Justin Currie recorded and toured with Del Amitri and solo for 30 years and his travelogue The Tremolo Diaries perfectly captures the rhythm of life on the road. He talks to us here about combative crowds, the curious bubble you occupy and a recent shock diagnosis that’s forced some adjustments. This includes …
… hard-won rules for life on tour: “Never leave the boat, stay in the bubble, never interact with real life, always maintain low-level adrenaline.”
… seeing Dr Feelgood in ’77 “who passed the punk rock smell test”.
… choreographed abuse from rugby club members; a Liberal Party benefit with his Beefheart-like school band; following rock antagonists Jackyl at Woodstock 2; being pelted with toilet rolls at an ice hockey stadium in Minneapolis.
… the tensions between the Glasgow acts from the Gorbals and the “influx of enormous middle-class twats like us”.
… bands who look exactly like they sound.
… Edwyn Collins as style icon – fringe, corduroy, plaid – and how it took courage to walk round Glasgow dressed like that in the early ‘80s, “a scary place full of pitch battles and hooligans”.
… the loss of the pop tribes when pop music was subsumed into the entertainment business.
… Michael Stipe’s advice about life on the road and how that changes when you’re over 40.
… “if an audience doesn’t like you, the smaller that audience, the worse it is”.
… and his medical diagnosis in 2022 “and my negotiations with the disease”.
Order the Tremolo Diaries here: https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Tremolo-Diaries/Justin-Currie/9781917923002
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