News that Del Amitri had signed a new record deal was one of the best pieces of non-pandemic news in the last year. Their first album since 2002 is their seventh and emerges on Cooking Vinyl over Bank Holiday May weekend 2021.
It is a perfect time, for new followers and old acolytes, to count down their top ten tunes, in chronological order, with apologies to the many great songs I have left out of my list. Great source material comes from the band’s biography, These Are Such Perfect Days, authored by Charles Rawlings Way (Find the book here).
Del Amitri’s self-titled debut came out on Chrysalis in 1985. Recorded in Glasgow, the ten tracks were full of Justin Currie’s verbose sets of lyrics, influenced by Elvis Costello. The songs had been constructed in chunks, with no discernible choruses, over a period of two years in the early 1980s.
Hammering Heart is a jangly three-minute pop song. The lyric includes lines about dustbins, canyons, hounds and foxes and a ‘hammering moon’ that is a lady’s heart. It was brought back for the 2014 reunion tour and the quirky video was added to Youtube in July 2020. Roll To Me may have had the guys in prams but here they are in boxes of vegetables. The lads are in sleeveless vests and Smiths-y haircut while Justin’s low burr is eschewed in favour of Proclaimers-style singing and a brief bit of falsetto at the end. Indeed, the band would support The Smiths in 1985 and jangly popper Lloyd Cole in 1986.
Justin grew up as the son of a singer and a choirmaster. Gilbert O’Sullivan was a favourite of the family, while Justin’s older sisters loved Dire Straits and Dr Feelgood. Then came the Beatles. Guitarist Iain Harvie, meanwhile, detested Radio 1’s ‘horrid pop and creepy DJs’, preferring the best of 70s rock and soul. Justin became a bass player like Paul McCartney or Peter Hook but, in his band with Iain, someone had to be the singer.
In conversation with Ricky Ross for BBC Scotland, Justin admitted that a record deal meant he could earn money doing what he loved. He was also able to tour America, where people enjoyed both ‘the Clash AND Bob Seger’. The fact that ‘people would go mad in the instrumental bits’ was an early realisation, which pushed them to the heartland sound of Tom Petty and, by his admission, ‘frighteningly mainstream’.
The track which gives its name to the band’s best of collection is on the second side of Waking Hours. Ricky Ross hears a lot of The Faces in Del Amitri, something Justin admitted ‘we mercilessly ripped off any ideas we could get away with’. Ditto early 70s Rolling Stones, an influence I had previously not detected in their work.
Among the ten tracks picked by Justin on Radio 2 stalwart The Tracks of My Years were Suicide Blonde by INXS, Life’s What You Make It by Talk Talk and a lovely version of the Jimmy Webb composition Do What You Gotta Do by Roberta Flack.
With loyalty to Scottish indie rock, he chose Brand New Friend by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and A Girl Like You by Edwyn Collins, who was in Orange Juice and popularised ‘post-punk’ music while Justin was a young musician. Lloyd Cole and his band were ‘getting better and better’ the more gigs they played and had major-label backing to spend time on crafting their sound.
In their early days in Glasgow, where Justin would cook burgers for money, Del Amitri would print menus of songs for their audience, initially friends and family, to pick from. A support tour with The Fall didn’t work out in spite of Justin’s love of the mercurial band. Another Fall fan, John Peel, took them to heart, played their demos and invited them in for a session down in London, produced by Mott The Hoople’s old drummer. A keen-eared A&R man heard it and offered them a deal, whereupon they recorded some first efforts with Television’s Tom Verlaine as producer. The sessions were scrapped and the band returned to Glasgow to make their debut album with a new producer.
Label politics can be dull but a useful cautionary tale. The band were on the cover of Melody Maker six months before their album came out but, stupidly, no single was released to capitalise on this. The band became victims of the hype machine in the UK but were picked up by college rock stations in the USA and were big in Portugal.
Dissatisfied with their label, the band went on strike and were able to leave. Incredibly they toured America as free agents on tourist visas over summer 1986. They met up with guys who didn’t care for picking sides in the music wars (ie they liked both Bob Seger and The Clash). The band were impressed with young fans who liked pop and rock, giving them the confidence to be more than just a jangly pop band.
The closing track of Waking Hours, which has been a staple of rock radio for three decades, is excellent described in the band’s biography as having a ‘low-lit sadnes’. ‘We’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow,’ sighs Justin Currie of a song that was a hit from the moment he wrote it, even though it lacks drums and is in triple time.
Rather handily, the US version of Waking Hours was about to come out. By now under new management, Del Amitri pulled the initial UK album from sale. This meant that when Nothing Ever Happens hit radio, everyone had to buy the single because it wasn’t on an album. It became their biggest hit, peaking at 11 in early 1990; number one that week was Nothing Compares 2 U while future number one Dub Be Good To Me was a new entry at 15.
On this second album, Justin’s songs were more spacious and less prolix, with a skew to the macabre and dark. ‘I didn’t have to make stuff up!’ he told the band biography. He was also influenced by Glasgow’s decline, which is clear on Stone Cold Sober:
Whole generations thinking of themselves as infidels and popstars…
We are the dead life, locked in dogfights, lost in disbelief…
Loaded or totally legless
This was his attempt, complete with the corny chorus ‘Looking for bottles of love’, at country music. Listening to ‘new country’ in the late 1980s, Justin expanded his horizons beyond line dance anthems. Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam, both rocking country guys, as well as Lyle Lovett (in a jazz-rock-country class of his own), were also on their turntable. Bringing in keyboard player and philosophy postgrad Andy Alston beefed up their sound.
The sessions for Waking Hours were far less successful than the demos, which had been recorded with Scouse producer Gil Norton. With a couple more producers, the band tidied up the demos, adding digital drums. This prompted real-life drummer Paul Tyagi to leave; he was one of five line-up changes between the formation of the band and the release of Waking Hours.
The album came out on A&M, the famous label started by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Justin told the label to go all in on Nothing Ever Happens, a later single. ‘It’s the only time I’ve been right on a single,’ says the songwriter, who still gets residual cheques today.
‘Success is an accidental phenomenon,’ Justin told fellow successful Scottish songwriter Ricky Ross in May 2020. When the band were booked for Top of the Pops after charting at 23 with their hit, ‘you were instantly famous!’ It was luck that put Del Amitri – ‘some little Scottish band with an acoustic protest song’ – on the musical map.
The album Change Everything was thrust into the world at the same time as Pixies and Nirvana were taking over guitar rock. Gil Norton was the Scouser who had produced both Doolittle, released on British label 4AD, and Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen. Having worked on the band’s early demos there was a sympatico relationship between band and producer. Listen to Everlong by Foo Fighters to hear similar perfection.
Change Everything opens with a sombre first three tracks: Be My Downfall, Just Like a Man and When You Were Young, but the second side kicks off with the one-two punch of The Ones That You Love Lead You Nowhere and radio smash Always The Last To Know, which was accompanied by a black-and-white performance video.
A line from the second verse gives the band the title of their biography These Are Such Perfect Days. The song charted at 13 in the UK and at 30 in the US, thanks to MTV and rock radio support. It has taken me 20 years to realise it’s a partial rewrite of Stand By Me.
In the UK, Del Amitri had spent the first few years of the 1990s becoming a popular pop group, popping up on daytime TV ‘with a hangover after a night out’ and, according to Iain, playing to ‘the nation’s housewives, gym bunnies and slackers. It wasn’t rock’n’roll.’ Otherwise it was all-day junkets, early flights and helping A&M make back their advance, as per the role of a band signed to a major record label.
This very Scottish rock anthem charted at 32 in 1996, the era of Oasis and Blur. Tell Her This, like Driving with the Brakes On, was initially thought of as a B-side. ‘The record company needed at least six new tracks for every single you released. They tended to be my kind of acoustic ramblings.’
Del Amitri were never considered a Britpop band, or indeed a particularly Scottish rock band like Deacon Blue or Simple Minds. Perhaps that was because of their success in America, something Blur famously failed to have in their early years when they retreated into Englishness in the face of wilful indifference from a grunge-loving America.
Del Amitri played at the LA Troubadour and CBGBs in New York to promote Twisted. ‘It’s just the right shape,’ Justin says of CBGBs. ‘The walls are filthy. Everything reflects back onto the stage and it had a bit of a warm sound. The location was important but the way it sounds…’
Similarly, in the era where Del Amitri entered the marketplace, there were two brands of music in the UK, as Justin told Ricky Ross: white soul like Simply Red, or Velvet Underground-type bands like The Jesus & Mary Chain. Bands laughed at Del Amitri in the mid-1980s – ‘you were a bit of a joke and maybe that drives your ambition’ – but they remain their own genre who leapt over the trends of the decade.
‘We didn’t really think in terms of verses or choruses,’ Justin told Songwriting Magazine in 2014. ‘We thought in terms of hits.’
Twisted emerged in 1995 and included Roll To Me, a radio hit with a crazy video starring the band’s heads superimposed onto babies’ bodies and pushed in some prams by gorgeous women on a sunny American day. Once you see it, you can’t listen to the song without the Dels’ heads popping into your mind.
Helped by the punchy mastering of Bob Clearmountain (Bruce Springsteen’s mixer) and the drums of future Oasis member Chris Sharrock, it still sounds amazing as a record, particularly with those guitar lines cuddling one another. Because of the way the song is mixed, ‘multiple times we realised a lot of radio stations would only be broadcasting the left or right channel’ so only one side of the song could be heard in stereo. ‘Bob freaked out!’
It was the third single from Twisted and, helped by the video, became a top 10 hit in the USA and number 22 in Britain. Justin was looking to write a ‘deceptively lightweight Paul McCartney song’. The melody and chords came way before the words, which had ‘an incredible overuse of the word “baby” because I couldn’t get anything else to work.”
Justin told Ricky Ross: ‘All the DJs said: “I love your record because I can always fit it before the news!” They got really into market research and so it researched well among people who didn’t have jobs or who were [funny American accent] homemakers.’ Once again, this alternative rock band from Scotland were helping suburban housewives go about their day.
Released in June 1997 just as Britpop was about to implode (or give way to the prog-and-pedals of Radiohead), the album Some Other Sucker’s Parade went top ten. It included a response to Where It’s At by Beck called Not Where It’s At as well as the melancholic title track. Iain’s electric guitar riffs coil around one another in a symphonic manner while Justin croons a sad tale: ‘It ain’t no sin to drink when you’re suffering/ Patience they say is a saintly virtue but hell why should I wait?’
In the video, Justin has had a haircut and walks around various shops with an earpiece in to help him remember the words and looks directly into the camera lens for every shot. Iain’s solo is played in a laundrette on an acoustic guitar while a girl dances in a cowboy hat. It’s a strong visual that showed how big the budget was for music videos in the dying days of the record industry.
Ricky Ross compares Justin to Elvis Costello, a songwriter who plays up the spite. ‘I was listening to far too much Elvis Costello growing up,’ Justin agrees. Ditto Hank Williams, whose music Justin played in a cover bands. ‘Depth and genuine pathos’ leaked into Justin’s songwriting, and you can hear that in the finely structured pair mentioned above, both with mighty middle eights.
The last time Scotland qualified for the World Cup was in 1998. The acerbic song about how ‘even long shots make it’ proved optimistic in the extreme but the melancholy of the tune makes it an anti-Three Lions.
‘The slagging I got was unbearable!!’ Justin chuckled when asked by Ken Bruce. ‘I got blamed by many an old geezer in a pub! I wasn’t on the bench!’
The song was the final of the 17 tracks on Hatful of Rain, the band’s Best Of, which was sold in a deluxe edition with a collection of B-Sides (remember B-Sides?). It was my introduction to a band whose big radio hits I knew. I gravitated instantly to the joyful sounding trio of Some Other Sucker’s Parade, Here & Now and Kiss This Thing Goodbye. Perhaps I was perhaps too young (at 14 or 15) to appreciate the slower tunes which had a more Adult Contemporary feel.
This is the opening track of, and the sole single released from, Can You Do Me Good?, the band’s 2002 electronic-y release which landed in a climate where soft-rocking bands like Coldplay and Travis sold millions with their downbeat upbeat tracks. It follows that Del Amitri should have been huge successes in the new era. But Ian and Justin zagged instead of zigged and the band were dropped due to poor sales of the album.
There’s much to recommend on a patchy album. There’s the fuzzy shoutalong power-pop on Drunk in a Band, which consisted of a list of people doing jobs more important than singing for money. A lot of the tracks are driven by the type of drum loop that digital recording can make possible: Cash And Prizes sounded like indie-dance while I like the poppy Baby It’s Me and the abrasive shuffle of Wash Her Away. Album closer Just Getting By is seven minutes of string-soaked bliss, classic Justin Currie and a lost gem in the band’s catalogue.
Upon leaving the band, Justin Currie didn’t want to make a solo record. He told Ricky Ross (the Deacon Blue frontman who has also put out album under his own name) that the idea of a band was preferable to being alone onstage. His view was coupled with business sense: launching his majestic solo album What Is Love For in 2008, Justin told The Aquarian that ‘there’s no demand for Del Amitri’.
I saw Justin promote the album at the Edinburgh Liquid Rooms, where the compositions released under his own name were as lovely as the renditions of Driving With the Brakes On and Move Away Jimmy Blue. I remember being impressed by the boisterous singalong of Tell Her This but the real emotion behind If I Ever Loved You was particularly evident.
Justin and the band did reunite for live shows in 2014. Seven years on, the album Fatal Mistakes is the result of three years’ writing. Starting with Close Your Eyes and Think of England (opening line: ‘Day by day we’re winnowing away’), the album rollout teased a return to the definitive Del Amitri sound: interpersonal relationships shot with melancholy. It’s Feelings (‘that cut you’) demonstrate the pain and well as joys of love, while album opener You Can’t Go Back is Radio 2 catnip, with the line ‘Promise me forever you will stay right here’.
For the first time in almost 20 years, the world has a new Del Amitri LP, which they will tour in the autumn. As well as a date at London Palladium they have three Christmas shows scheduled at Barras, Barrowlands Ballroom. Back in 2014, their set began with Always the Last to Know and Kiss This Thing Goodbye, while a typical 2018 set included Be My Downfall, The Verb To Do and a cover of Heathens by twentyonepilots, who released their own new album a week before the Dels did.
Live favourites include What I Think She Sees, Surface of the Moon and Food for Songs, as fans in the Del Amitri Facebook group made clear. Move Away Jimmy Blue is a scarves-aloft, arms-around-mates song about getting out of a small town before it ‘swallows you’. Indeed, its I-IV chord pattern makes it an easy segue into You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
Kiss This Thing Goodbye (live for Children In Need)
The biography of the band is a good place to start when looking at what makes Del Amitri a cult favourite. ‘We looked back on how ambitious we were and we didn’t know!’ Justin recalled to Ricky Ross when recounting how the group told their story for the band’s biography. ‘We were very eager to prove the doubters wrong.’
Being on the radio was more thrilling to the band than selling albums: ‘You’re in the public domain, taxi drivers’ faces, guys on building sites’ faces…Guys come up to you in the street going “I really like that song, mate.”’ A policeman in Australia ran over for an autograph, he told Ken Bruce, which may have been even more surreal than passing Michael Hutchence and Kylie Minogue at a posh hotel when he was touring there.
‘I genuinely believed music could change the world,’ concludes Justin Currie. Well, his music certainly changed mine.
Fatal Mistakes is out now on Cooking Vinyl. The band tour the UK in September and October. Find ticket info here.