Bobby Gillespie

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Bobby Gillespie
Bobby Gillespie with Primal Scream at Summercase, 2006.
Background information
Birth name	Robert Gillespie
Born	22 June 1962 (1962-06-22) (age 47) Glasgow, Scotland
Genre(s)	Alternative rock
Occupation(s)	Musician, Songwriter
Years active	1984 - Present
Associated acts	Primal Scream The Jesus and Mary Chain The Wake

Bobby Gillespie (born Robert Gillespie, 22 June 1962, Glasgow)^[1] is a Scottish musician. He is the lead singer and founding member of the alternative rock band, Primal Scream. He was also the drummer for The Jesus and Mary Chain in the mid-1980s.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

From the south side of Glasgow he attended Kings Park Secondary School. His father is Bob Gillespie, former Labour Party candidate in the 1988 Govan by-election, who infamously lost the seat to the SNP's Jim Sillars.^[2]

[edit] Jesus and Mary Chain days

Gillespie first found fame playing drums for the influential East Kilbride band The Jesus and Mary Chain. Prior to The Jesus and the Mary Chain, he worked as a roadie for Altered Images and played bass in The Wake. Gillespie was a friend of Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart, who asked Gillespie to join the band after their original drummer had left following the release of their debut single in 1984. Gillespie's style of drumming was minimal to say the least, with his drum kit consisting only of a snare and a floor tom, which he played standing up; an idea he borrowed from the Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker. This fit the Mary Chain's style, which was drowned in layers of feedback.

Gillespie played on the Mary Chain's classic debut LP Psychocandy, which was released in 1985 to wide critical acclaim. By this time Gillespie had already released a single, albeit to little attention, with his own band, Primal Scream. Throughout his days as a drummer Gillespie had continued to work at Primal Scream, the band he started along with guitarist Jim Beattie in 1982. By early 1986, Gillespie had played his last show with the Mary Chain and left to devote his attentions to Primal Scream.

[edit] Primal Scream

The band signed to Creation Records in 1985, and over the next year, they released a pair of singles. However, Primal Scream didn't really take off until the middle of 1986, when Gillespie left the Mary Chain and guitarists Andrew Innes and Robert Young joined the band. "Velocity Girl," a rush of jangly guitars, was a B-side that wound up on NME's C86 cassette compilation, a collection of underground pop groups that defined the U.K.'s mid-'80s indie pop scene. After the band rejected the initial version of debut album, Sonic Flower Groove, recorded with Stephen Street, they re-recorded the album with Mayo Thompson, and the record was finally released in 1987 on the Creation subsidiary Elevation. The album was well received in the British indie community, as was its 1989 follow-up, Primal Scream, which demonstrated hard rock influences from the Rolling Stones and New York Dolls to the Stooges and MC5.

As the '80s drew to a close, Britain's underground music scene became dominated by the burgeoning acid house scene. Primal Scream became fascinated with the new dance music, and they asked a friend, a DJ named Andrew Weatherall, to remix a track from Primal Scream, "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have." Weatherall completely reworked the song, adding a heavy bass groove echoing dub reggae, deleting most of the original instrumentation (even the layers of guitars), and interjecting layers of samples, including lines of Peter Fonda's dialogue from The Wild Angels. The new mix was retitled "Loaded," and it became a sensation, bringing rock & roll to the dancefloor and dance to rock & rollers. "Come Together," the first single from their forthcoming third album, was in much the same vein, and was similarly praised.

For their third album, Screamadelica, Primal Scream not only worked with Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson, the pair who essentially designed the sound of the album, but also the Orb and former Stones producer Jimmy Miller. The resulting album was a kaleidoscopic, neo-psychedelic fusion of dance, dub, techno, acid house, pop, and rock, and it was greeted with rapturous reviews in the U.K. Released in the spring of 1991, Screamadelica also marked an important moment in British pop in the '90s, helping to bring techno and house into the mainstream. The album was a massive success, winning the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992.

In the wake of the groundbreaking Screamadelica, most observers wondered what Primal Scream would do next, yet few would have predicted their retreat to '70s hard rock for Give Out But Don't Give Up. Released in 1994, the album was eagerly awaited, but its Stonesy hard rock was not well received, and it was a relative commercial failure. More importantly, it hurt the group's reputation as innovators, a situation they reacted to with the title track to the hit 1996 film Trainspotting. Primal Scream's contribution to the soundtrack was a return to the dance stylings of Screamadelica, only darker. The band continued to work on their next album, entitled Vanishing Point, over the course of 1996, finally releasing it to enthusiastic reviews in the summer of 1997. The ultra-aggressive XTRMNTR followed in the spring of 2000. Two years later Primal Scream released Evil Heat, a guest-laden (even supermodel Kate Moss makes an appearance) album in line with XTRMNTR, and in 2006 Riot City Blues came out.

[edit] Personal life

Gillespie married stylist Katy England at St. Margaret's Church, Betley on 29 July 2006. They have 2 children together, Wolf (born in 2002) and Lux (born in 2004).

Bobby Gillespie is a well known supporter of Celtic FC.^[3]

[edit] Controversy

Primal Scream were drafted at the last minute to play The Glastonbury Festival in 2005, as one of the replacements for Kylie Minogue. During the set Gillespie was abusive, making various gestures including a Nazi salute and referred to the crowd as "a bunch of fucking hippies". He also declared that if the crowd wanted to see The Stone Roses reunite that they "should've been here 15 years ago, you lazy bastards". He then accused festival headliners Coldplay of being boring and said that they are the reason why Radiohead are so miserable. The band were eventually removed from stage by security for over running their allotted time. When Gillespie was asked why he acted in this manner, he said: "Some fucking hippie robbed all my ale."

Gillespie was also criticised for defacing a Make Poverty History poster signed by all the acts at the festival. Gillespie scribbled over this and wrote "Make Israel History".^[4] Gillespie later said that he did this in support of Palestine, and when questioned on whether he was anti-semitic, he responded "Because you oppose one country's government's policies doesn't mean to say that you hate all the people from that country."^[4]

Gillespie and Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis have since met and Eavis reportedly brushed off the incident as amusing.^{[citation needed]}

On 7 June 2008 during an interview over the phone with Lauren Laverne for her first ever show on BBC 6 Music (in the afternoon), Gillespie swore several times on air finishing with 'mind your own fucking business!'. Lauren joked that [because of the incident] there wouldn't be a 'show number two'.

Steven Van Zandt, guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and The Sopranos cast member, described Gillespie as a "waste of space" after his attempts to organise a Primal Scream tour of the United States were stymied by Gillespie's drug problems^[5].

[edit] References