Del Amitri mainstays Iain Harvie and Justin Currie remember the good old days, when a Glasgow indie band “who never really cut it as Orange Juice and Josef K copyists” became, in effect, overnight successes. Suddenly, after a critically-acclaimed but still-born first album (1985’s Del Amitri, being re-issued this year), with 1989’s Waking Hours, the hit single ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ saw them sharing a Top of the Pops stage with Phil Collins, then in the imperial phase of his solo career, newcomer Sinead O’Connor singing 'Nothing Compares 2 U', and the premiere of Public Enemy’s ‘Welcome to the Terrordome’ video. Two years later, Del Amitri were still regulars on the nation's favourite chart show. Promoting 1992 hit 'Always The Last to Know', the band appeared on an episode alongside an En Vogue video ('My Lovin'), Shakespear's Sister ('I Don't Care') and, performing smash US hit 'Jump', adolescent rap duo Kriss Kross, they of the backwards-jeans.
“I remember hearing their manager shouting at someone from the BBC,” says guitarist Iain Harvie, “complaining about the sound: ‘Even that fucking Scottish rock band sound better than my guys!’”
Del Amitri also remember the other side of the good old days. That happens when being successful enough to bag a stadium support with one of the biggest bands in the world isn’t quite enough success to insulate you from the indignity of a breakfast TV outside-broadcast from Blackpool and being upstaged by a dancing omelette.
“We did a gig with REM in Cardiff Arms Park, third on the bill with Belly and The Cranberries,” begins singer/guitarist Justin Currie. “And REM were mingling round the catering area after and invited us to their aftershow. We’re like: ‘Oh yes! We’re going to get to party with REM!’”
Alas…
“Oh no – we had to get on the bus at midnight, drive through the night to Blackpool, sit outside the beach on the tour bus, waiting on the 5.30am call-time, then got put in a Portakabin, ignored for three hours. What the fuck are we doing here? We could still be partying with REM!
“Then at three minutes to nine, Dannii Minogue comes in and yells at us to get onstage! So we get up there – as the credits are rolling – and it’s chaos. There’s a Nolan Sister, all these kids waving inflatable toys, us miming, in front of a dancing chicken and egg – I still don’t know who came on first– waving kitchen utensils. Then Frank Carson comes on just as we’re about to down tools. He spots how pissed off I was, so starts dancing behind me, occasionally leaning into my ear going: ‘You’re a wanker! You’re a wanker!’”
“It was a travesty,” Harvie laughs ruefully. “But at least our tour manager enjoyed it – he was at the side of the stage, pissing himself laughing.”
Still, “the Dels” had the last laugh. In America the song they were promoting on TVam, 1995’s ‘Roll To Me’, hit Number 10 on the Billboard Hot 10. It became a soundtrack favourite (everything from Family Guy to one-boy-and-his-dolphin “abomination” Flipper) and US jukebox staple that resonates (and generates royalties) to this day..
Equally, selling six million copies of half-a-dozen studio albums between that mid-Eighties debut and 2002’s Can You Do Me Good? does a great job of enabling you to, firstly, laugh about the cheap digs of Northern Irish comedians and, secondly, quit while you’re ahead.
Which is exactly what Currie and Harvie, the consistent core of the band since 1982, did after that sixth album.
“Iain and I took a hiatus after 2002 because we’d been dropped by Mercury and we thought: ‘Well, that’s a bit of a milestone – we’ve had major deals since our late teens,’” relates Currie. “So it felt like a good moment to take a bit of time off. And I just did anything that was offered – a bit of jazz singing with a big band, a bit with a folk-orchestra…”
“Ha, I missed that one!” chips in Harvie. “I spent a time as a record producer. I did three or four albums with Rough Trade, then worked with a young band from Berwick-upon-Tweed, then tour-managed them a bit, then worked in studios. So I’d drifted off the other way, which I quite enjoyed. But then the bottom started falling out of the studio industry as well, as bands started recording themselves. Which just started to make me miss our band.”
Currie similarly oscillated between feeling disgruntled and… gruntled? “I did four solo albums,” the frontman says, “and some touring, including one on my own which I absolutely hated. You can’t look round at anyone and go: ‘Well, this is weird.’ And you’re meant to be a raconteur when you do solo shows, and I can’t do any of that. Then, after, you’re standing in the dressing room on your own. There’s no one to talk to! It’s horrible. So, aye, I really missed the band, too.”
In 2014 and again in 2018, Currie, Harvie and their band embarked on sell-out UK reunion tours. But by the time of the second run, the appeal of playing solely songs from the past began to pall slightly.
“It’s great fun doing those gigs,” says Currie, “but if there’s not something current you’re really happy with, you start to feel like a human jukebox. Which is great but you wouldn’t want to do that too many times. You start to feel dead inside.”
Heading into the 2018 tour, Harvie suggested they try their hand at some new songs. Currie had been writing solo songs, “but they’re all dirges, which you can get away with solo,” the singer admits cheerfully. But as it had been a long time since he’d written songs with the band in mind, he took himself off to a borrowed cottage on the Isle of Lewis and started writing songs that would suit a two-guitar set-up. Down south, Harvie was writing, too. The pair realised that, without forcing it, they had created a bunch of songs that sounded “very Del Amitri”.
By the time 2019 came around, those songs had turned into the core of a very Del Amitri album and a new deal with Cooking Vinyl. Then, the night before lockdown in March 2021, recording of that album was completed. Fatal Mistakes was their first collection of new songs in 18 years, it was recorded “pretty much live” in three weeks with producer Dan Austin (Biffy Clyro, You Me At Six), First out of the traps was the instantly hooky ‘You Can’t Go Back’, performed on that 2018 tour, followed by ‘It’s Feelings’, another big tune that was classic Del Amitri, with Currie’s soulful tap-room rasp reverberating down the years.And cue, too, the-state-of-the-nation lament ‘Close Your Eyes and Think of England’. A classic Dels ballad, the creative spark lit for Currie during a solo tour of Brexit Britain as he pondered the state of English nationalism (“and also, ‘Scotland’ didn’t scan”).
Three years of worldwide touring the Fatal Mistakes album - including what has since become an annual Xmas knees-up at Glasgow’s Barrowlands - saw them also visit Europe, Australia, New Zealand and a now significant run of rather painful US arena shows, as first on the bill to Five For Fighting and headliners Barenaked Ladies. Significant, because it was around this time that Currie received a diagnosis of his Parkinson's Disease, a condition that he’d been aware was gradually worsening during this long stint of performing, a hand tremor that both his fellow bandmates and his audiences had seen developing over the last weeks of that US run. What this initially traumatic news also led to, however, was Currie then sitting down, back in Glasgow, and penning what has since become a Sunday Times best-selling memoir “The Tremolo Diaries; Life On The Road And Other Diseases”. This hugely funny, melancholic, acutely-observed US and European tour diary/ health manual has now developed into something of a parallel career for Currie, winning countless accolades and rave reviews, and seeing him reading to sell-out crowds at major book events around the UK, which carry on to this very day.
Not that his condition has yet seriously affected their principal metier, namely the writing and recording of some classic new Del Amitri tunes, something which will surely bear fruit again this coming year with the emerging of an as yet-untitled new Cooking Vinyl album, a possible summer run of US shows around Scotland’s World Cup group games, and then a soon-to-be-announced nationwide UK tour in November and December 2026. Not bad for that Glasgow indie band who never really cut it as Orange Juice and Josef K copyists.