'A few lights might distract the audience from how middle-aged we are' – Justin Currie on Del Amitri's return

I hastened to apologise to Justin, whose acquaintance I first made before Del Amitri had made a record, and was fortunate that if you are going to bump off a pop star’s old man in print, Currie is the one to choose, legendary as he is for his dark – and sometimes misinterpreted – sense of humour. He assured me that not only was he not upset, he hoped to catch his father in a lucid moment to share the joke, and that his mother Barbara and the rest of the family wouldn’t hate me either.

As one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies set of instruction cards designed to encourage artists to explore new directions in their work has it, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”, so let’s take that tale as an example of the Currie sense of perspective, which is what we are here to explore.

At the end of this month, Justin Currie and guitarist Iain Harvie are reconvening the band that made them famous for concerts at Edinburgh Castle and Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom. It is well over 30 years since Del Amitri took their first steps to stardom, and they have not made a record since 2002. In 2014, however, they appeared at Glasgow’s Hydro venue at the invitation of Celtic Connections, and there is talk of recording new material as well as offering glimpses of it at the shows.

Currie explains: “Iain approached me about six months ago saying that we should think about making another Del Amitri record, which I was dead against because I’ve not been in that headspace. But then I thought I should maybe try to write some Del Amitri songs instead of songs for a solo album and I did find it quite a different experience – I found I was thinking quite differently about what I was doing.

“So having written those things we’ll try to record them, but whether we release them or not is a different kettle of fish. There are things we did in the mid-90s when we were a pretty good band because of touring quite a lot, and that sound would be quite hard to better. A lot of money was spent on those records, with a lot of other talent. So I was sceptical about it, but we are going to give it a go.”

As to what the new material will sound like, we’ll have to wait and see.

“We’ll certainly rehearse one or two new things. We are trying to make these shows a bit different, even when you are essentially a ‘heritage act’, for our own sanity a couple of new things would be a good idea.”

With a single exception, the song Roll To Me, which was the band’s biggest hit in America and essentially a studio creation which Currie says the band has never been able to execute live, to his satisfaction at least, the singer says that there is nothing in the back catalogue that he dreads performing.

“All the well-known ones that we’ve got to do, there something there that makes them valid or musically justifiable. A good 40% of my solo set is old Del Amitri things and I enjoy playing them. Sometimes the lyrics seem to be trying a bit too hard – but that is something I am still guilty of.”

As for the look of the shows, Currie is not enthusiastic about the temptations of excess. “There are lots of options now in terms of production; you can start ramping up the visuals, because the sort of things that used to be unaffordable are now affordable. But those are the sort of things we try to avoid – we like the idea of being five blokes who walk onstage and do what we do.

“But maybe this year there will be a few more flashing lights. We are a few more years into our fifties, so there is the question of how much you resemble the person you were in your thirties. A few more flashing lights might distract the audience from how middle-aged we really are!

“When we did the Hydro we decided not to use video screens. I went to see Bruce Springsteen at Hampden and I found I was having to force myself to watch him, not the television show. I can see why they are necessary but I think it would have been much more involving without them, so that you have to focus on the performance. We’re '90s people and when we get offered all this digital technology it is a bit confusing for us – but maybe that’s what people pay for now.”

“And I would never want to do the Hydro again. It sounds terrible. It has great sightlines and the punters love the accessibility of it, but it is a concrete floor surrounded by glass and it is just not good enough for me.

“These places are not really for music, they are for getting lots of people in one place at once and making lots of money. The Hydro was supposed to be significantly better than the SEC, which is widely known as the worst sounding venue in the world, and it is not that hugely better.”

“On this tour that balance is important. The Castle is a huge gig for us, a really scary one, while Barrowlands is more of a ‘Yee-hah’ thing, so it is effectively two different shows.”

Completely immersed in the whole business of life as a musician, Currie talks animatedly – and entertainingly – about every aspect, from the personal side of song-writing through to the business of selling tickets. It has been all he has known since his teenage years, and yet his father’s career played no part in that at all, he says.

“There was a piano and a trumpet and a bassoon lying around, but we weren’t given lessons unless we specifically wanted them. My sisters learned oboe and violin, and I didn’t learn anything. There was classical music playing in the house, but I couldn’t have told you whether it was Brahms or Beethoven.

“Because my dad ended up working for Scottish Opera Chorus we were taken to quite a lot of operas and I hate opera even now. Sitting through four hours of actors declaiming that they are dying of TB in Italian is not my idea of entertainment.

“The first thing I got into was middle-of-the-road '70s pop music, Gilbert O’Sullivan and Simon and Garfunkel, when I was about 8 or 9. And then I discovered The Beatles when I was about 10 or 11. I didn’t consider playing an instrument until punk rock happened, and around then a guitar turned up in our house, because a friend of my father’s was moving and he stored all his furniture in a spare room. I started to learn basslines on that and then my sister’s mate bought a bass when he was laid off his job and he stored it at our house and he was happy for me to play it.”

With drummer Paul Tyagi, Currie formed what he calls “a secret band” when he was at school in Glasgow’s Jordanhill. “We were enormously beguiled by Orange Juice and Josef K. There is some VHS footage of us playing at the QM union at Glasgow University, and we have totally modelled all our moves on Josef K. We sound like the world’s worst Postcard band, with all the good things about Postcard missing.”

Currie lasted less than a year at the University of Glasgow, where he took English, Philosophy and Film and TV Studies. At the same time he was working in Glasgow’s then trendy burger joints, like 51st State on Sauchiehall Street and Back Alley off Byres Road, and playing with his band at the weekends.

“The thing I really hated about Glasgow University was that there were hardly any students from outside Glasgow at that time. It was full of middle class kids like me from posh schools like the one I went to and were all going to go into white collar careers. I had a job in a kitchen and that was my life – there were pretty girls and guys who had mad stories about being in the Merchant Navy.”

With Iain Harvie now on board, Del Amitri followed what Currie calls “the classic route” of putting an indie single out, doing a John Peel session and then getting signed to a major label that had an indie off-shoot.

To his astonishment even now, the band were able to go full-time. “We were given an advance of £25,000 which meant we could pay ourselves a wage, but we weren’t really professionals. There were no commercial considerations in our thinking, it was all based on what we thought was cool, and that led to a great deal of tension between the label and us.”

Del Amtri’s relationship with Chrysalis produced one album, recorded in Glasgow’s Park Lane studios.

“We had an extremely good producer, Hugh Jones. He was an expert at getting the best out of bands and very clever with structures and arrangements. Park Lane was the first studio in Scotland run by guys who could play and were up to speed with current trends, which you didn’t get in the older Glasgow studios.”

The album was not a commercial success though, and Del Amitri found themselves being adversely compared with bands on other labels associated with Chrysalis.

“The Housemartins put a huge amount of pressure on us when they had a number one single, and then Prefab Sprout’s When Love Breaks Down, which was released three times until it was a hit.”

Eventually released from their contract, Del Amitri went to America and toured, often sleeping on fans’ floors after gigs.

Says Currie: “It changed our perspective. We were meeting people who were into mainstream American rock music but also really liked our record, and that seemed an amazing liberating thing. They cheered the guitar solos and that never happened in the UK. The Americans had heard something in that first album that no-one in Britain had, least of all us.

“We saw the value of being entertaining rather than just being introspective and angst-ridden, so we came home and started writing things that sounded more mainstream and Del Amitri morphed into a completely different beast.

“We must really have had some commercial ambition after all, because at that point we thought: ‘Do we have to be a craven Postcard copyist band – why can’t we be Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers?’”

Currie says the American route to success is simply not available to young musicians now. “It used to be very cheap to work in the US but it is too expensive now to get visas. You have to feel sorry for new artists who just can’t afford to tour in America. Gone are the days when people got on tour buses for three or four months at a time. That’s a real shame because it is a complete life-changing experience – seeing the vastness of the country and living that rock’n’roll lifestyle.”

Signed to A&M, the album Waking Hours transformed their fortunes, particularly after third single Nothing Ever Happens provided the chart hit Chrysalis had been nagging them for.

“Looking back, being entertaining was always part of our remit. Back in the late '80s we thought that although we write quite serious songs, they sound quite bright and chirpy. Even though the lyrics aren’t particularly happy-go-lucky, the gigs should be a bit of a laugh. So there was a lot of tongue-in-cheek rock posing with leather trousers and drinking Jack Daniels onstage. You’re pretending to be Spinal Tap, but the danger is that you actually become Spinal Tap!”

“I’ve always been more conscious of the audience than Iain is. I found the second A&M album, Change Everything, really hard to make. It was the first time I’d gone into the studio when I knew there was an audience out there expecting something – and quite a big audience, because Waking Hours had been a platinum album. I found that really stressful and confusing.

“I didn’t find writing the songs hard, but I found the recording process really tricky.”

Currie himself never expected that Del Amitri would be plying their trade again, 16 years after they had effectively wound up the business.

“In 1989 I imagined that by now we’d be as big as The Beatles or absolutely nowhere. I wouldn’t have imagined there was anything in between, and it is probably the bit in between that is the most fun in a lot of ways.

“We called a halt in 2002 because we were selling fewer tickets, nobody wanted to buy our records, and there was no justification for keeping going. The phone didn’t ring for 12 years and then when it did it was with offers that meant we could make a lot of money. And that had never happened before.”

Characteristically, of course, Currie sees the darker side to the fact that older bands have found a new lease of life.

“At the very beginning of austerity some cultural commentator said that it would lead to an incredible state of cultural stasis because when people are skint they rely on what they know and don’t venture into the new. Very few new acts are breaking through now, and that is really tragic. And I feel totally implicated in that.”

However, it is not as if Justin Currie has been idle in the intervening years. His solo albums have enjoyed critical acclaim, if not Del Amitri levels of sales, and his live performances have covered the full gamut from solo gigs and with his own band, the darkly-named Pallbearers, to singing with the Ryan Quigley Big Band at Glasgow Jazz Festival and having his songs played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at The Spree in Paisley Abbey.

“I’m always chuffed to be offered anything that involves working with other great musicians. It is a very privileged position to be in when you have been around long enough you get offered these sorts of things, which are really interesting to do.

“But I don’t think about whether it is part of my musical development or something because that probably stopped when I was 15! You do these things because they look stimulating and are not run-of-the-mill. You’d be mad not to do The Spree thing if you are offered it because you get the chance to work with a top-class orchestra and an arranger who is going to spend a lot of time working on your material.

“I’m not on tour in America and Japan, so I have time to do these sort of things. I would much rather be a lot busier, but I love doing those one-off gigs. If I was doing solo gigs on the scale of the Del Amitri gigs that would open up all sorts of horizons, but you have to do things as well as you can within the limitations, and that, realistically, is as much about budget as ability.”

Justin Currie, the pragmatic popstar. A realist who can still throw a fine rock pose, possibly not entirely tongue-in-cheek. And still with more ambition that he usually cares to own up to.

“I wanted to be in a band that had a number one single and album on both sides of the Atlantic, but now I’d be content just to have a number one something. Just to be able to say it.

“I really know it doesn’t matter, but we had two number two albums and at the time I wasn’t that bothered. But looking back I’m really annoyed!”

Del Amitri play Edinburgh Castle on Saturday, and Barrowland Glasgow on July 28 and 29.