Jack White's Third Man Books will be giving U.S. releases to upcoming memoirs from two UK alternative rock legends: Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie's Tenement Kid and Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant's Bunnyman: Post-War Kid to Post-Punk Guitarist of Echo and the Bunnymen. Both will be out this fall.
Here's more on Bobby's book (preorder):
So much more than a rockstar’s memoir, Tenement Kid is also a book filled with the joy and wonder of a rock’n’roll apostle who radically reshaped the future sounds of fin de siècle British pop. Structured in four parts, Tenement Kid builds like a breakbeat crescendo from Gillespie’s working-class Glaswegian upbringing to the “Second Summer of Love” that saw the '80s bleed into the '90s and a new kind of electronic soul music starting to pulse through the Great Britain’s consciousness. In this book, Gillespie takes us through the release of Screamadelica and the tour that followed as Primal Scream become the most innovative British band of the new decade.
Published thirty years after the release of that seminal album, Tenement Kid cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house. It’s a joyful, celebratory, and beautifully written book which will remind us of better times, just—as we hope—those better times might be returning.
And more on Will's (pre-order):
“It is a heady time of power cuts, strikes, flying pickets, bread shortages, skinhead gangs, IRA bomb scares, nuclear war fears, rock gigs, glam clothes, drowned motorbikes, explosives, dead-end jobs and the usual school lessons of chicken strangulation,” Sergeant writes. “With the help of music, I manage to navigate myself through the sinking sand of prog rock and into the safety of punk. My boots still muddy with a bad attitude, I head into the winter of discontent to become a post-punk trailblazer worshipped all over the world as a god. Well? An inventive and influential guitarist of some note at the very least.”
In other news, Bobby Gillespie will release his collaborative album with Savages' Jehnny Beth, Utopian Ashes, on July 2 via Third Man.
