Bobby Gillespie

Robert Gillespie (/ɡɪˈlɛspi/ ghih-LES-pee; 22 June 1961) is a Scottish musician, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He is the lead singer, founding member, primary lyricist, and sole continuous member of the alternative rock band Primal Scream. He was the drummer for The Jesus and Mary Chain in the mid-1980s, leaving after the release of the band's debut album Psychocandy, and was once the bassist for The Wake.

In October 2021, Gillespie published his memoir Tenement Kid.

Born in Springburn and moved to the south side district of Mount Florida in Glasgow aged 10, he attended King's Park Secondary School. His father is Bob Gillespie, a former SOGAT union official and Labour Party candidate in the 1988 Govan by-election, won by the Scottish National Party's Jim Sillars.

Gillespie played drums for the band The Jesus and Mary Chain. Prior to The Jesus and Mary Chain, he worked as a roadie for Altered Images and played bass in The Wake. He was a friend of The Jesus and Mary Chain's bassist Douglas Hart, who asked him 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, 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. He has also said that he played only two drums due to his own lack of ability as a drummer.

Gillespie played on the band's debut LP, Psychocandy, which was released in 1985 to critical acclaim. By this time, he had already released a single, albeit to little attention, with his own band Primal Scream. Throughout his days as a drummer, he had continued to work at Primal Scream, which he had started along with guitarist Jim Beattie in 1982. By early 1986, Gillespie had played his last show with The Jesus and Mary Chain and left to devote his attentions to Primal Scream. The Reid brothers gave Gillespie an ultimatum to abandon Primal Scream or be replaced. He later said, "I never really enjoyed being in Primal Scream ... But the Mary Chain is Jim and William's band and I knew I could express myself better in Primal Scream."

The band signed to Creation Records in 1985, and over the next year, they released a pair of singles. However, Primal Scream did not really take off until the middle of 1986, when Gillespie left the Jesus and Mary Chain and guitarists Andrew Innes and Robert Young joined the band. The B-side "Velocity Girl" wound up on NME''s C86 cassette compilation, a collection of underground pop groups that defined the UK'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 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 1980s 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 reworked the song, adding a heavy bass groove echoing dub, deleting most of the original instrumentation (including 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. "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 worked with Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson, the pair who designed the sound of the album. They also worked with The Orb and former The Rolling 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 favorable reviews in the UK. Released in the spring of 1991, Screamadelica was one of the records credited for bringing techno and house into the pop mainstream.^{[citation needed]} The album was a success, winning the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992.