Justin Currie
Justin Currie has just released his second solo album, The Great War (Ryko), since his old band, Del Amitri, went on hiatus. Currie is about to embark on a short club tour of select cities in the United States as well. The tour begins in Chicago at Lincoln Hall on June 10th (full dates below).
The thought of returning to the states is something Currie is excited by. “I like American breakfast. I love the states. It’s massively different from Europe.” he says. ” There’s always a culture shock when I go there, no matter how often I’ve been there. I find that really stimulating. It takes me a couple of days to get up to speed. But once I get up to speed I find it endlessly fascinating.”
Currie still resides in Glasgow, Scotland, the same city he grew up in. Living there brings him a lot of comfort. “It’s a pretty friendly place. I know a lot of musicians there. I know a lot of people, of my generation, with a very similar career trajectory as I have. They’re struggling, but they’re still making music. It’s great to have that camaraderie.”
When I asked Currie if he’s had to hold down a job since Del Amitri went on hiatus, he responded, “No. Thank fuck no!”.
Justin Currie Tour Dates:
06/10/10 Chicago IL Lincoln Hall
06/11/10 Minneapolis MN Fine Line
06/12/10 Denver CO Toad Tavern
06/13/10 San Francisco CA Café du Nord
06/15/10 Los Angeles CA Troubador
06/17/10 New York NY Joe’s Pub
06/18/10 Boston MA Paradise
06/19/10 Philadelphia PA Tin Angel
06/20/10 Washington DC Jammin Java
Justin Currie
Rock ‘n Roll Ghost: You’re kicking off your tour in Chicago. Can you tell me about your memories about playing here?
Justin Currie: All good, really. Chicago was by far the biggest town for Del Amitri in the 90s. The audiences were, a lot of times, 10x the size of the audiences we were playing to in other cities. We always had days off and had lots of fun. The very first time we played there, I think, was 1990, we did the Metro. There was like 900 or 1,000 people there – something we’d never seen before. They were just a really amazing audience. I have a very vivid memory, we had a meet and greet in the balcony after the show which took about an hour. We shoved the gear into the bus and then we went to a little bar just next door. When we walked into the bar the people started applauding because it was all the people who had been at the show. Which I’d never had since. It was totally fantastic. And ever since then we’ve loved Chicago.
Do you consider Del Amitri to be officially over?
Justin Currie: Not officially, because we never decided not to do anything ever again under the name Del Amitri. When we got dropped by Universal, which is what A&M turned into, we had to sit down and think…the last thing we wanted to do was go and chase another major recording deal and make another record. So we took some time off, at which time Ian (Harvie) started producing and I started making a solo record because I didn’t have anything else to do. Every time we’ve discussed it, neither of us has been eager to do Del Amitri. The other thing is, that we were never so big that promoters would be phoning up saying, ‘Here’s $100,000 to go and do a European tour.’ I don’t think we would do it. The idea of going back and doing the same venues would just be an exercise in nostalgia. We’ve written lots of new material, Ian and I, which we may release under the name Del Amitri but I don’t think we would tour. I don’t think it’s tourable. It’s just me and him bonking on digital machinery. It’s not rock ‘n roll. I think part of what happened was, we had an amazing recording deal on and off between 1984 and 2002 – that’s an awful long time. We were institutionalized and we came out of that and we quite liked being outside of the institution. It brings you a lot of freedom. At the same time, we’d felt like we really tried hard to make a classic rock ‘n roll record. We never felt like we’d succeeded. We didn’t think we were necessarily going to succeed if we kept trying. We’d made six or seven studio records that we were proud of, but we didn’t think we made a properly great album.
Justin Currie
Tell me about being a solo artist compared to being in a band?
Justin Currie: Initially, I didn’t want to release a record under my own name it seemed like the obviously egotistical thing for a lead singer from a band to do. But I eventually realized that it would be utterly pointless to put a record out under any other name. So, I very begrudgingly put the first album out under [my name]. Initially, I found the giging thing utterly terrifying because it was completely out of my safety zone and I was doing something that was diametrically opposite to what Del Amitri did. Del Amitri was kind of a variety rock show: lots of pop, lots of rock, lots of atmospheric guitar solos – it was a rock show, really. So what I did to circumnavigate the terror of the whole thing was I set up a nightclub called the ‘Monday Night Misery Club’. I invited people via text message to come down, pay a fiver to get into a really miserable venue, playing really miserable music. I did covers of the most miserable songs ever written. Like a cover of Grant Lee Buffalo’s “Happiness”. That was kind of making a joke out of the fact that I was embarking on this miserable solo project. I loved having full control over everything in the studio. I loved getting to really produce myself and make my own mistakes. Rather than making mistakes that come up via a democratic decision which is very frustrating. Especially when you’re right and someone else is wrong. The other thing I realized very quickly, when you step outside of a band because a band is, to a certain extent, a creative democracy. Everybody in a band is permitted and encouraged to put in creative input. Whereas, when you’re a solo artist, that’s not always the case. People have to wait for you to tell them what to do, or to guess what to do, musically. I realized pretty quickly that I was going to have to find a way of replacing the second and third voices that you get within bands. For example, the second voice in Del Amitri was what Ian played on guitar. Sometimes it’s deliberately undermining what the lyrics are saying and sometimes it’s complimenting it. That’s what makes bands really interesting, I think. You get those multiple voices going on at the same time. So I had to replace that by either doing overdubs myself or trying to play lead guitar or bringing in a string arranger so there was something for me to bounce off of. You miss that creative tension that you have within a band that often makes the best music on the whole. Which is probably why I prefer listening to Television than Tom Verlaine solo records or why I prefer listening to The Beatles rather than John Lennon.
What were your goals going into this new record?
Justin Currie: The goal was to make a record that wasn’t anything like the first record, so that meant I had to stop writing all these slow fucking songs, which I found quite difficult to do. So I concentrated on trying to write things that were more uptempo and were in major keys. That took me awhile to get anything decent because I really felt I had run out of…I’d written so many songs in Del Amitri over the years…hundreds of songs in that mode, that I just felt that I was repeating myself. I think that I achieved that. The only thing, when I finished the record, because I wanted to make a record that was still a variety as well and changes pace and changes mood, I realized that there was nothing acoustic on there at all. So that may have been a bit of a mistake.
Justin Currie
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Good interview! I am psyched for this tour! Love the new CD too.
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