You may remember Beatle John Lennon’s wry but seething definition of life.  That “it’s what happens to us while we are making other plans”. Well since the late ‘80s Del Amitri have become a very popular band although most music fans will mainly be familiar with hits like ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ and ‘Kiss This Thing Goodbye’ and, at a stretch, their album Waking Hours.

Nevertheless, I, for one, was surprised to discover that the Scottish combo, led by singer/songwriter Justin Currie, have sold six million albums worldwide. I guess that’s because during this period I was busy making other plans like writing for the broadsheet press and buying houses to secure the future of my children who were born around the same time as Del Amitri were taking off.

However it didn’t escape my attention that Justin had a lovely sincere-sounding voice while the band’s brand of rolling pop-rock partially disguised his formidable lyrical talent, such couplets as “When our lips were kissing / Our tongues were telling lies” appearing with fine abundance. During band breaks of touring and recording Justin also released solo albums of his own and now has an autobiography to his name.

The Tremolo Diaries might seem like a typically snappy title for a musician’s memoir (a tremolo being an effect produced by a rapid repetition of notes) but this is no ordinary jolly romp-on-the-road sort of oeuvre. Currie decided the group should go on a lengthy American tour soon after being diagnosed for Parkinson’s Disease, a long-term degenerative disorder of the nervous system affecting both motor and non-motor skills including, in Justin’s case, playing bass guitar.

Meanwhile his girlfriend – referred to throughout as My Love – suffered a very serious stroke leading to her being domiciled in a care home. The resulting guilt is monumental as Justin is more than ready to admit: “I despise myself for letting this happen to her, under my watch.” Yet “I don’t care about the guilt” he adds, towards the end of the book. “I care about the love. Love that could no longer maintain without the extraordinary support of the system and our community. Without them I’d be a twenty-four-hour carer and both of us would be destroyed.

“The hero should save the day.  But what does he have left to say when so much has been taken away? (His Love has lost the ability to speak). Except for love. The love is here to stay.”

Strong stuff but along with the empathy and compassion there are breath-taking tranches of sarcasm and bitterness. I managed to speak to Justin at his recent visit to the Walthamstow rock ‘n’ roll book club in London E17. He reckoned his memoir was not so much therapeutic as cathartic, meaning it was a vehicle for releasing powerful emotions and relieving almost indescribable tensions following the double trauma.

The book is also darkly funny, gallows humour tear gassing every diary entry. So without any further ado let us virtually gate-crash Del Amitri on tour in America with a couple of local bands and then in Europe with one of his favourite acts, Simple Minds. I should point out I read the book twice in order to alight upon and then edit the parts which made me double up with laughter.

Paul Hayes, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s much to do with food which, along with longish walks, obviously keeps his strength up. In Washington DC Justin chances upon a Gordon Ramsay fish & chips outlet and a Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen restaurant. “Another narcissist charlatan who likes to smear his name on edifices.” I can see where he’s coming from. Wilmington, North Carolina, has different issues: “Two blonde beehived ladies cross the street in floral pantsuits and matching gold-rimmed sunglasses. They look like extras from a B-52s video. I imagine they imagine they are Southern belles.

“Smug white pedestrians who look like they know what they did, still-victorious ethnic cleansers. What a scourge white folk are, what a pitiless plague.  Everywhere you go – art gallery, coffee shop, tattoo parlour, truck stop, deli or shoe store – they’re selling T-shirts and baseball caps with logos.  The world is awash with these wasteful souvenirs.”

But then he is gracious enough to confess:  “We sell this sort of shit every night, clogging up the future.  The human race could say I will end up fashioning entire cities from these cotton and polyester remnants.  Shanty towns will be named after obscure lube shops, kids will cower under Del Amitri blankets on their MAGA hat mattresses.” Justin is no fan of The Donald. Jumping ahead to a gig in Dubai he describes the city as “a monument to real estate hubris. A penal colony designed by Donald Trump during a bout of food poisoning. It’s a colossal folly, a carpet of crap. It’s the future and the future is hell,” he fumes,  paraphrasing Leonard Cohen.

But the money is still good: “I could say I was railroaded into doing this show, but I’m here and guilty of all charges, hypocrisy, greed and moral turpitude. There’s a prayer room next to the immaculately tiled toilets (with showers).  Perhaps I should ask for forgiveness.”  That was Day 91 of the tour.  A few weeks earlier Manchester, UK, came in for an architectural review, more detailed and devastatingly accurate:

“At every turn you meet mad collisions of the industrial past and the near-present.  Glass boxes grow out of old sandstone ramparts, nineteenth-century red-brick facades cage 21^st-century offices.  Concrete car parks jam up against Victorian terraces, old warehouses and sunken canals. Not all of it works but the music I grew up with has much to do with this renaissance.  From Buzzcocks through Joy Division and Factory Records to the Smiths and towering outsiders The Fall, bands made the new Manchester, sucking in designers, artists and writers.”

I would like to think I am one of the latter, the Northern Correspondent for Record Mirror in the wake of punk, before accepting the call to come down to London after writing about all the above in late 1978. At the book club event we chatted about this and how as a proud Glaswegian he felt honoured to be part of a tradition which produced Josef K, Orange Juice and Simple Minds.

“In the 60s and 70s Glasgow had never been cool but Edwyn Collins (Orange Juice) was important from the point of view that if they and their indie label Postcard could make it, we could, too.  Orange Juice wore ridiculous clothes and deliberately flaunted their amateurism which led to them encouraging others.  In fact early Del Amitri were copyists, five years younger and still at school. There were other bands playing in pubs but they were more like Quo i.e. not as interesting. At 19 I was very proud of what I was doing, no boss and the best job in the world. Del Amitri didn’t expect our fans to dance to songs they had never heard before – smiling was enough!”

The momentum of the band’s career was such that when in 2022 Justin was diagnosed with Parkinson’s he decided to keep touring and working “despite the uneasy feeling that another man was growing inside me, slowly seizing the means of control.” He gave that man the name Gavin “after a guitar tech who couldn’t do the tour”. But Justin mainly refers to the disease as “My Ghastly Affliction”.

On a happier note there are some tremendous anecdotes and one-liners. In a Belfast Museum “I meander through the usual video walls and interactive bollocks. Small-nation stuff – ‘look how successful we’ve been!’” The National WWII museum in New Orleans gets it worse. “That war was an international orgy of violence and inhumanity that happened on a colossal scale at an insane speed and intensity. This force-feeding of the lie, in both the West and former Soviet countries, that the war was about freedom reminds me of Ladybird books. Everything is company propaganda and there is no video content illustrating the role of Special Brew in the development of the Great British derelict.”

In Dijon, France, “A slightly frail man resembling a rock star gives me a knowing nod.  I think we recognise one another as gentlemen who have taken drugs.”  Off the road “We were recording ‘Can You Do Me Good’ around uber-hip Old Street circa 1999. The tech bubble was yet to burst and east London was awash with wankers of every description.  Young mums on bone-rattler bikes with baguettes sticking out of their front baskets, artistic types with no socks…”

Currying favour with Justin

Which takes us a few tube stops from the recent rock ‘n’ roll book club event. Justin tells us how in the west of Scotland it pays never to be too enthusiastic about things.  So when a friend talking  about The Tremolo Diaries said  “I couldn’t find anything wrong with that”, he took it as “the greatest compliment”. 

With a tad less modesty he reckons the timeless ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ “is as relevant now as ever. The music spoke to us emotionally if not politically. It was never our plan to change the world although in 1979 and 1980 we naively thought indie could achieve what The Beatles did. Now pop has been subsumed by the entertainment industry – even Mick and Keith, in a recent documentary, call it ‘Showbusiness’ while even Jim Kerr just talks about ‘keeping the customer satisfied’. Last year I went to see another hero, Bob Dylan, and although he was great he wasn’t going to change the world like he pretty much did in the 60s.

“The pendulum will never swing back.  No area of pop culture is as good as it was, there will just be reiterations and tweaks. My Ghastly Affliction meant that my bass playing wasn’t as good as it had been so the rest of the band had to cover for me. But we were getting away with it.”

I wondered if the Parkinson’s made it more difficult to write songs and whether there would be another Del Amitri album. To the relief of the crowded venue the answer was in the affirmative.

“The affliction makes it harder which means having to write songs in a different way,” Justin explains.  “Honing everything down with the notion that I’m not repeating myself and everything is less complicated. We’re hoping to release something next year,” he reveals with a tired smile.

To which all I can conclude after an action-packed book and a highly entertaining evening … who said nothing ever happens?

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