2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
I haven't fallen over on stage yet, says Del Amitri's Justin Currie
'I suddenly realised that in between taking mouthfuls of sushi, my hand was shaking and it looked like I was sitting there by myself, conducting a tiny orchestra in between mouthfuls with my chopsticks. Sometimes you can see people looking at you wondering what's going on.'
Gavin - the name Currie has given his Parkinson's tremor - knows what's going on. He's been gradually making himself known in the singer's right hand for the last few years, and now he's started taking a real interest in the rest of the 60 year old's body too.
'My balance isn't what it was and if I turn too quickly I get quite disorientated,' said Currie, sitting in a coffee shop in Glasgow's west end, without chopsticks, and remarkably balanced in more ways than one. 'I haven't fallen over on stage yet, but if I do, then I'll probably joke about it.'
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This wry stance is nothing new for followers of Justin Currie. He's been writing poison-tipped songs about self-inflicted pain for decades, spinning pop gold from imagined tales about being the last to know, taking adulterous roads to ruin, kissing things goodbye and nothing ever happening.
Followers of his enjoyably sour online tour blogs have grown familiar with his on–the-road nihilism since he first booted up his laptop in 2008, a vent which will take the form of a book to be released later this summer.
Its title, The Tremolo Diaries, is nicked from the Radio 4 documentary he made last year when he came out as a Parkinsonian, as he calls his fellow sufferers
Subtitled Life On The Road And Other Diseases it deals with the fall-out from a hellish triumvirate of turns even he would have thought too heavy for any of the characters in his songs. And, funny stories about chopsticks in sushi restaurants or not, Currie has suffered.
In a few dreadful weeks at the end of December 2022, he lost his mother to cancer, saw his girlfriend severely debilitated by a stroke and received the dreaded confirmed diagnosis of a condition which has been robbing him ever since of the talent which has made him one of the country's most popular and successful songwriters and live singers.
No surprise, perhaps, that one day a few months later, he couldn't get up in the morning. And it had nothing to do with the disease's depletive impact on his motor skills.
'They give you a leaflet when they tell you you have Parkinson's,' he said. 'It's actually a really good leaflet, and on page five it says that everybody who gets Parkisnon's gets depressed. I've never been depressed before, but one day, a few months later, I couldn't get out of bed.'
Del Amitri (Image: free) A combination of antidepressants and 'talking about it' helped Currie put his feet back on the ground a few weeks later. He talks about Parkinson's a lot now, and 'really likes' doing it, 'to the point where I tell my mates in the pub to tell me to shut up.'
Unsurprisingly, Currie's reflections on the aftermath of his personal 2022 trainwreck have found their way into songs he's written for a new Del Amitri record, which he hopes will be released next year, and which, he warned, are 'definitely grim.'
'But I think they're good,' he said. 'If I thought they were sh** then I wouldn't share them.'
Talk about stoking expectations. Currie is, after all, the man who delivered 1989's state of the nation address Nothing Ever Happens, in which he laid to waste the decade's trends of mass consumerism, the hollow monotony of the nine to five and the casual acceptance of ethnic persecution, decades before the first doom scroller logged into their social media.
These songs, Currie said, are different from before.
'I faked a lot of emotional pain before,' he said. 'But having gone through all the shit with my mum dying, then Emma's stroke and my confirmed diagnosis, it's all coming from real life rather than invented dramatic scenes. I've written lots of songs about death and disease in the past. Those sorts of songs are easier to write now. One's mother dying at 86 is sad but it isn't tragic. All three things coming at once was traumatic, although I didn't think it was until I started writing songs about it.'
As before, the bitter comes wrapped in the sweet. Even at their bleakest, Del Amitri know a hooky melody.
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'It definitely has the tunes,' said Currie of the new LP, still in early gestation. 'I was wary at first, but I really like it now.'
Whether the Dels will play any of the tunes at this month's gig under the big top at Queen's Park in Glasgow is anyone's guess. Currie doesn't know how well he'll perform, let alone what.
'It's harder with Parkinson's. I can't play as well as I used to, and that's endlessly frustrating.'
The band last performed a double header in Barrowlands at the turn of the year. Gavin is noticeable on Currie's right hand when he sings, and has been for a few years, but the impact on the overall quality remains distinctly minimal.
Nevertheless, the band have had The Chat about knowing when to call it quits. He's already killed off any notion of playing solo again, but with the support of his Dels mates he hopes there's road ahead yet.
'The only thing I know how to do is write songs and sing them somewhere,' he said. 'I don't want to get obsessed by that thought. It'll happen when it happens.'
Del Amitri play Summer Nights on the Southside, Glasgow, on June 26, with King Creosote, Withered Hand + Kathryn Williams and Alice Faye
