EXCLUSIVE
Del Amitri
BACKSTAGE WITH DEL AMITRI We go behind the scenes at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall to catch up with Glaswegian pop rockers, Del Amitri, whose comeback tour has them sounding better than ever. Words Paul Watson Del Amitri are back, and we at Headliner are delighted about it. Formed out of Glasgow in the early ‘80s, frontman Justin Currie and co. have had 15 UK Top 40 singles, and five Top 10 albums, with Waking Hours (1989) achieving Platinum status in both the UK and Australia. The guys knocked it all on the head in 2002, and although Currie continued to make music, while fellow founding member, Iain Harvie, delved into the world of record production, the band were in the shadows until a reunion show was announced at Glasgow’s SSE Hydro in 2013, where 8,000 people showed up to see Currie, Harvie, Andy Alston (founder member/keys player), take to the stage with renowned drummer, Ash Soan, and guitarist, Kris Dollimore. Fast forward to present day, and that same line-up are back in a big way. They’ve just completed a run of shows in the UK: Newcastle, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, London, and the famous Barrowlands venue in their hometown of Glasgow. It’s been a blast, and it’s good to
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be back, they tell me, as we chat backstage over a cuppa at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall to talk touring, speaker technology, new music, and giant inflatable parrots. “I started a band called Del Amitri when I was at school, but that only went on for about a year, and we did alright, actually,” Currie reveals. “We did quite a few gigs, put out a flexi-disc with a fanzine, which was quite a big thing at the time. The two guitarists went to university, so I thought that was that, but then a journalist persuaded me to try and find other musicians; and I didn’t think you could do that, I thought bands only existed because magic only happens once, I was very romantic about it – and then I put some notices up in some music shops advertising for like-minded people, and met these total arseholes – guys who wanted to be rock stars, and didn’t have any discerning ability to be anything other than a clothes horse. “Finally, after two weeks of meeting people, fruitlessly, I met Iain [Harvie], and we clicked straight away – and within a week, we were
in a room writing songs together. Iain would play a part, and we would stick parts together; I would take away a cassette, write a load of lyrics for the rest of it, and we would come back and edit it.”
A Sound Choice
Del Amitri used to use Dick Rubel as their live sound guy who, although great at his job, was a little too hi-fi for their liking. “Dick was great; if you walked into a show, and he was mixing it, you would just know, as he had his own way of doing things,” Currie explains. “But we always wanted to sound a bit dirtier and heavier, and we found the Adlib [Audio] guys were really good at that. “I remember I went to see Texas; I had seen them before, and they had sounded OK, but they always had that kind of ‘80s voice and snare mix; and then I saw them again at [Glasgow’s] Barrowlands: I thought ‘who the fuck is their sound man – we want him!’ And it turns out it was Andy Docherty at Adlib. It turned out that we were on a different touring
