[1] 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.

[2] Born in Springburn and moved to the south side district of Mount Florida in Glasgow aged 10, he attended King's Park Secondary School.

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 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.

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.

It hurt the group's reputation as innovators, a situation they reacted to with the title track to the hit 1996 film Trainspotting, a return to the dance stylings of Screamadelica.

The band continued to work on their next album, entitled Vanishing Point, over the course of 1996, releasing it to positive reviews [citation needed] in the summer of 1997.

Two years later Primal Scream released Evil Heat, an album in line with XTRMNTR, and in 2006 Riot City Blues came out.

Gillespie's book, Tenement Kid, a memoir relating his childhood in 1960s Springburn Glasgow, the discovering of punk, then his realization as an artist, until the release of Screamadelica, was published in late 2021.

[7] The Times reviewed it as an "elegantly written tale": Will Hodgkinson said that "the Primal Scream frontman writes movingly about his troubled youth".

[8] In 2023, Gillespie was a guest singer on the songs "This Is What It Is (To Be Free)", "Ghosted at Home" and "Country of the Blind" for the album Los Angeles by Lol Tolhurst, Budgie, and Jacknife Lee.

On Primal Scream's 2013 album More Light, he is credited with a number of keyboard instruments along with drums and percussion, and he played synthesizer on one of The Wake's singles.

Gillespie is credited with guitar on the track "Gravitational Waves (Drifter's Song)", the b-side to the Record Store Day 2016 release Mantra for a State of Mind.

[17] In 2019, Gillespie called Madonna a "total prostitute" for agreeing to perform at that year's Eurovision which took place in Tel Aviv, Israel.

[18] In January 2021, Gillespie declared his support for the Scottish independence movement, saying that Scotland's exit from the UK was "inevitable", however he also said "I don't see myself as a nationalist, as that leads to Fascism".