primal Scream right there.

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The breakthrough for us was Loaded [in 1990]. Andy Weatherall remixed our song, I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have. And it became a big hit in the underground, in house music clubs, and then it crossed over, got radio play and we ended up on Top of the Pops, and we had a hit song. It was in the charts for weeks, staying around the higher echelons of the charts. The next single was Come Together and that became a hit as well. That gave us some money to build a little studio in Hackney in London, and that’s where we wrote the Screamadelica album. You know, two songs don’t make a career. You have to have a really great album as well. More than one. 

With addiction you go through stages. In the early stages, everybody’s having fun, everybody’s having a good time and nobody’s getting hurt. Everybody’s just partying. And apart from the comedowns, it’s kind of worth it. But when you get to the middle stages and later stages, it’s not good fun and bad things start happening to people, overdoses… I had friends who died. And you know you’re harming yourself, and you’re harming your relationships with the people that you love. And even your work has been harmed by the addiction. But it’s like you’re possessed by a demon. I’ve seen it in other people, where no matter what you say to them you can’t help them. They’re on the path. They’re on the fucking highway. For me, there were a series of moments where I realised the game was up, and I had to stop. Fortunately for me, my wife is a very strong woman. I had the support of my family, a very strong and loving family, and I had the support of some of the people that I worked with, and I had support from friends. Ultimately I think I’m a strong person. I get that from my father. My father was a stoic. He was an alcoholic, and he was told, if you don’t stop drinking and smoking you’re gonna die. So he stopped. And I thought, well, if my dad can do it, I can do it. 

I’d tell my younger self to give up the drink and drugs earlier but I’m not sure I could have. In my work environment, everybody was an addict. The band and the crew, you know. And certainly in the ’90s, the management. And the friends, and the fucking entourage. It kind of fed the self-perpetuating myth of the band. We were a band that took hard drugs and partied hard and could still pull off a great show. And we’re very much in love with the rock’n’roll myth. In the early days, you take the speed and a couple of drinks and you get this Dutch courage to go and face an audience and go out there and put on a show. And you feel invincible, like a god. Then you’re chasing that feeling for the rest of your life. But I had a young family. And children and hard drugs don’t mix. 

I wrote Ready to Go Home [from the new album] a year or two before my dad was dying in hospital. It was just a song about feeling weary and about acceptance of death. It’s not a depressing song. It’s kind of joyous. I’m at the end of my life, and you know what? I’m OK. I’ve given a good account of myself. I’m just part of the world, a small part of it. So it’s a song of humility and acceptance. I sang it to my dad when he was very ill. He was in a coma. His body had taken over, and he was starting to die. He was on morphine. I kind of knew he didn’t have long to go, and it was just me and him in the room. So I just felt I should sing it to him.

I think the Glaswegian spirit is indomitable. It’s a soul that can never be beaten, that will never give up. And it’s rooted in working-class struggle. The shipyards, the trade union movement, the collectivism, the solidarity. You look at the passion that even the football fans in Glasgow show for the teams, regardless of which side of the sectarian divide. I was in Dortmund when Celtic were beaten 7-1 [in October] and the fans just kept singing to the end.

Primal Scream’s new album Come Ahead is out now.

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