It’s been 30 years since Del Amitri last played Australia and the host of sold out shows in February shows that either party has forgotten about each other in the interim. The tour will also see founding members and songwriters Justin Currie (vocals/bass) and Ian Harvie (guitar) reunited with former members Andy Alston (keyboards/accordion), Kris Dillimore (guitar), as well as Jim McDermott (drums). Touring off the back of their 2021 release ‘Fatal Mistakes’, which saw them return to the charts hitting no. 5 in the UK albums charts, it’s bound to be a memorable return. We caught up with Justin Currie to talk about the tour and ask the big questions!
Mark: Great to see you coming back to Australia again after such a long time I guess the first question must be what did we do wrong last time that made you leave it so long?
Justin: Well you never asked us back!
Mark: (laughs)
Justin: Nobody ever asked us back after 1990! We must have pissed somebody off.
Mark: You open the tour in Perth in just a few short weeks now, I’m not sure if you played the Astor before, but it’s a lovely old theatre with a wonderful sound.
Justin: We did a theatre in Perth before but I’m not sure it was the same one.
Mark: It’s been a while for the band now…
Justin: Just a bit!
Mark: 43 years can you believe it!
Justin: I can believe it! It feels longer!
Mark: (laughs)
Justin: It’s a whole lifetime of fun and anxiety.
Mark: What a great way to describe being a working musician! You must have seen so much wonderful music during that time, the start of the 80’s was a wonderfully rich and creative time for music, so much texture, so much variety. What sort of things were you listening to in the early days of the band to get the sound that you had?
Justin: Well in this country there was a famous show on the BBC called The John Peel show which played Alternative Rock, it kind of played everything: a bit of Reggae, a bit of Soul, but with the emphasis of the obscure and the new. And that’s what we kind of came out of, so from about 1978 onwards I was listening to what you would call Punk and Post-Punk and that’s what we came out of. There was a record label in Glasgow called postcards that had a kind of Post-Punk DIY aesthetic and crossed it with a kind of Motown sensibility and that had a huge impact with guys like me at school in the early 80’s.
Mark: So let’s put the pieces together. Why did you choose the bass? Now we all know the bassist is the most important member of the band…
Justin: Absolutely.
Mark: But what led you to it? You mentioned Motown and I love the drive and the basslines that people like James Jameson gave a lot of those old songs.
Justin: Yeah, but to be honest I think the main reason I played the bass Mark was my big sister had a friend who bought a bass that he couldn’t play. He lived in a bedsit and he was worried that it was gonna get stolen so he kept it at my parent’s house. And he was quite happy for me to play it so I had a bass in the house, and also at the time I was listening to a lot of really bass-driven things like ‘Echo and the Bunnymen’ and especially Joy Division. I remember learning all the Joy Division bass-lines from ‘Unknown Pleasures’ which are kind of like very simple lead guitar parts. And I found the bass so much easier than the guitar, I’ve always struggled with the guitar. And also I’m a huge Paul McCartney fan as well, I love melody and his bass-playing. But I think the main reason was just that I got my hands on a brand new Fender Precision and had unlimited use of it.
Mark: A nice instrument. It’s been great to have a new Del Amitri album to listen to ‘Fata Mistakes’ were we just lucky that we had a pandemic?
Justin: No because it was written and recorded before the pandemic, in fact the last day of recording was the first day of the UK lockdown at the end of March 27th or 28th or whatever it was in 2020. So it’s not in any way influenced by the pandemic the only effect the pandemic had on that album was that it took ages to mix because we couldn’t be in the same room as the producer.
Mark: Before we dig into the new record let’s look back to the early days. How do you look back at them now, and did you have a plan?
Justin: Well we learned quite quickly that any plan that you formulated would go disastrously wrong so we gave up designing masterplans in the mid 80’s, or maybe the late 80’s! I sort of think of that early Indie band Del Amitri as a different life. You know, we just looked so different then, we were so…. we were kind of desperate in a lot of ways: desperate to try and be original, desperate to forge our own unique path; and I think we made it quite difficult for ourselves. And it wasn’t until we went to America in 1986 and met a whole load of people who listened to different kinds of music, that we became a bit more relaxed about what we were doing, and threw out the rule book and kind of followed our noses a wee bit, and didn’t worry so much about writing songs that sounded like somebody else. So we started to relax and grow our hair towards the end of the 80’s and everything became a lot easier.
Mark: Was there label pressure constantly throughout that period to make you sound a certain way or fit their ideas about you?
Justin: Yeah there was on the first album with Chrysalis, that first album didn’t do anything commercially but they picked up the option on the second album and then tried to mold us into something that we couldn’t really be and that was extremely painful. We then… we went on strike! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Justin: We went on strike because they were forcing us to write Pop songs that we weren’t capable of doing. We staged a sit-in, we got some fans to stage a sit-in at the Record Company offices in the West End of London. And when the Record Company heard of that they very quickly got rid of us which was the plan all along. so that worked! And then after we left Chrysalis we spent a few years in the wilderness just kind of reconfiguring who we were and what we were doing.
Mark: I love how a mythology has grown up over the years about the name Del Amitri, from obscure Greek translations to Ice Cream men, what’s the real story?
Justin: Well there is no real story it’s just a made up name t sound a bit foreign. We liked the idea of calling ourselves Dimitri Gonzalez or something, we thought it sounded like a Mexican Cruise Ship singer or something.
Mark: I’ve seen him he was sensational! (laughs)
Justin: (laughs) And that idea just morphed into Del Amitri, and it’s quite weird because in the late 80’s and early 90’s there were loads of bands with ‘Del’ in their names. The Del Vikings and the Del-Lords and the Delgardos and I’m sure there were more. So you would go to Record Shops in the United States and there would be all these ‘Del’ bands, so there must have been something in the air in the early 80’s that this word ‘Del’ just got adopted by various different Indie groups.
Mark: It is something I shall have to look into and report back on! (laughs)
Justin: (laughs)
Mark: I was just watching the live DVD the other day ‘Every Night has a Dawn’ are things like that going to be available on the tour? It’s been hard to find over here.
Justin: That’s on a DVD that we did last summer – we shot a couple of nights of Barrowlands concerts, then we put some extra acoustic songs on the DVD. I guess it might be available online somewhere.
Mark: I shall track it down and let the good people of Australia now, it’s well worth a watch.
Justin: Than you.
Mark: Now let’s get down to the serious stuff – if you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any album in the history of rock and roll what would you have like to have seen being made – just to see how the magic happened?
Justin: I would like to have been in the control room for the recording of ‘Hard Day’s Night’ which I regard as the greatest Beatles record that they made. Just because it would have happened so fast and most of it was played live. I think it would have been incredibly exciting watching these four people move from being a pretty crazy rock band to be something else entirety – a Brill Building meets Folk meets Elvis kind of thing. And just to watch them record the first suite of songs that were all self-written as well. That would have been quite amazing I think. Just to watch those Abbey Road engineers in their white coats moving big levers about you know (laughs)
Mark: It’s incredible when you think about it and everyone has their own particular period for The Beatles and I guess a lot of that comes from what you heard first. We get a lot of musicians who answer with a Beatles album but it tends to be towards the end of their career like Sergeant Pepper.
Justin: I do go through periods when I really adore Sergeant Pepper but the last time I listened to Sergeant Pepper I didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous time I listened to it in fact a couple of things really annoyed me about it, but I expect the next time I listen to it I’ll absolutely love it again.
Mark: (laughs)
Justin: I had a couple of years where I was completely obsessed by the ‘White Album’, I just couldn’t stop listening to it which is strange because it’s such a strange disturbing record in a lot of ways. Full of sarcasm and satire and kind of hellish expressions of disillusionment and alienation. But ‘Hard Day’s Night’ for me is just so perfect and to me it’s also the one that’s most dominated by John in a really good way, not in a self-indulgent ‘oh woe is me’ way. It’s a very positive record but it’s also very full of pain and a kind of anguish in a very accessible way. I just think it’s perfect from start to finish ‘Hard Day’s Night’.
Mark: Certainly right up there with the best records of that great decade. Let’s wind it all the way back now:- when was it in your life that you realized that music was going to play such an important role? I know some always know, some stumble into it and some have a defining moment. what was it for you?
Justin: Well I was always kind of musical. I sang a lot around the house and I sang to records a lot even when I was quite young – about eight or nine. I would learn the lyrics to a whole album. I listened to a lot of Cole Porter, I remember ‘Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter songbook’ – my mum had a reel-to-reel of that. But it wasn’t until Punk happened that I thought music was a cool thing, before that all the local bands, the guys were just idiots. They were playing Led Zeppelin covers to impress girls which I just thought was so uncool.
Mark: (laughs)
Justin: And they weren’t very good, and they were trying to do all these complicate things they weren’t capable of. Whereas Punk was all self-expression and being: making art for art’s sake and saying what you wanted to say without being a virtuoso, or without being particularly skilled at anything. Punk Rock really opened the door for me and everybody that I know that is in music now is in music because Punk said “Anybody can do this and you don’t need to be a virtuoso”.
Mark: Do you think that your writing has changed much over time, particularly with regards the things that you want to write about? The lyrical themes?
Justin: Yeah, I mean my writing has probably changed less that I would perceive it having changed. The subject matter definitely changes in that as you get older you’re not writing to impress as much I donlt think. I think when you’re young you’re writing to try and dazzle people. You use a lot of wordplay and you write a lot more words (laughs) and you try and inject a lot of energy and intelligence in what you do. Whereas when you’re older you’re just trying to get ‘feeling’ out a bit more – you try and get emotions out. And I guess it depends what you listen to – the stuff I’ve been listening to in the last 20 years is a lot slower and probably more expressive than what I was listening to when I was in my teens. And also you wrote about adult themes – you write about disease and dying and regret and loss, and you just haven’t experienced those things when you’re a teenager.
Mark: You’re right, things change so much as you get older and it’s great to see those themes change over time as a fan looking in. We always tend to close our first chat with the easiest question of the evening
Justin: Oh good.
Mark: What is the meaning of life?
Justin: (laughs) I have been pondering that a lot recently, I have to keep reminding myself there is no meaning and the search for meaning is illusory and utterly futile. I think older people do tend to think about that question. Because they go through more stuff they do tend to start clutching around for meaning, and I repeat myself, you have to remind yourself it is completely pointless. So just try and enjoy the day.
Mark: A great sentiment to leave with. Over 14 years I’ve asked over 400 people that question, and I’m slowly getting there!
Justin: (laughs)
Mark: Thank you so much for your time, it’s been great to talk to you.
Justin: My pleasure Mark.
Mark: I shall be photographing you on the night so I shall see you soon.
Justin: I will give you some good poses.
Mark: (laughs) Thank you! It’s funny because I was just talking about photographing bands and how some come out and it’s all dark for three songs and others come out like Kiss and they just pose for the first three songs.
Justin: (laughing)
Mark: So I shall be expecting you to come out more like Kiss.
Justin: Yeah I think that’s definitely not gonna happen! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Justin: Having seen Kiss and watching them appear out of a Sphinx’s mouth, that will never be topped! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs) You’ve still got two weeks to come up with something.
Justin: That’s not fair it’s in my mind now! (laughs)
Mark: Thanks Justin, safe trip!
Justin: Thanks Mark.
Del Amitri 2023 Australian tour
Astor Theatre, Perth: Thursday February 16
Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide: Saturday February 18
Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane: Tuesday February 21
Palais Theatre, Melbourne: Thursday February 23
Enmore Theatre, Sydney: Tuesday February 28