Del Amitri star Justin Currie on his 'scary' Parkinson's diagnosis

When Currie straps on his bass guitar and leads his band around a 16-date UK tour, culminating in a much-anticipated Christmas homecoming double date at Glasgow’s Barrowland, it will be the first headline tour he’s done since going public with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease earlier this year.

The musician revealed his shocking diagnosis on a Radio 4 documentary, Tremolo, last summer, a year after doctors told him he had the neurodegenerative disease. As if this news wasn’t devastating enough, the fates had not finished with Currie nor those he loved. In a two-month period around his diagnosis, his mother received a terminal cancer diagnosis and died shortly afterwards. Then, unbelievably, his long-term partner suffered a catastrophic stroke, which has left her with significant care needs.

When we meet in a cafe in Glasgow’s West End, Currie has both the demeanour of a man who knows he can only accept his lot, and one who knows he still has plenty to be grateful for.

“One of the most important things is not to be jealous of your past,” he says. “Don’t think about when you could sing better or play better. If you don’t do that and don’t really focus too much on the future, you can be quite content.”

Currie’s past is well garlanded. His band have scored six top ten albums in the UK, and are one of the few Scottish acts to trouble the US singles top ten, with their 1995 track Roll To Me. They’ve sold six million records, and his songs have taken him around the world and back again more than a few times. He’s written half the songs for a new Del Amitri album and toured Europe as support for Simple Minds in the spring. Business as usual, then. Apart from Gavin, the new member of the band.

“Gavin is the shaky hand,” he says, momentarily cupping his only occasionally trembling right mitt in his left. “Sometimes he is very well behaved and sometimes he’s a very naughty man. If something has made me nervous or stressed or excited, he’ll kick off. He signals to the wider world what is going on in my conscious and subconscious mind which is quite scary. So I do things like stuffing him in my pocket.”

Currie has even conceded a place at the songwriting table to the neurological interloper, saying: “When you have Parkinson’s it’s like someone else taking control of you, someone starts taking over. And you have to let that guy do some of the writing as well. You can’t fight against that.”

His tremor is, for the time being, most notable still only in his right hand. He’d spoken in the past about noticing a dip in the dexterity of his fingers when playing guitar, which led to him seeing a doctor and embarking on the eventual road to diagnosis. Aware that people were noticing his tremor on stage, he held back on going public so as not to concern his elderly mother.

“There was a big relief initially knowing that people knew about it because it meant I didn’t need to hide the tremor so much,” he says. “For whatever reason, whether it’s medication or an idiopathic thing, or a condition like Parkinson’s, they’re sort of socially embarrassing. People get freaked out by tremors, almost like they are instinctively physically repulsed by it. They can make you look really ill. So it was a relief knowing people wouldn’t be staring at it anymore, going: ‘I wonder what that is. Is he pished? Is he nervous?’”

Some of Del Amitri’s most popular tunes, such as Be My Downfall and Driving With The Brakes On evidence Currie at his juxtaposed best. They’re love songs built on the deadliest quicksand: sweet-bitter rather than bittersweet.  The new songs, he says, are different. “Some of them are a bit bleaker, which I actually quite like, because I have the authority to write something bleak now more than I did 20 years ago, when bleak might have been a bit of a pose. All I have ever really tried to do is write about what I know – so it’s natural.”

The tour will begin with an unusual warm-up gig at Glasgow’s Tramway, to mark the launch of a special edition whisky, struck by The Glasgow Distillery. At £70, the single malt is at the pricier end of band merchandise, although Currie notes the band insisted on lowering ticket prices for their tour, which, he says, had a demonstrably positive impact on the pace of tickets sales. “The fumes alone will get you dizzy,” he says. “Iain (Harvey, band co-founder and lead guitarist) did a lot of research on it. It’s his pet project, really. And it’s probably more environmentally friendly than a hoodie.”

Despite his determination to live in the present, the environment is one of Currie’s worldly concerns. Prevailing political climates have influenced his songs from the get-go. On their most recent album, 2021’s Fatal Mistakes, Close Your Eyes And Think of England, was a post-Brexit howl.

He jettisoned social media last year and watches the TV news no more than once a week. “The vast majority of UK political news is soap opera regardless of the party,” he says. “None of it is really about anything other than personality and petty arguments. Politics has become irrelevant and economics, too, in the face of the climate catastrophe, which is a hopeless, unstoppable, terrifying behemoth.

"Even writing songs about it is pretty redundant, because everyone knows it. Yet we still spend vast amounts of energy and time on fruitless activities, whether it’s buying bitcoin or streaming a Kylie Minogue song. Actually, maybe that’s unfair on Kylie,” he says, smiling. “Streaming a Del Amitri song.”

Maybe so but for two hours every night up and down the country in the coming weeks, everyone will be allowed to forget the perils of the future and the past . . . including Justin Currie. 

Del Amitri play Tramway on November 30; Inverness Leisure Centre December 17; Aberdeen Music Hall Dec 18; Perth Concert Hall December 19; Edinburgh Usher Hall Dec 20; Glasgow Barrowland, Dec 22/23.
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