For A.W. and R.Y.
Thanks for the trip

‘When we go onstage, man, it’s a war between us and the audience’

– Robert Young

‘I do not want the world to change, I want to be against it’

– Jean Genet

Part One

(1961–1977)

1.

A Springburn Boy and Proud of It

I grew up in spectral places. My playgrounds were an abandoned locomotive factory, a sprawling graveyard and ghostly streets of evacuated tenements. Springburn was torn down during Edward Heath’s Conservative Government’s ‘slum clearance’ programme of the late sixties; street by street the houses were evacuated, until the district resembled the photographs of German cities bombed by the allies in a World War Two history book my dad owned. It was scary but exciting. It became a wilderness. An older boy would help us break into the boarded-up flats and houses on Vulcan Street. Where once had lived the families of the hated ‘Vulcies’ (our street gang enemies) was now a void. Some people had left behind tables, chairs, beds, there were plates in the filthy sinks, and curtains were left hanging, collecting dust and dirt that would never be cleaned again. It had the feeling of flight and abandonment, as if the former tenants had fled an enemy army. In some ways they had. What had been a thriving working-class community was destroyed and replaced by a motorway.

Whatever happened to those people? What became of them? Where did they go? Here’s what happened to me.

I was born on 22 June 1961 in Rottenrow Maternity Hospital, Cowcaddens, Glasgow, in the heart of the old medieval city. It’s a couple of streets away from Provand’s Lordship, the oldest house in the city, built in 1471, overlooked by the twelfth-century cathedral where the city’s patron saint St Mungo originally built his church. Nearby is the Necropolis cemetery – Glasgow’s Père Lachaise – where the city’s Victorian-era industrialists, sugar merchants and tobacco barons, some of whom made their vast fortunes from slavery, are interred. On top of the highest hill of the Necropolis stands the statue of the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, John Knox; his cold, pious, concrete gaze ever-vigilant, passing judgement on the wanton sinners below. There, also, on Cathedral Square, stands the statue of King William of Orange. My gran told me that drunken Catholics would come to throw bottles at King Billy on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne every summer. Religion, violence and alcohol are inextricable in Glasgow.

The Gaelic translation of Rottenrow is ‘Road of Kings’. It is also traditionally an old English and Scottish street name given to a place where rows of rat-infested cottages once stood. You could say that I was born on a rat-infested road of kings.

I was born a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the year the Berlin Wall went up. My mother, Wilma Getty Gemmell Gillespie, was young when she had me. She told me that she was terrified Russia and America were going to annihilate the entire planet in an apocalyptic nuclear war when I was a baby. I was a child of the Cold War. The paranoia of imminent nuclear annihilation was ever-present in those days. She was twenty-one, and my father, Robert Pollock Gillespie, was twenty-three. They met when they were both working for Collins, the book publishers. Dad was a print labourer and member of the National Union of Printing, Bookbinding and Paper Workers; they were both members of Springburn Young Socialists. Dad was involved in a strike in the late fifties to reduce working hours from forty-five to forty hours per week, essentially introducing the five day week. Until the unions won that dispute employees were expected to work on Saturday mornings as part of the working week. Experiencing the power of class solidarity and the change it could bring politicised Dad. He had joined the army at seventeen – the usual story of a largely uneducated working-class kid with no real prospects being lured into the armed services by the promise of travel and adventure. He was a Lance Bombardier in the Royal Artillery and was stationed in Hong Kong during the Cold War, taking part in reconnaissance missions, positioned high on a mountaintop waiting for Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army to come storming over the mountains. He told me that the army made a man out of him. It also gave him insight into the workings of the British class system. He would entertain my brother Graham and me with tales of his army days: huge barroom brawls with American GIs who the British lads thought were so soft and spoiled they couldn’t fight a war without a Coca-Cola machine on the front line. Dad has the words ‘HONG KONG’ tattooed on his knuckles. He also has a black panther on his upper right arm (imagine my surprise when I saw the same panther tattooed on the upper left arm of my future wife, Katy, in the Hudson Hotel in New York in 2000), a Chinese lady on his upper right arm looking coy behind a fan, and the name ‘Jim Surrey’, his best mate in the army, on his lower left forearm. Back in the fifties, way before the current fashion for tattoos, only soldiers, sailors, Hells Angels, gangsters, criminals, felons and gypsies had their skin pierced by the tattooist’s needle. Tattoos were strictly for outlaws and outcasts, not straights. Tattoos were taboo.

We lived on the third floor of a tenement building in a one-room flat bought for £100 at 35 Palermo Street in the district of Springburn. These flats were known in Glasgow as a ‘single-end’. Ours consisted of one room, with a sink and a cooker. We shared an outside toilet on the landing with two other families. The only vivid memory I have of the single-end was when, still a toddler, I threw a full tin of Heinz baked beans out of the window. My mum was freaked out and rushed over to see if the can had hit anyone, but luckily it was daytime and everyone was at work or school. I just had an overwhelming urge to do it. I think I enjoyed the feeling of being bad. I also noticed the effect it had on my mother. My first ever transgressive act.

My brother Graham was born in 1964, just after we had moved to a slightly larger flat which cost £150 to buy on the landing directly below us, a ‘room and kitchen’. There was a small hall adjoining both rooms. For the first decade of my life I shared a bedroom with my mum, dad and brother. Our parents bedded down together in a recess space, and Graham and I each had a single bed. There was a wardrobe, a tallboy and a wooden box which held our toys and cowboy and fireman outfits. God knows how much extra strain this arrangement put on their marriage. It must have been tough.

In the kitchen–living room there were two abstract watercolours, both painted by an artist friend of my parents, John Taylor. There was also a huge black and white poster of heroic Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, based on that great Alberto Korda photograph, with Che looking totally heroic and hip in his zipped-up army flight jacket, beard and black beret with a star on it, looking to the future with a Christlike gaze. Che was our Jesus, a rockstar revolutionary. Dennis Hopper’s whole sixties image was based on Che, Fidel, and the other bearded Cuban revolutionaries who had successfully expelled the US government and Mafia-backed dictator Batista. They say the Beatles kicked off the sixties but Fidel, Che and the boys beat them to it by three years. We also had a black and white photograph of US Olympic gold medallists Tommie Smith and John Carlos doing the Black Panther raised-arm clenched-fist salute on the winners’ rostrum at the Mexico 1968 Olympics. I remember asking Dad what the guys were doing. Why did they have black gloves on, and why were their fists in the air? He explained to his seven-year-old kid that in the United States those men could not attend the same schools as white people, nor eat in the same restaurants, nor even drink from the same water fountain or sit on the same park bench. Dad also told me the story of how Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, had refused to fight in Vietnam by saying, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.’ My first sporting heroes were Black: Muhammad Ali and Pelé. Sport is an incredible way of breaking down racial prejudice.

The room was sparsely furnished, with only a small couch and one other chair to sit on. There was a desk with Mum’s typewriter sitting on top. She was a shorthand typist and there were always sheets of white A4 paper with the logo of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in the top right corner – a kite-shaped logo with a quartered black and white harlequin design – an organisation that helped bring members of the Asian community in Glasgow into left-wing politics as a pathway to power and influence. Dad was the driving force behind setting this up; the only person in Scotland to do so. We had no bath so Mum would bathe us in the sink. Like in the single-end we shared an outside toilet with two other families. There was a contraption called a ‘pulley’, made of four long pieces of wood held together at each end in a metal frame suspended from the ceiling by ropes on a mechanism. Mum would hang the wet, handwashed clothes up there. There was a bookcase along the length of the wall crammed with Dad’s books. I remember a North Vietnamese flag on display somewhere. We also had a chirpy green and yellow budgie named Jackie.

Music was always playing in our house. Dad ran a folk club called the Midden where people like Matt McGinn and Hamish Imlach started out. I believe Billy Connolly actually paid my dad to play there; by which I mean he came along to watch and asked if he could get up and sing before the main act. Whenever Dad sees Billy at a funeral for an old pal Billy will say, ‘Hey Geggie, remember I sang at your folk club?’ and Dad will say, ‘No, Billy, you paid me to play.’

Radical politics and folk music were intertwined back then, as the centuries-old songs often told stories of proletarian struggle. When you read history you understand that not a lot – in terms of class power and inequality – has changed since the eighteenth century. Dad was a working-class autodidact. His family circumstances meant he hardly went to school. During World War Two he was evacuated to the countryside in Ayrshire, near to where his mother worked in a plutonium factory, part of Britain’s race to create an atomic weapon before the Nazis. His own father was away at war, an infantryman trapped on the beach at Dunkirk with the British Expeditionary Force, bombed by Göring’s Luftwaffe and pounded by Rommel’s Panzers. Dad’s older sister Rosemary more or less brought him up whilst their mother worked. They never had their own place, always renting floor space in the flat of another family. Dad was born into and grew up in real poverty. At one point he became malnourished and was sent to a hospital to be properly fed and built back up to strength again. He told me that he never wanted to see any other kid experience the hunger, pain and humiliating deprivation he’d gone through as a young boy. That’s why he has dedicated most of his adult life to changing society – he truly believes in socialism.

My first memory of recorded sound was on a Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder my parents owned. Dad would record performances at the Midden and he would also borrow records from friends and tape them. Muddy Waters was a favourite of his. He loved to sing ‘Got My Mojo Working’. There is a tape of me somewhere, aged four, recorded on the Philips singing ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles. My very first recording session. The most-played record in our flat in the sixties was Diana Ross & the Supremes’ Greatest Hits on Motown. It had a purple cover with a painting of Diana, Flo and Mary. There was also Ray Charles’ Greatest Hits Volume 2 on the Stateside label with a cool photo of Ray. Dad would play this record a lot. Songs like ‘Take These Chains from My Heart’, ‘Busted’, ‘The Cincinnati Kid’ (from the movie starring Steve McQueen), ‘In the Heat of the Night’ (from a Sidney Poitier movie) and the sad and beautiful ‘Crying Time’. The blues seeped into my soul at an early age and made a deep impression on me. There was a lot of Bob Dylan played in the house. We had the Greatest Hits and Dad loved his The Times They Are A-Changin’ LP with all the protest songs on it. There was Joan Baez, June Tabor and Irish rebel songs by the Dubliners. Mum owned a ten-inch album with a blue cover by Hank Williams titled Moanin’ the Blues which she played a lot. Hank’s voice was like no other. It was hard, serious, pained, and although I was too young to understand what he was singing about, I paid attention when he was on. Mum loved Doris Day. She also had an Elvis single with a picture sleeve that I used to gaze at for ages thinking how beautiful he looked. I later found out it was Suspicious Minds. I would read all the information on those sleeves. I remember a Smokey Robinson live album which had a quote from Bob Dylan proclaiming Smokey to be ‘America’s greatest living poet’.

There were no Beatles records in the house. Mum later told me she never liked them; she preferred the Stones.

My dad had a bookcase which ran the length of the hall stacked with books. He worked at Collins so he could easily source literature. He had Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson – all kinds of classics housed in a uniform green livery, the size of a pocket paperback. They sat on the top shelf of the bookcase. There were radical classics such as Robert Noonan’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (published under the pseudonym Robert Tressell) and Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, the eighteenth-century English radical whose ideas were taken up by both the French and American revolutionaries who also helped to write up the French Constitution. Dad loved both these books and encouraged me to read them when I was a teenager. I never did. I was too busy reading Sounds and NME.

He had a couple of Victorian-era boys’ adventure novels by controversial author G. A. Henty set in Afghanistan, Africa and India during the days of the British Empire. They were published by Blackie & Son and had these cool gold-embossed covers illustrated with tribal warriors. One was called With Clive in India. I guess Dad thought this might be the kind of thing two young boys might want to read. There were photographic military history books and Marxist literature. He had Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Mark Twain, Jack London, a biography of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, and other political books. One book which fascinated me was The Book of American Folk Songs. Here I found ‘The Ballad of Jesse James’ and Joe Hill. The records and books gave me some kind of early cultural reference points. My mind was curious.

We were surrounded by streets of tenements. They were constructed like impregnable medieval forts in a rectangular shape. Our block consisted of four streets: Springburn Road at the top, Palermo Street and Vulcan Street opposite each other and Ayr Street at the bottom.

Each tenement was three storeys high. There was a space outside the flats known as ‘the back’ where the dustbins were kept in the middens. The little brick washhouses where the women used to wash clothes had been boarded up by the time I was born. If you got inside these buildings you would find rusted antique mangles with huge winding handles to wring wet clothes on. There were filthy, cracked sinks too. These were foreboding, forbidden places and we hardly ever dared enter. Dead spaces with strange energy; spirits of the past were trapped there. As a kid I could feel unseen forces in abandoned places.

There was a brick wall that ran the length of the street which divided Vulcan Street from us, with a lane that could be accessed from Ayr Street. The ground was all black dirt with cracked and broken paving stones which would be pulled up and used in fights between a few scattered gangs in rival streets. There was no grass to be seen anywhere, and washing lines full of drying laundry held up by big wooden poles traversed the backs in every street. On a sunny day, women from the upper flats would hang their washing out on V-shaped poles from their back windows. The kids playing out would shout up to their ma for a piece and sugar, two slices of white bread spread with butter or margarine coated in sugar. That kept you going on those long summer days in the sixties.

The flats were accessed by ‘the close’, an open doorway at street level which led into a hallway that went straight through the building into the back. The doors to each flat were on the left and right side of the close and the stairs to the upper levels were broken by a small landing between each floor with an outside toilet.

Springburn was a really vibrant place. I remember the kids hanging outside the pub at the top of the street waiting for the dads to come out at teatime, because the men would finish work knackered and go for a quick drink and a blather with their mates before going home, when the wives would have their tea cooked and ready for them. There’d be men selling the evening Times newspaper, or the pink on a Saturday, which had the football results. I vividly remember coming home from visiting my grandparents in London Road, Bridgton with Mum and Graham in 1971 and seeing the newspaper vendor on Springburn Road outside the pub at the top of our street selling the pink with the headline IBROX DISASTER – 66 RANGERS FANS CRUSHED TO DEATH. Celtic were winning by one goal to nil in the Old Firm derby and the Rangers fans, having given up hope, were leaving in droves. Then, in the very last minute of the game, Rangers centre forward Colin Stein equalised. Those leaving heard a huge roar from inside and tried to get back into the stadium, causing the flimsy metal safety barriers to collapse. Sixty-six people were tragically crushed to death. It had an effect on me, a feeling of dissociation (although I wouldn’t have known to describe it as such at that age). Boys at my school would have been at the match with their dads. Death was real and close; not just something that happened to bad guys in the movies.

The Aberfan mining disaster in Wales had happened a few years earlier; a whole school full of kids the same age as me crushed to death underneath a mountain of coal spoil from the pit nearby. It had been all over the news. This tragedy entered my childhood imagination in a big way. Sometimes when I looked out the classroom window of my school, which was overlooked by a big hill on Hyde Park, I would wonder if a similar thing was going to happen to us.

Springburn Road had lots of shops and it was always very busy. There was a big department store called Hoey’s and a cinema called the Princes on Gourley Street, and every Saturday morning my mum would take me over there and leave me to watch films. They would have matinees – Batman, The Magnificent Seven, and One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch (my first crush, along with Catwoman). It was a magical place always packed with hysterical, screaming kids hopped up on sweets, teenage girls parading around the stalls with trays holding tubs of ice cream. We would all chant ‘COME ON BATMAN! Watch your back!’ like it was a football match and there would be a GOAL!-like cheer whenever he or Robin the Boy Wonder would punch out the Joker or the Riddler. In 1936 the world-famous escapologist Harry Houdini visited the Princes Cinema and did a show there, which would have been a mind-blowing experience for the Depression-battered and culture-starved proletariat of Springburn.

For my sixth birthday I received a Rangers strip from my grandparents. I didn’t even know what football was. I wanted a cowboy or cavalryman outfit. I went up to their flat in London Road (ironically very close to Celtic Park) and they dressed me in this Rangers shirt and I didn’t know what it was. It was the classic 1960s Jim Baxter-era strip – blue jersey with white V-neck, white shorts, black socks with red tops.

Later I knew about football alright.

I was friends with the boys on my street – on my side of the street. Even down to which side of the street you lived on there was territorialism. I never hung out with the guys on the other side. In the next close to me lived a kid called Alex Donnelly, and three closes up lived two brothers, David and Charles. Alex and David were the same age as me, Charles a year or two younger. They were all Celtic supporters, so I became a Celtic supporter because they were my mates. They all had Celtic strips; the 1960s green and white hoops and white shorts with green numbers on (a classic detail) and white socks. I thought it was the coolest strip ever, so fresh, clean and beautiful. Celtic were the best team in the world. This was the era of the legendary Lisbon Lions; the team had recently won the European Cup in Portugal, beating Inter Milan by two goals to one. Jock Stein was the manager and our captain was Billy McNeill. The fans had a nickname for (King) Billy: Caesar. If you look at photographs of him on that glorious May night in Lisbon 1967, holding aloft the European Cup as he stands on the winners’ rostrum in the Stadium of Light, he looks imperious as a Roman Emperor. Hail Caesar!

That Celtic team captured the imagination of street kids like us. The mythology is genius. The whole squad came from within a ten-mile radius of Glasgow except Bobby Lennox, who came from Saltcoats, thirty miles away. In these days of globalised football it could never happen again. Jock Stein believed in a modern, fast, attacking style of football; that when the game was played in the right way it could be a thing of true beauty, a transcendent experience for those watching. Football in the sixties was a very working-class game, and often the only entertainment or culture in the lives of the (mostly) men and boys who attended the matches each week. Jock came from a village in Ayrshire, from a long line of miners, and shared a philosophy with his great friend and fellow shamanic manager, Liverpool’s Bill Shankly, that football was really a form of socialism in action, an example of how eleven individuals can come together and achieve something bigger and more beautiful and powerful as a team, the sum of the parts being bigger than the whole, very much like a rock and roll band. Capitalism is predicated upon the potential gains and riches that await the (extremely lucky) ‘sovereign’ individual. Socialism is about the power of the collective.

There was a battle of light and darkness at play in that Lisbon final. Inter Milan were managed by Helenio Herrera, an exponent of the catenaccio system of football developed in Italy: a defensive style in which you wear your opponent down slowly over the course of the match, blocking and frustrating their every move, ten men behind the ball at all times. It was a negative, almost nihilistic vision of sport as a war of attrition, but the outcome was justified by the success this tactic had brought the great Italian clubs.

Later, in Primal Scream, Jock Stein’s game philosophy played a huge part in how we shaped our attitude to playing and presenting our live shows. We believe that a live rock and roll show should be an assault on the senses, a commando-raid on the soul, a high-energy attack. You’ve gotta come out all guns blazing. Take it to the stage. Lift the people. Take them with you. Make it beautiful and entertaining and deadly all at the same time. Give one hundred per cent every time you play. The fans are rooting for you, and in return you have to give them your all. As Robert Young once said to me, ‘When we go onstage, man, it’s a war between us and the audience.’

We played football in the street, two tin cans from the midden in the back for goalposts. We all wanted to be Jimmy Johnstone or Stevie Chalmers or Bobby Lennox. The first Celtic match I ever saw was the 1970 European Cup final against Feyenoord. I watched it on our black and white telly in the kitchen. The image was washed out, almost distorted. In those days worldwide sporting events like Muhammad Ali’s boxing matches and football finals in foreign countries would be beamed into British homes via satellite; the quality was always poor, flickering in and out of focus, which gave it a kind of ghostly quality. Everyone had black and white TVs in those days. No one had colour on our street. We had two channels: BBC and STV (Scottish Television). My friend in the next close had BBC2 which showed a Western programme that I loved called The High Chaparral. I pleaded with Mum to get BBC2 but it cost extra on the TV licence.

One day in the summer holidays I went out to play with my friends David and Charlie on the street. Everything was cool, then things got out of hand and they both started beating me up. I was shocked and traumatised, because these guys were my friends, and I totally trusted them. This was the first time anything like this had ever happened to me. I went home in tears. My mum asked me what had happened and when I told her she grabbed me and marched me up the street. She said, ‘Right, you’re gonna fight both of them.’ I was screaming in fear all the way. She took me up to their close where they were sat on their doorstep. I was crying, and she said, ‘Fight him first. Fight him! Fight him! Or else you’re getting it.’

I was terrified. Terrified of both him and my mum. I didn’t want another ‘doing’ (Glaswegian for a beating). I was still crying with fear, rage and skin-stripping, nerves-exposed humiliation from my earlier street encounter with them but I had no choice. It was either fight them of face the fury of my mum. I launched myself at David, the older brother, aiming a flurry of weak punches at his head until it banged against his front door. He didn’t put up a fight, just stood there and took my blows without any retaliation. His little brother, Charles, was freaking out in silent terror, his eyes grown large and frozen with the dread of imminent violence as my mum stood guard on the tenement landing. Revenge had to be taken. There was no escape for any of us.

It wasn’t a fair fight by any means because the presence of my mum meant that David hardly fought back. Then it was Charles’s turn to get hit around the head to salvage my family’s wounded pride. Once both had been reduced to tears Mum was satisfied and dragged me away back down the stairs of the close, down the street and back up to our flat. It was a traumatising experience for me and I’m sure it was for them. They never bullied me again.

Now, I have never been a great fighter, physically speaking. I’m a coward when it comes to real hand-to-hand violence, I’d rather run than fight … leave that stuff to the total bams and the headcases. I’m a skinny guy, there’s not much muscle on me, and I’m a ‘lover, not a fighter’ as the old cliché goes. Instead I learned to defend myself with words, ideas and humour, not fists and boots. Still, my mum taught me a very important lesson that day: to stand up for myself and not be afraid of confrontation. It’s stood me in good stead all down the years. Thanks, Mum.

I remember my mum leaving me on my first day of primary school. It was bewildering to be in a playground and classroom with a load of strangers. What unsettled me most was the fact that none of my friends from Palermo Street were there. When I came back home that first day I asked my dad why Alex, David and Charles weren’t at school. My dad explained to me that they went to a different school, that I went to a Protestant school (though it was actually non-denominational, because Sikhs, Muslims and Jews could go there too) and the Breslin brothers and Donnelly went to a Catholic school. That was my first experience of the poison of Scottish sectarianism. It was bitter. ‘Why is it like this?’ I said to him. I felt the wrongness of it. And he said, ‘Yes, it is wrong.’ He explained in simple terms the stupidity and injustice of the situation, so that I as a five-year-old kid could understand. He could see that I was deeply upset.

Up until that day I had no idea what religion was. My parents were both socialists and although later on I found out that my grandparents, uncles and aunties on my mother’s side had all been members of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland back in the thirties – an organisation that promotes Protestantism, Unionism and loyalty to the British Crown – it never had any influence in our house. My mum had been a member when she was younger but gave it up when she met my dad.

When I think about it now it’s funny. Round Alex Donnelly’s they had a framed picture of Pope Paul VI hanging on the wall above the fireplace. I’d go into other kids’ houses and their parents would have a picture of HRH Queen Elizabeth II. We had Che Guevara and the Black Panthers. Thank fuck.

After that first day, I used to go to school on my own. I walked there and back, even in the winter, when you’d go to school in the dark and come home in the dark. When it snowed the contrast of walking on a carpet of pure white, untrodden fresh snow, against the deep, dark velvet shades of the bluish-black, low Scottish sky was beautiful. I remember feeling excited. The school was only a couple of streets away, a fifteen-minute walk. Still, at age five it’s quite wild, an adventure in the snow.

There was a huge abandoned factory at the bottom of my street, the Cowlairs Works. At one point in the early twentieth century a quarter of all locomotive steam trains in the world were manufactured in Springburn. During the days of Empire there had been a lot of train industry, the factories and workshops providing valuable work for the people of the district. By the time I came along the area was well into the first stages of post-industrial decline. The factory ran alongside the length of the tracks coming out of Springburn railway station where we would play chicken on the lines. We’d stand there on the sleeper in the middle of the tracks and we’d see who’d jump off first when the train was coming, last guy being the winner. I always won. I loved it.

Springburn Engineering College was on Flemington Street and beside the college there was a whisky-bottling factory, and another factory next door to that which had been recently demolished. It looked like it had been hit in a bombing raid, exactly like the photos you see now of the buildings in Aleppo after Assad’s and Putin’s boys have dropped their murderous hellfire. Huge slabs of concrete converging at strange angles, as if a motorway flyover had collapsed at rush hour. There were rusted red spears of metal protruding from the slabs that had held up the floors where people had once worked. These spears jutted out of the collapsed concrete slabs here and there in twisted agony, as if held vainly by warriors in an ancient battle.

That’s the kind of place we used to play in. It was dangerous and exciting and there were never any adults about, just you and your imagination. It was reminiscent of the Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man, a science fiction story set in the future in which Charlton is one of the only people still alive in in a city that has been destroyed in a nuclear war. He spends the whole movie fighting for his life against legions of rabid, zombie-like, bomb-damaged street survivors. A dystopian classic for a little kid to enjoy.

One summer day when I was eight or nine I was on my own in the demolished factory. My dad was on nightshifts, so he was sleeping, and my mum was out working. I was playing, possibly imagining I was Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare, and I slipped. My right leg was trapped between two huge slabs of broken concrete. As I tried to pull my leg out I ripped the flesh on my upper thigh wide open on one of the rusted metal spears jutting out of the concrete. I thought I was gonna die. I’d never seen that much blood before for real (only in war movies), nor felt such searing pain. The sanctity of my body had been violated for the first time and I had no way to deal with the shock.

I managed to pull my leg out and started walking home, bleeding badly. I kept thinking I was going to die. Luckily, some friends found me limping down the street, and carried me the rest of the way home. I woke my dad up by banging at the door, and he took me to the hospital where I had thirteen stitches. The doctor was this very calm and handsome guy, he looked like Sidney Poitier. He could see I was in a state so he calmed me down and stitched me up real good and that was that. Thirteen stitches when you’re that age is a big deal. For one thing, your legs are tiny so the stiches look enormous. There’s a psychic scar from the trauma as well as a scar on your skin. Both are there forever. A couple of weeks later we went back to get the stitches out and it was a different doctor. I remember saying, ‘I want the Black doctor, I want the Black doctor! I like that guy!’

Not long after, I had another accident. I fell off some pallets at the whisky-bottling factory. I used to climb over the perimeter fence and get up onto these disused pallets stacked twenty feet high. I’d jump between the pallets, on my own, thinking I was Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. I fell off and had five stitches in the left side of my head.

When I was eight or nine, I got run over by a car in Flemington Street. A girl from my class teased me about something. I got angry and she started laughing at me, so I chased after her, past the lollipop man who marshalled the busy street, and as she reached the pavement on the other side I was hit by a white Mini Cooper, went flying up in the air and lost consciousness. I woke up to a scene from a film where I was surrounded by ambulance men and a circle of nosy schoolkids (and the lollipop man) plus the worried student from the tech college who’d been driving the Mini. I was driven up to Stobhill Hospital in the ambulance. My leg had been badly bruised and I was concussed from banging my head on the road. It could have been worse. I was very lucky. That was an augury of things to come. I was to find out that chasing girls can be a dangerous and life-changing thing.

Consensual reality can be boring and growing up where I did there were not a lot of amenities available to us. We had no football pitches, and the only playgrounds with swings and roundabouts were up in Springburn Park which was too far away to go on your own. Mostly we played in the street or in Hyde Park after school using coats for posts. I would break into the condemned locomotive works in Ayr Street and shin up the pipes on the wall at the side of the building and crawl along the girders high up beside the glass roof. The girders were about forty or fifty feet above the concrete floor and if I’d fallen there would have been no one to help me because I always went there on my own and never told anyone where I was going. Mum never asked and I didn’t know myself ahead of time. I’d just go out for the afternoon and see where my walkabouts would take me. You never knew who you would bump into on the street. Each day was different. As kids we have no real sense of time; we are constantly living in the moment. That power of The Now was something I would seek out later in life. I enjoyed the fantasy world. I imagined I was starring in an adventure movie. Breaking into that factory I was a commando on a dangerous mission into enemy territory. It gave me a feeling of freedom.

Life was good. Those Springburn streets were golden. We owned them. I never saw the cracks in the concrete pavements. They were open prairies that cowboys and Indians and the US cavalry would ride and fight on, or they were the racetrack at Le Mans. I’d seen the trailer for the Steve McQueen film of the same name at the cinema and imagined I was Steve on my chopper bike (mine wasn’t a Raleigh chopper but a cheap copy with an electric-blue spangly plastic seat, like those beautiful lurex Teddy Boy jackets that Kings Road designer Kenny McDonald made for PiL that I would admire a few years later). I would ride a non-stop circuit up to the top of Palermo Street, turn the corner into Springburn Road then down Vulcan Street and across Ayr Street back to Palermo Street, imagining I was McQueen in Monaco in his racing car.

Towards the end of the sixties all my friends began to leave the street. It was the beginning of the dreaded slum clearance programme coming to Springburn. I was far too young to understand. All I knew was that one day you’d be out on the street and your friends would have gone, disappeared. Because there were no kids left to talk to or play with on the street, I moved into my head and stayed there. It felt good and it felt safe. I dared myself to do things, like jump off the walls in the backyard onto other adjoining walls or middens. These were all about eight foot high. I once climbed the scaffolding attached to Springburn Tech and attempted a Tarzan jump between metal poles which were about six feet off the ground and six feet apart. I fell and banged my head on the concrete a few times but I was determined to prove to myself that I could do it so kept at it, pumped up on adrenaline, until I successfully caught the opposing pole.

We used to play this game called ‘Best Man Falls’, where one kid would stand on top of a midden and the guy on the ground would say, ‘How do you want to die?’ The kid on the wall would either ask for a hand grenade, a bomb, a knife or machine gun and then the kids on the ground would mime the action of throwing a knife or firing a gun and the kid would have to fall as if he’d been shot or blown up from the dyke or midden onto either an old mattress we’d found dumped in the back or a few pieces of cardboard sourced from the bins. Sometimes the mattress or cardboard would be pulled away from under you just as you fell and you would hit the cold hard dirt. We also played a game called ‘Borstal’. Ten kids would each get an individual letter which together made up a secret word. They would all disperse around the surrounding streets and one guy (the Borstal Governor, or Chief Screw) would go hunting the ‘escaped’ kids down. Each kid that was caught would take a beating until they gave up their letter. Then they would help the Governor to hunt down the rest until he had enough letters to guess what the secret word was. I always told them my letter. No point in taking a beating for a stupid game, I thought to myself.

We were all mostly latchkey kids with both parents working. I learned how to climb up drainpipes, and could climb into somebody’s first-floor window and open the door. It felt really good. I dug the idea of being a cat burglar dressed in a black polo neck and looking cool like David McCallum’s character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Illya Kuryakin.

I put myself in danger a lot. I was always drawn to transgression. You don’t know the word transgressive as a child but you do feel the compulsion to do dangerous things. Looking for kicks. Cheap thrills. Sometimes I fantasised about being a stuntman. How cool would that be? You get to drive fast cars over cliffs and bridges, get into fights and always win! I remember flying off a midden wall when I was twelve, during the summer holidays, headfirst into the concrete, at the back of the tenement. I broke both my wrists. I had stitches in my head. I couldn’t even wipe my own arse. It was at the start of the summer so I had to go the whole of the holidays with both wrists in plaster.

Other times, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was born in 1961, the same year Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. I loved that fact: me and Yuri sharing a moment in history. Mum gave me a stamp album with a lot of real Soviet-issue stamps featuring Yuri’s face and a rocket in different colours, like a Warhol. Later in life, with the help of psychotropic drugs, I would become a cosmonaut of inner space.

My dad took me to the cinema most weekends, to the Odeon in Renfield Street, or Eglinton Toll in the Gorbals which had the biggest cinema screen in Europe. Years later Primal Scream played down the road from there, at the Bedford Cinema, now the Carling Academy, and Shane McGowan joined us to sing ‘Born to Lose’ by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. I remember my dad and Shane sharing jokes in the dressing room after the show.

As well as movies like The Great Escape and Where Eagles Dare, Dad would take me to see historical dramas like Waterloo with Christopher Plummer, Young Winston starring Simon Ward, and Cromwell, a film about the English Civil War starring Richard Harris and Alec Guinness as Charles I. I loved The Magnificent Seven. We all wanted to be Yul Brynner, the leader of the Seven, a cool, calm, cold and calculated gunman, dressed from head to toe in black. I remember Dad taking me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Shalako, a Western starring Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot and Honor Blackman. A scene in this film burned itself into my pre-pubescent mind: the stagecoach carrying Blackman and the other rich white colonists is held up by the Apaches, and they choke Blackman to death by forcing her to swallow handfuls of sand and the string of pearls she is wearing. The image of Blackman lying on her back on the desert sand, her hair tumbling down in a mess after being proudly stacked up high in a bouffant and her breasts bursting out of her white bustier stayed with me.

On Gourlay Street there was a shop selling comics and toys. I used to buy DC and Marvel comics there, the first things I read passionately. Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, the Thing, Fantastic Four, Thor. Stan Lee was a god. That guy brought happiness into the lives of countless kids like myself and helped us imagine ourselves out of our humdrum working-class lives and into other universes. I used to buy these other comics about Lord Carnarvon the Victorian explorer, the guy who went to the pyramids and ransacked the graves of kings and queens, the mummies and other treasures of Ancient Egypt, bringing back the booty from conquered, non-white, pagan, so-called primitive civilisations. The British upper classes and their lower-class foot soldiers raped, plundered and pillaged every place on the map of the world that they conquered. Dad said he remembers his teacher pointing out all the countries coloured in pink on a map of the world and proudly announcing, ‘See that little island here?’ (pointing to the UK with his teaching stick) ‘We rule all of these countries.’

The first time my dad saw me on stage was at the Church of Pentecost up the top of our street. Mum used to leave me there sometimes; she had attended Sunday school when she was young, and thought it was the correct thing to do. It’s weird when I think about it now, because they were both atheists and socialists, but at the church there was this thing for children called the Band of Hope, a Christian charity set up in Victorian times to educate working-class children about drug and alcohol abuse. I guess it was like free childcare. Dad said one day he was out in the street looking for me, it must’ve been teatime, and when he asked around the kids told him I was up the Band of Hope. When Dad walked in the first thing he saw was me up on stage singing the hymn ‘My Cup is Full and Runneth Over’. That was my first gig. Aged five. At church. A temperance society. Singing the gospels. Oh, the irony! I got the blues. Fuck you.

The people who ran the Band of Hope were nice. They gave you a cup of tea and a biscuit. It was somewhere for us kids to hang out when there was nothing else happening on the street. Another place we would go was the Springburn Library on Ayr Street. Dad always encouraged me to read. He had experienced next to no education but he had enjoyed reading Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe when he was a kid and he wanted me to experience the stimulation of imagination that literature brings. There was an adult section which was quite serious, people would be in there reading and it was very well-kept. The librarians weren’t to be messed with. I guess I just went in and looked at kids’ books. Sometimes it was just a place to escape to that was not the street.

Just around the corner from the library on Vulcan Street there was a storefront church at ground level. Next door to that was a bookies, like a hole in the wall with no signage above it – a working-class bookies, not a bright, multicoloured, modern-style Ladbrokes or anything. We’d always see tired and beaten old men hanging out near the dark doorway, betting away their wages or dole money on fading dreams of winning horses. It’s a fixed game and they all knew it, but that didn’t stop them going back every other day to try it all over again. Addiction. Compulsion. Boredom. The storefront church had a Hammond organ in it, with all the stops and stuff to change the sound. A prim middle- aged lady would play it. I loved the sound she got out of the organ. There was something calming about it. Sometimes during school holidays we would go in and listen to the people singing their hymns. I always dug that and I was always respectful of other people’s faith. I remember finding it fascinating – all these strangers singing hymns, standing together with a commonly held belief in something bigger and more powerful than themselves, a belief in a god. My family never attended church. Still, in the not-too-distant future I would find myself again singing hymns, but not as a believer.

Eventually, when I was nine or ten, I had to go to church for real because my school didn’t have a football team and I was desperate to play. I joined the Boys’ Brigade just so I could get in the team. But to get in, you had to go to church every Sunday, to Bible class. I had to learn the New Testament – a kids’ version of the New Testament – and pass a test. I did really well at it. But all of this was just to get in the football team. My dad was cool with it even though he was a Marxist.

My parents were members of the International Socialists, or the ‘IS’ as it was known. They had meetings in a hall not far from our flat in Springburn. I was going to demonstrations from day one. There’s a photo of me as a baby in Dad’s arms on a May Day march in Queen’s Park in 1962. My mother made the banner for the Springburn Young Socialists to take on marches. It was red with their name in white writing on it. Mum and a friend knocked it up on her sewing machine in our single-end flat on Palermo Street.

One of the members of Springburn YS in the picture with Dad was a teenager named Stuart Christie who had heard my dad speak on a street corner. Dad told him about the weekly YS meetings and invited him along. Stuart left the YS after a while because they were not revolutionary enough for him, so he joined an anarchist group. He believed that only direct action (not parliamentary politics) would lead to true, revolutionary change in society. Stuart was arrested in Madrid in July of 1964 in possession of explosives, with the intention of blowing up the fascist dictator General Franco. He faced the death penalty but in the end was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Dad and other friends protested outside the Spanish Embassy in Glasgow on Stuart’s behalf – footage of them burning the Spanish flag was shown on local TV. Stuart was released after three years in Franco’s prisons, during which time he made contact with Spanish anarchists. My parents remained in touch with him until he died in 2019.

Dad was always saying, ‘You’ve gotta read, you’ve gotta read.’ As I say, he never really went to school, because of the circumstances he grew up in. He was a feral kid on the streets, living in the Kingston district right next door to the Gorbals, close to the shipyards which had been bombed by the Germans during the war. Glasgow and Clydebank were bombed heavily by the Luftwaffe.

When he did go to school, my dad had a bad time of it. Teachers would humiliate him because he would be wearing rags, no underpants, holes in the arse of his trousers, and the teacher would parade him in front of the whole class, compare him to the best-dressed boy, point at the holes in his trousers then make him stand in the corner facing the wall and encourage the class to laugh at him. Making fun of an impoverished child. Imagine how that felt, for him. His sister Rosemary was responsible for looking after him and bringing him up. They had nowhere of their own to stay. They were staying in other people’s tenement flats, paying for lodging and sleeping on the floor of somebody else’s bedroom. When she was sixteen – quite a bit older than him – she got a job in another town, so he was left to his own devices and he lived on the streets for a while. He missed a lot of school. He told me that when he was evacuated to the countryside, he went and sat by the river in the woods, picked berries and felt like Tom Sawyer. He loved Huckleberry Finn. It helped him dream his way out of his disadvantaged situation. That’s the power of art.

My dad didn’t have much of an education, so he had to educate himself. He loved Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. I remember him saying to me when I was about eight or nine, ‘Whatever you want to do, if you want to go to art school, study art or be a musician, I’ll pay for lessons.’ But at that age I didn’t really know what the fuck he was talking about. I remember him taking me to a local art class and it was a bit dry. I just wanted to be outside playing with my mates, climbing, fighting, playing football.

Dad told me he’d go to the cinema when he was a kid, and they’d show two or three films – a matinée and then a main film. These films that he watched, the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton, some of the big Hollywood films like Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon with stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and gangster movies starring Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft, would take him away from the pain and squalor of living in poverty as a child, transport him to another world. He was trying to give me that same experience by taking me to the cinema every week. It was a really good thing to do, passing that culture on to me, and I’m grateful to him. He wasn’t really into football. He liked it but couldn’t take it seriously. Other kids’ dads would take them to see Celtic and Rangers, but my dad wasn’t into that.

One of the warmest memories of my childhood in Palermo Street was when my dad brought home a copy of Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’. Graham and I both loved it whenever it came on the radio, both of us laughing at the story of a boy whose father had given him a girl’s name. When you’re a little kid, stuff like that is funny. In these days of ‘intersectionality’ anything goes, and so it should, but this was the mid-1960s.

Dad came home one day and said, ‘I’ve got a surprise for you boys, close your eyes.’ He then put on the seven-inch single with the burnt orange CBS label (I can still see it in all its glory in my mind’s eye) on the family ‘radiogram’ and played it loud. When the music came through the speakers Graham and I were ecstatic, roaring with laughter as the Man in Black spun his tale of a sad and angry abandoned boy and his unfortunate childhood made hell by his hapless, wastrel father. Eventually the narrator gets to meet ‘the son of a bitch who named me Sue’ and they finally face each other down in the final verse of the song amid the throes of blood-splattered inter-familial violence. It’s all told with Cash’s genius talent for storytelling and humour and pathos mixed with vulnerability and toughness.

Dad then flipped the record and played the ‘B’ side, San Quentin, which Graham and I grew to love as much as ‘A Boy Named Sue’. This was the very first rebel song I ever consciously listened to. Johnny assumes the character of an inmate at the legendary San Quentin prison. Cash’s voice boomed out from the speakers filling up the space of our small living room with a low and threatening rumble. If God had a voice, I thought, it would sound like this: a dread rolling thunder old testament righteous sound, commanding us to listen to his story. We were held rapt under his spell; two little kids enjoying music with their dad is a deep bonding experience.

Graham and I loved it when Johnny sang, ‘San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell.’ I didn’t know much about the world at the age of eight but I did understand that the message here was that Johnny Cash was taking the side of the prisoners – the unwanted and most despised people in society – and taking a stand against the prison wardens. Johnny was singing on behalf of society’s downtrodden, the outcasts. When I became a teenager I realised that Johnny Cash was a bit of an outlaw himself. His show of empathy and solidarity with felons in San Quentin had been no hollow showbiz gesture but a real identification with men from the same background as him. We asked Dad to play us both sides of the record again that afternoon. Graham and I were both lost in music, captivated.

My dad also introduced us to the joys of the Marx Brothers movies and many a Saturday afternoon was spent with the three of us falling off the settee onto the carpet, our faces wet with tears of joy, our bodies convulsed in fits of hilarity, shaking so hard that I thought I was going to die of laughter as the anarchic antics of Groucho, Chico and Harpo exploded onto out little black and white TV screen, transforming our tiny tenement into a theatre of pleasure and mirth. Films such as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races and Horse Feathers poked fun at the absurdity of the world and made nonsense of consensual reality. Shane MacGowan once said to me, when I asked him about politics, that ‘the world is just one big Marx Brothers movie’. Shane may well have been correct about that. If all the world is one big lunatic asylum and we are the inmates but most of us don’t realise the fact that we are merely minor actors in a movie that someone else is directing to our misfortune and their benefit, then it takes a genius like Karl or Groucho Marx to point out the scam that has taken us for fools. In our house Groucho was equally as important as Karl. Without fun and dancing, what was the point of revolution?

In the early seventies we had this car, a beautiful dark green Vauxhall Viva. It had a cassette player too and Dad would play Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Glen Campbell’s ‘Where’s the Playground Susie’. That’s when I first heard the Rolling Stones, in that car. He also had Charley Pride, a Black country singer, and I remember hearing ‘Streets of Baltimore’. When I got older, Gram Parsons did another version I love. It’s a beautiful song. I heard a lot of music in that car. I thought it was really glamorous. Later, when we moved to Mount Florida, Dad had a Ford Capri, the same colour as Man City’s strip, sky blue. That was glamorous as well. I guess they were the British version of American muscle cars.

My parents knew a lot of musicians. They often had parties, and of course we could hear them because we were just in the next room. Sometimes I remember the parties ending in an argument, and a big scene.

There was a lot of arguing between my parents at this point. Really bad arguments. It accelerated when my dad got his job with the union when I was seven or eight. He wasn’t much of a drinker before that, but when he became a union official, got out of the factory, and rose up through the ranks of the union he started drinking. He eventually became Branch Secretary for the west of Scotland for the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades, or SOGAT. They were a very powerful union in the country, especially on Fleet Street at the time. With the better job came more pressure. He wouldn’t finish at five o’clock. He gave his life to the struggle of the Labour movement and he sacrificed a lot of time he might otherwise have devoted to his family. It wasn’t just a job, for him, it was a vocation, a cause, a struggle. He was a very well-respected man in the Labour movement. People like Daily Mirror journalist and Private Eye columnist Paul Foot would come and stay with us in the sixties when we lived in Palermo Street. He even kindly helped us with the loan of some money to buy the room-and-kitchen, according to Mum. Dad knew Arthur Scargill, leader of the NUM, and Mick McGahey, the Communist leader of Scottish Miners, was a close friend too. He knew future Chancellor and Prime Minister Gordon Brown; both were comrades in the Scottish Labour movement pre-New Labour. Socialism was what defined him; it gave him an identity and a sense of purpose in life, strength and pride, a sense of self-worth.

When I was a kid I worshipped my dad. Before the age of ten, I didn’t really know the importance of his job. I remember he had the night shift, then day shift, then suddenly he was wearing suits. I thought he looked great. He would wear brightly coloured off-the-peg suits, probably from Burton the tailors, and always a white shirt with a wide, striped kipper tie. He was flash. When you see men in business suits they always choose dull, drab colours – dark greys or black, but Dad was rock and roll. He later told me with a sly smile on his face that when he went in to negotiate with an employer he was representing the working class and it was essential he looked sharper than the class enemy. He had an office on Hope Street, across from Glasgow Central Station. I remember visiting that office a few times. It felt very important. There were some lovely Victorian-era red sandstone buildings which had become blackened over time on Hope Street, right in the centre of Glasgow. The nearby Station Hotel is where Bob Dylan stayed on his ’66 tour.

Unfortunately, some of my most vivid memories of that flat in 35 Palermo Street are the many late-night arguments between my mum and dad. There were times when he would come home near midnight, causing her to rise from bed and go into the living room-kitchenette, and the angry noise would begin. My little brother Graham and I would be woken up by the shouting and we would both hide under our blankets, scared in the dark. I asked Dad about this stuff in later life and he told me these incidents almost always happened after he’d put in a long day at work and had gone straight from his office to hosting the monthly SOGAT branch meeting at the trade union centre. It was a very boozy, macho culture and he said he would be so stressed and wired on adrenaline that he didn’t want to go straight home, but needed to unwind first. I remember my mother threatening to leave and coming into our bedroom, turning on the light and demanding that my brother and I choose between them. Would we leave with her or stay with him? Dad would say that she shouldn’t treat us like human tennis balls to be smashed back and forth over a metaphorical net between two sides, battling for our loyalty. That is not a choice to present to crying six- and nine-year-old children at midnight, or any time. Graham and I were torn. We didn’t want to leave home with Mum, we wanted her to stay with us and Dad. We loved our parents and hated the idea of our family unit, the bedrock that gave us our identity and strength, breaking up. Even at that age I had a strong belief in family. It is all you know and when that is threatened, everything you believe in just shatters. It’s as if your faith has been attacked, and you collapse. As a child you haven’t yet built the necessary psychological and emotional defences to deal with such trauma. It’s a powerful thing, the threat to the feeling of security in someone so young. You never really recover from it and you carry the feelings of upset and familial destruction with you throughout your life. It affects the life choices you make and every single relationship you ever have.

I fucking hated every second of these midnight arguments, and I quickly learned to dissociate in these situations; a therapist later said to me that when I did this my breaths were so short it was as if I wasn’t breathing, as if I was already dead. This comes from not wanting to be noticed, not wanting to be in the line of fire. There are poisonous wells of anger and resentment buried deep in many people who on the surface seem really nice, pleasant and well-mannered when they are out in the world, but are revealed only to their closest family members and the ones they love. People can wear many masks. Even one’s parents.

Though my parents’ marriage was turbulent, Dad was generally a very laid-back character. He was never violent, and his way of disciplining us was to make us stay at home. It was a much more effective form of punishment – looking out the window and seeing the other kids playing in the street on a warm summer’s day was torture. Mum had more of a temper and could be prone to an emotional outburst. They were deeply unhappy in their marriage but did their best for us.

I began to question the world and other people from a young age. I suppose that gave me a sense of emotional distance, a lack of trust in future friendships and relationships; I would assume a friendly and open manner, a cloak of safety. The price you pay is a fear of commitment and all the loneliness that entails. I was quietly angry, always have been. I still feel it, but I’m working on it. If you’re anything like me you have to recognise this well of poison that we carry, isolate the reason why we’re always ready to spring up like a cobra and bite at any time, any place, anyone. Unless you deal with it you will always repeat the same disastrous mistakes. You’ve got to confront your demons. Those painful childhood memories we bury, that some of us try and drown out with sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, all the usual crutches and distractions. These childhood experiences are going to be really painful to engage with, no one wants anyone else to be exposed to their deepest, darkest, most shameful secrets, but unless these issues are talked about they can never be defeated, and you will never be at peace with yourself or anyone else. You have one day got to face that shit head-on and defeat it. Believe me.

Anger at home, anger in the streets, anger in the classroom, anger on the football terraces, anger at work, anger at teenage discos, anger, anger, anger. Anger in me. Anger is an energy, as John Lydon says.

I think my mother wanted more out of life than being a housewife, perhaps to be creative and make things. I remember her wearing an Indian sari to go to the Sikh Temple in the sixties. She was the one who would decorate the house, strip the walls, paint them, put up the new wallpaper, and she did that in every house we ever lived in. She was artistic. She would make clothes for me and for herself on the sewing machine. She made me a Spider-Man costume, an all-in-one bodysuit with a mask, somehow having managed to find this red fabric with a webbed print on it. She also made me a great Captain Scarlet outfit using duffle-coat toggles as epaulettes. I loved it. In my teenage years, as I was attempting to make sense of my family’s emotional tensions, I came to realise she was frustrated with her situation and her marriage. Maybe they’d fallen out of love. Perhaps that happened early on, or maybe it was the pressures of life and the responsibility of bringing up a young family.

Before I was ten my mother could sometimes be hard on me. But her family history is complicated. Her mother had four children. Two of them died in infancy; the older sister Jessie died when she was twenty of TB, and her father left her mother and then came back. My mother was a result of the father coming back. For her whole life, and in the eyes of her own mother, my mum was never good enough, because she couldn’t live up to her big sister Jessie, this sister who I don’t think she ever knew. By all accounts she was a beautiful girl, very pretty, and my grandmother’s favourite. My mum was brought up hard, as was the way with Glasgow’s working class.

I knew Mum wasn’t so happy, and something wasn’t right between my parents. The arguing carried on, from Springburn, when I was a kid, all the way through to when I was a teenager living in Mount Florida. It just got worse. When I was a teenager I started to think about how dedicated Dad was to the struggle for working-class rights. He had devoted his life to the Labour cause fighting inequality and that’s fucking great. I was proud of him. But what about women? He was out fighting the cause, and my mother was at home running the house. Where do women stand in the revolution? I’d seen Paine’s Rights of Man on his bookshelf. I wondered to myself, what about the rights of women?

It sounds like I’m making excuses for him, but it was the seventies and feminism hadn’t yet made a deep impact on the Labour movement. Dad was born in the thirties like most of his comrades, and they had all been brought up in an environment where the men went out to work and the women stayed at home and looked after the kids, cooked and cleaned the house. I kind of became a feminist from an early age, even though I wasn’t aware of the feminist movement in any way. I admired my mum a lot. In her own quiet way she was a fighter. Dad was a charismatic guy, a big personality, a raconteur, so she would be overshadowed by him at times. He was also quite an imposing man physically: broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, striking and handsome with a great head of hair. Mum was a housewife during the day and went out to work at night. She took a job as a barmaid in a trade union club. I suspect my dad didn’t like the fact she was working in the bar where he was a regular.

I carried a lot of shame because my parents were fighting. You think something is wrong with you because your parents don’t get along. I think this darkness seeped into my consciousness. You don’t talk about this stuff with anyone as a kid, you hold it in. You go to school and think everybody else’s family is normal. You bear a lot of shame and pain, and you don’t know what to do with it, you don’t recognise it as such – you bury it deep, but it comes out later on in life in many different ways. It grows, like Blake’s poison tree: ‘And I water’d it in fears …’

I had an anger from an early age. It comes from home, and it comes from Glasgow. It comes from having to be wary about what street you walked down, where you could go and where you couldn’t go. Not very far from the cinema, maybe half a mile or less, there were places called Possilpark and Maryhill, and they were just scary. We travelled through them on the bus sometimes and they looked grim: bleak and unforgiving places where the kids – girls and boys – had a permanently hostile look on their faces, and the dogs, normally underfed, wolflike Alsatians never on a leash or collar, looked ready to sink their rabid, yellowy fangs into trespassing strangers. Springburn seemed a lot safer by comparison. Still, if somebody asked you to fight them, you’d have to fight them. If you didn’t fight you’d get bullied. The older you were the more of a target you became.

In those days, if you stuck to your street and the street either side of you, you were OK, up to a point. If you went beyond that, you could get beaten up by kids your own age, or the teenagers in gangs. The local gang was called the Bison. I remember seeing the name written on the wall and this kid coming in the summer holidays saying, ‘You’d better get off the street – the Bison are coming,’ and thinking, ‘Fuck, they’re gonna kill me.’ I’d seen black and white cowboy movies on TV with gigantic herds of buffalo covering the plains like an invading army. I imagined this gang as a herd of bison about to stampede anyone in its path. So, I hid under a car. I just lay there trying not to breathe, hoping that the Bison wouldn’t find me. I must’ve lain under that car for an hour. Why didn’t I just run home? What was I thinking? I remember playing in our back yard in Palermo Street, I must’ve been eight or nine, and a guy suddenly appeared on the midden wall and threw a whole brick at me. Random acts of violence were a regular occurrence in working-class lives. It was just accepted as normal behaviour.

One of the first gang slogans I ever saw, apart from the Bison, was near Sighthill Flats, giant brutalist fortresses bordered by British Rail works on one side and Springburn Cemetery on another. The territorial declarations were daubed on a wall in spidery silver spray paint:

GEO IS 100% MENTAL

GEO IS A SPRINGBURN BOY AND PROUD OF IT

GEO IS 100% CRAZY

Every time I passed that on the bus with my mum, going to visit my grandma in Bridgton, I remember thinking, ‘I do not want to meet Geo.’ This is a guy who will just cut you up. My imagination was full of these psychotic gang members, unseen bogeymen. Life was determined by invisible borders, and if you crossed them, you could be in danger of your life. There were guys with axes and knives, you were told not by your parents but by kids in the streets. Though I do remember my dad saying to me in the summer holidays, ‘You gotta be home before it’s dark because when it gets dark, the man with the iron teeth walks the streets and he picks up little kids and he takes them away.’

Glasgow in the sixties and seventies was extremely violent, and it made me defensive, wary, and cautious of other people. I learned to dissociate. I took myself out of the scene. In later life, when I got into some kind of argument or something happened that would trigger this feeling, I would dissociate, become disengaged, absent; my body was there, but I’d be powerless. This stuff affected me deeply and I didn’t realise it, I never understood the roots of the feeling until I undertook therapy for drug addiction in my forties.

When I was a teenager I had some kind of depression – a melancholia – that was maybe tied into this stuff. I remember when I was seventeen standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a razorblade and having an urge to cut up my unpimpled, perfect, baby-soft unshaven face. I inwardly cursed my parents for giving birth to me, I was consumed by an indescribable pain, both spiritual and psychic. I couldn’t speak to anyone about it. I started to question love, and the people who said they loved me. I didn’t trust other people: I was scared of relationships, of committing to people and saying ‘I love you’ (I still have a huge problem with this phrase). I was like, this is how life really is. There’s no such thing as love, people don’t love each other. All life is confrontation, compromise and violence.

So, when punk came along, I was just ready for it.