Bobby Gillespie’s Tenement Kid (White Rabbit, £20) takes us from his rough working-class childhood in Glasgow to the release of Primal Scream’s trailblazing acid rock album, Screamadelica, on Sept 3 1991. “For some people, that’s the day the nineties really began,” Gillespie immodestly concludes, in prose so purple it would surely have embarrassed the NME journalists he professes to despise: “It was a mantra of spiritual resistance, an electronic intifada, an analogue bubble bath for the mind and body…” The politics of his trade unionist father suffuse his world view, so that a band is never really a band but “a form of socialism in action” and childhood adventures on bomb site playgrounds are dotted with commentary on imperialism. If it all sounds overblown and ridiculous, well, that is part of the fun. An obsessive music fan who fulfilled his wildest rock star dreams, Gillespie has found an authentic voice to describe his often hair-raising experiences, and the result is a rock ’n’ roll epic.
A similar fandom infuses Stevie Van Zandt’s Unrequited Infatuations (Orion, £20), delivered in punchy sentences peppered with beatnik riffs (“it’s a vagrant winter and you can’t sell consciousness”) and the zippy Italian-American “bada bing” of Silvio Dante, the character he played in The Sopranos. A perennial sideman in his own story, there is a lot to be learnt from his name-dropping adventures as Bruce Springsteen’s consigliere. It is immensely good fun, even as Van Zandt hints at his own unreliability as a narrator. “Who knows?” he says, of Rolling Stone’s report of the exact moment he was recruited to the E Street Band. “We’re all making up half of this s— anyway.”
Dave Grohl may be even better connected than Van Zandt. The Storyteller (Simon & Schuster, £29.99) is peppered with encounters with rock heroes from Iggy Pop to Paul McCartney. Presented as a series of vignettes, it follows the hyperactive Virginian high-school dropout from local punk obscurity to drumming with Nirvana to becoming the charismatic leader of Foo Fighters, arguably the last great stadium rock band. Grohl is an engaging raconteur, but his memoir suffers from his default Tiggerish enthusiasm, bouncing over the dark stuff (Kurt Cobain’s suicide) to celebrate superficial moments (his daughter’s bedtime story). In Grohl’s world, everyone is lovely, and all’s well that ends well.
The great folk rock guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson is less complimentary about his fellow travellers in Beeswing (Faber, £20), which hones in on the years 1967 to 1975 and the struggle to find his voice with Fairport Convention. “The music world is full of a——-s,” he reports, “absolute, arrogant, self-serving d——-s who imagine it all revolves around them.” Which, to be fair, is almost a prerequisite for an entertaining music book.
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