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 Caught in the Carousel - Music Reviews and More
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Justin Currie
UNEASY LISTENING: One of Scotland’s Great Gentlemen of Song Navigates the Hammered Heart
By David Porter
If you are of a certain age and reside in the Western world, chances are a number of Del Amitri songs pepper the soundtrack to your romantic history. Justin Currie, the band’s songwriter, vocalist and bassist, released his first solo album, What Is Love For, this past October.
It was the triad of Waking Hours, Change Everything and Twisted, released in 1989, 1992 and 1995, respectively, that landed Del Amitri on the shores of the pop world, particularly the singles “Kiss This Thing Goodbye” from Waking Hours and “Roll To Me” from Twisted. Always an anomaly in pop music, Del Amitri eschewed keyboards in the Eighties and recorded restrained power-pop anthems throughout the band’s career that drew from the Beatles, Jackson Browne, early Seventies Rod Stewart, particularly Never A Dull Moment and Every Picture Tells a Story, and late-Seventies Rolling Stones, particularly Some Girls. The band had an affinity for American Country, and they swirled its flavor through many of their muscular, plangent pop confections. Del Amitri’s closest counterpart here in the States might have been the Gin Blossoms, whose booze-soaked tribute to Big Star, New Miserable Experience, from 1992, is still one of the best albums of the same period and perhaps the closest American record, in sound and spirit, to Del Amitri’s jangling tales of shipwrecked love affairs and crow’s nest yearning; a list of the band’s current inheritors might include Minibar and the Thrills.
“Nobody knew if we were a rock or pop band,” Currie told the New York Daily News in November of 2007. “Maybe we weren’t very sure, either.” After 2002’s Can You Do Me Good? the band packed it in. “We’d been trying to get off the label (A&M) for the previous four years. It took that long to make the last record because the company kept rejecting songs.”
What Is Love For is rife with the ardor and crack craftsmanship Currie and his accomplices brought to six albums. The record sounds lush and spare at the same time, a feat one associates with Burt Bacharach, Nick Drake and early REM. An album about the failure of romance and the aftermath of some of its particular failures, What Is Love For is evocative of Aimee Mann’s recent work, particularly Lost In Space, the Pernice Brothers’ Overcome by Happiness, Joe Pernice’s Chappaquiddick Skyline, and some of the ballads on Everything But the Girl’s Amplified Heart. This is adult contemporary music in the truest sense of the description, a map of the brittle end.
“I think that these songs represent the end of my youth,” Currie says. “I wanted to allow my world-weariness to roam unchecked. And I wanted to be straight about love – about how I can’t explain it, control it, or figure it out.”
In its conception and execution, What Is Love For is reminiscent of Painted From Memory, Elvis Costello’s1998 record with Burt Bacharach, in the craftsmanship endemic to its songs and in the strain and urgency of Currie’s vocals (and in Currie’s break from the dense, propulsive pop of Del Amitri). Just as Painted From Memory features some of Costello’s finest singing, Currie strains to match the emotional demands of his new songs, and his voice, always one of the more salient and inviting elements of Del Amitri’s music, is the centerpiece of the album, particularly on spare piano ballads like “If I Ever Loved You,” the album’s “Jealous Guy,” and “In The Rain,” its final track. The strings on the title song sound as if they were imported entirely from Stevie Wonder’s “If It’s Magic,” from Songs in the Key of Life, and they underline Currie’s urgent vocal. “Walking Through You,” one of the album’s many gems, lifts its bass line and percussion from Sly Stone’s “Family Affair,” while the saxophone that punctuates “Not So Sentimental Now” and “Something in That Mess” recalls the Waterboys prior to Fisherman’s Blues. The album’s overall effect is that of jazz vocal and pop records from the Fifties and Sixties: it’s Currie’s version of In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, a Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66 album stripped of its jet set sunniness.
Love’s disappointments and their accompanying ghosts float through the record. “Only love makes killing time so cruel,” Currie sings on “Only Love” – “the hours come, and you drag them ‘round with you/when she is gone/the whole hangdog house aches/and you hum along to the sound of heartbreaks/you think you hear in every song.” What Is Love For is a weather map of the vestiges of exhausted, desiccated relationships and their travels: “Lovers leave their traces, like jets across the sky/they find in all those faces/lines they recognize.” On “Walking Through You,” Currie sings, “In the evening/when you’re blue/you will feel me/walking through you/when you’re crying/that’s my cue…”
What do we talk about when we talk about love? Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet: “…that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” What Is Love For is an album concerned with the failure of Rilke’s difficult task, a dive into the wreck.
Describing What Is Love For, Currie says, “…it’s ostensibly bleak, but underneath, there’s a Morse code melody that’s telling you something else. It’s my Scottish romanticism, heavily clothed in a shrug or resignation. The Scots believe that life is pitiless and harsh, but that deep inside us all there’s a churning sea of desire and optimism that’s usually suppressed by drink, stoicism and bravado.”
Please join us for a Glasgow pub-crawl with one of the finest songwriters of our era. A brief interview with Justin follows his Consummate Top 10. Many thanks to Mr. Currie for his effort, his enthusiasm, and his erudition.
Justin Currie's Consummate Top 10 Glasgow Pubs
1. The Persian's Forehead
An enormous hangar-like place tucked down a grim Dickensian back lane in the most sullen and sallow quarter of the East End, The Persian's Forehead features low-lifes of every persuasion: stabbers, dealers, pimps and perverts - dipsomaniacs all - begging for another taste of the landlord's special, Black Thunder, a mixture of Guinness and red wine. I wouldn't recommend going here without a weapon of some sort - perhaps a saw or a table leg.
2. Dorothy's
Dorothy's lies in a low-ceilinged basement on Sauchiehall Street (pronounced “Sickle Street”) at the bottom of a flight of steps so steep and uneven that many customers and staff-members either permanently limp or use crutches. Dot is famed for her repartee; her elliptical Polish riddles a particular delight. I once played here on Valentine's Day and was assaulted in the toilets by a one-eyed ballerina called Mary. She tried to kiss me and strangle me, but I fought her off with judicious use of my elbows.
3. TGIF
Reputedly an abbreviation for Thank-God-I'm-Fucked-Up, TGIF is a magnet for Glasgow's burgeoning crack addict community. It's a great place to hang out on Sunday mornings when Pol, the DJ, can be heard playing four-hour sets consisting of side one of Off The Wall over and over again. There are menus on the bar purporting to represent actual food being cooked somewhere on the premises, but nobody's ever seen any – and besides, no one is ever hungry. And don't use the disabled toilet. It's a wormhole into the next world.
4. The Union
Though I rarely darken its door nowadays, The Union was the venue for all of my formative romantic experiences. With its candle-lit circular tables and old 1950’s movie posters, it remains unchanged since its 1970’s heyday. The vibe, too, is the same. At every table sits an increasingly desperate girl who is usually reading a French novel in translation. Boys approach them warily and offer them refreshments. The general rule is, if you don't get glassed in the face – you're in.
5. The Belgrano
A stylish and relaxed original art deco cocktail bar, The Belgrano is the hang-out for the 21st century yuppie, now called uppies since none of them are a day under fifty.
Folk fiddle with the latest mobile phone, surrounded by shopping sacks and huge clumps of car keys while extraordinarily camp waiters deposit twenty-pound drinks at their booths. Worth a visit to watch Glasgow's political elite get cross-eyed on Champagne cocktails and crawl to the bathrooms over a gilded carpet while trailing vomit from their Prada shoes. I once met Sean Connery in here, and he looked at me with a mixture of disgust and desire before telling me to go away and fuck my mother with a four-iron (in an accent so unreal I thought I was dreaming).
6. Secret Police
This is the archetypal Glasgow "style bar", characterized by a singular absence of style in decor, fare and clientele. I only frequent such places to gather material for songs of loathing and disdain and the very, very cheap lager.
7. McMac's
Formerly a student haunt with decent music and a beer garden, McMac’s has lately become a meeting place for artists and writers who, through no fault of their own, have become has-been alcoholic bores. Any night of the week you'll find a coterie of characters, ten sheets to the wind, willing to relate to any who will listen their sordid tales of disappointments, miscalculations and semi-successes, which usually involve fucking up commissions from rich people too drunk to know trouble when they see it. The paintings on its walls serve as a gallery of failure and a warning to any who venture here who still harbour hope, optimism and talent. I am to be found there most nights of the week, at the bar, chewing my wrist and catching my reflection in the shining bottles, the familiar mantra turning in my head, ‘oh, God, oh God, oh, God’.
8. Dead Turkey
Technically this is a club, and an illegal one. Situated below the monstrous, towering concrete supports for Prince Charles's bridge, the Turkey specializes in cheap wine and music so obnoxious that the only visitors are the mentally ill. I had my 21st birthday party here. I remember little apart from the odour and somehow managing to chip my tooth on a plastic cup containing nothing but vodka and a gay girl's spittle.
9. My Place
My Place has a bar and a row of beer-filled refrigerators and ladies' and gentlemen's toilets. I have a rota on my bedroom wall, delineating the days when I clean, the days when I drink and the days when I serve myself. I don't know if it's profitable but I know if they close it will be a sad, sad loss.
10. The Kipper Club
Finally, an establishment so classy, so elegant, so je ne sais quoi, that I have never been let in. I sometimes press my nose up to the stained-glass window and wonder about the pleasures pursued within. Are the women fabulous, the men chivalrous? Is the company delectable? Are the drinks divine? The doormen stand like celestial sentries, never betraying a glint of compassion. You can hear the sound of laughter and congratulation ring out into the street when its doors briefly open to digest or disgorge another party of sophisticates. The Kipper Club is where it's at and I am anywhere but there, but where it's at is stiff and stuffy and stupid and I don't really care.
INTERVIEW
Caught in the Carousel: Can you discuss the recording process and your songwriting process for What Is Love For and how it differed from the process in Del Amitri? What was it like to produce the record, and was it different working with Iain Harvie now that Del Amitri is defunct (or on hiatus)? Does the new record feel like a progression or a new beginning?
Justin Currie: I don't like the term progression applied to an artist's output over long periods. It implies a lifelong striving for one particular kind of perfection, which sounds like the folly of the deranged. It comes mainly, I think, from the Beatle myth, where it is useful shorthand to describe their creative ascent from Please Please Me to Sgt.
Pepper. It's much less useful applied to, say, Neil Young, whose recording career is so satisfyingly rich in troughs, peaks and repetitions. Anyhow, I digress. Producing yourself is a bad idea on the whole. You have universal control on the one hand and a lack of discipline and motivation on the other. You make no compromises (or so you tell yourself), but so many compromises made in collaboration are actually enormous leaps of improvement or refinement. I initially worked with Iain as a player after I'd tracked some bass and drum parts in my living room and lost my way, but it was too strange for both of us. He was in his role as session player, and we'd never worked with one another on that basis, so it was a screwy dynamic. Where on a Dels album we'd have been tense and possessive and bickering over details, on my stuff we just had a laugh and shrugged and said, "That'll do, won't it?" Which is hardly the atmosphere required to make decent records. He helped more as encourager and engineering advisor, I guess, and only plays on “Gold Dust,” which is really a late-period Dels demo. And as for feeling like a new beginning? I see it as a side-step.
Caught in the Carousel: The ambiguity of the title is very clever: without the question mark at the end of the phrase, one might infer that the album is the answer to or explanation of the title (although the question mark punctuates the title of the song itself). I’d like to provide you with a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (I can’t take all the credit it for its discovery, much of it was also written on a poster advertising the School of Visual Arts, ubiquitous this past autumn in a few subway stations here in NY) and ask you to respond to it with the album’s title (and the album as a whole) in mind:
“…I want to beg you, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day to the answer.”
Justin Currie: That's a lovely and apposite quote and one of which my album is entirely unworthy! To be frank, I omitted the question mark on the album title because I think they are distracting, redundant and precious on album art, a lesson I learned on the last Dels album, Can You Do Me Good? It always irritated me because you just don't need it to define the meaning, so why have it clutter up the design? I left it on the song title just to have a typographical difference between the two entities. But you're right; it gives the album title a satisfyingly defiant ambiguity, which I liked.
I only titled the record What Is Love For after being lobbied to do so by Jac Holzman at Warners (owner of Rykodisc). It was originally called Rebound, but Jac had me swap two tunes and jiggle the sequence, and he felt the original title was shopworn and "WILF" (ahem...), just the blindingly obvious choice. I cringed when he made the suggestion because I knew he was right, so I put up a fight for a few months just to save some pride! It was always sort of a concept album, anyway - so why not be honest and label it like one?
Caught in the Carousel: You’ve mentioned Curtis, Plastic Ono Band, After the Gold Rush and Nina Simone and Piano as “four major reference points.” In addition to these records, was there a particular sound you were trying to create? Was there any music in your head that you couldn’t get on the album, regardless of your efforts? Are there other influences, outside these reference points, that found their way to the record? Did anything about the record – the writing, the recording, the production or the final mix – surprise you? How so?
Justin Currie: I have mentioned those records more to illustrate my very snobbish opinion of solo albums per se. They are rarely any good at all, and those records are the pinnacle of the sub-genre of ex-band player/writers stepping into the single spotlight (ok, Nina was never in a band, but you get my drift). Dylan or Joni Mitchell were irrelevant to me because they were always one-man bands. Of course all of the above are unassailable, but that's sort of the point. There were many more minor albums that were also inspiring, but why aim for the possibly achievable? The sound I was aiming for was half-way between the dry-as-a-bone minimalism of Plastic Ono Band and the soupy, strings-and-acoustic productions on Lucio Battisti's Emozioni. God knows where it ended up, but a man's got to have some kind of plan, does he not? I think I got everything on there that I wanted to and, I hate to say this because it's so fucking arrogant, but the finished record didn't surprise me at all because it was exactly what I wanted from the start. Of course, if you think it's shit, that's not arrogant at all - just stupidly candid.
Caught in the Carousel: Do your lyrics ever begin with an image? If so, please discuss some of the lyrics on What is Love For, from genesis to revision and completion.
Justin Currie: A big failing of mine is that I too rarely employ strong visual images in the songs. Everything is so internal - testament to my obsessive self-absorption. Where are the trees, streets and muddy rivers? The problem I have with imagery is, firstly, it is a magnet for cliché; secondly, it's appallingly hard to render conversationally. My aim is
always to have the lyrics within the realm of a personal exchange between myself and the listener (or a prosaic internal monologue), so when you start to insert poetic or cinematic allusion - CLUNK - the listener can hear the artifice and they'll stop believing you and start hearing the mechanics of the writing process. That being said, I allowed myself a bunch of visual metaphors to be the genesis of "Still In Love" just to show I could do it, to be honest, and I'm very fond of the symbols in the middle-eight of "Something In That Mess."
Caught in the Carousel: Any thoughts regarding your next album – in terms of its sound, lyrical and musical themes, production, etc. – you’re willing or able to discuss?
Justin Currie: Oh, God - can we wait until this one's in its grave? I mean, I have songs, but a pivotal idea? That'll take some mulling over...
Caught in the Carousel: Del Amitri comes from a long line of great Scottish pop, which includes bands such as Aztec Camera, Belle & Sebastian, Blue Nile, Camera Obscura, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, the Silencers, Simple Minds, Teenage Fanclub and Travis. What is it about Scotland, and particularly Glasgow, that makes it the provenance of these bands and their music?
Justin Currie: These kinds of questions are so much better answered by music writers than musicians. My stock answer, which may or may not contain some kernel of truth, is that the influence of Irish/Catholic culture in the West of Scotland creates a friction that is both creative and colourful. We probably do also have an all-pervasive melodic Celtic sensibility, but it's a slippery entity and hard to see how it disseminates throughout the culture. We have a thing in Glasgow called "the patter," which is a sort of localized concoction of bravado, wit and profanity, where someone's character is often evaluated not by their job, style or decorum but by the originality of their conversational cart-wheeling. Again, I think that is as much from the Irish story-telling tradition as the Scottish rural and industrial dialects. But what do I know? My patter's shite, so I have to sweat my efforts into pithy pop songs.
DISCOGRAPHY
Justin Currie
What Is Love For (2007)
Del Amiti
LPs
Del Amitri (1985)
Waking Hours (1989)
Change Everything (1992)
Twisted (1995)
Some Other Sucker’s Parade (1997)
Can You Do Me Good? (2002)
Compilations
B-Sides – Lousy With Love (1998)
Hatful of Rain: The Best of Del Amitri (1998)
20th Century Masters (2003)
Collection (2007)
The Uncle Devil Show
A Terrible Beauty (2004)
INTERNET
www.myspace.com/justincurrie
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