From: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org (oppositeview-digest) To: oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Subject: oppositeview-digest V9 #66 Reply-To: oppositeview@smoe.org Sender: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk oppositeview-digest Monday, October 15 2007 Volume 09 : Number 066 Today's Subjects: ----------------- OV: Another article ["Porl" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:10:19 +0100 From: "Porl" Subject: OV: Another article From Here - http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=1595282007 No surrender for Del boy COLIN SOMERVILLE JUSTIN Currie has self-deprecating humour down to a fine art, describing Del Amitri as his group of twee schoolboy punks who got firmly up the nose of the Glasgow white-boy soul cognoscenti when they emerged more than 20 years ago. The band's demise in 2002 is similarly dismissed as "having run its clichid course", but then it has always been hard to dislodge Currie's tongue from his elegantly sideburned cheek. Not even when talking about his solo album, What Is Love For, released tomorrow. "I've never written songs for other artists, they have nearly always been about what I think," he says. "I'm 42 and all these songs were written when I was in my late 30s; I had been travelling the world leading a pretty free and easy life, then I was back home pretty much sitting on my arse for four or five years, and thinking, this is a bit shit. I paid for the record and made it myself, and thought, well, I am only going to put songs on it that I really like, and I don't care if there is nothing on it that will get played on the radio - that's why it has ended up sounding the way it does." Which is as warm and bitter as John Lennon's solo work, all richly resonant and recklessly honest. Currie is a borderline Beatles obsessive, one wall of a room in his Glasgow home shored up by a collection of everything that band ever recorded. He is a fan of Lennon's first solo effort, being attracted to the sparse production and spartan soul searching of the lyrics. Since 2002 Currie's profile has been low, save for an incognito venture with fellow Glaswegian Kevin McDermott under the guise of the Uncle Devil Show, and occasional ventures with soul and rhythm and blues revivalists Button Up. "It was just the odd thing, answering the call to get up on stage like the attention-seeking singer I am. But I have basically been going to the pub and watching football for five years," he says. He jokes that his former record company boss at A&M, with whom Del Amitri enjoyed their greatest success, with hits such as 'Nothing Ever Happens' and 'Spit In The Rain', was aghast when Currie played him 'Still In Love'. "It is basically saying that I am a self-obsessed bastard, and he just burst out laughing and said: 'You can't put that out!' "Often with Del Amitri songs I would write a cynical or bitter love song and there would be a twist at the end, or a hint in the song that the singer didn't really mean it. But this time I wanted the audience to have to try and guess whether the singer is a complete shit or not. I wanted them to think, well, maybe guys are like that, that's the way they think." The record's main talking point is 'No, Surrender', more than seven minutes of rasping, rapping invective, despairing at society's critical ills. It captures the zeitgeist of middle-class angst and rather cynically the pointlessness of protest. "The idea was to subvert the slogan No Surrender, because it has been co-opted by a section of the community here and in Northern Ireland, and I thought, well, if you just put the comma in the middle, you totally reverse the meaning." Currie says this is his most autobiographical record since the first two Del Amitri albums, saying success makes that kind of personal analysis all but impossible. "Everything gets easier, you are making a little money, doing what you love, and it's brilliant. But you don't write too many autobiographical songs after that." These days his concern is for the human condition, and after all this soul searching, Justin sides with Greta Garbo. "Things are easier to cope with on your own. There are a few that maybe aren't, like grief or bringing up children, but on the whole I think people want to be left alone." . What Is Love For is released on Rykodiscs tomorrow. Justin Currie plays the Ironworks in Inverness (0871 7894 173), Saturday, Edinburgh Liquid Room (0131-225 2564), October 15, and Fruitmarket, Glasgow (0141-287 5511), October 16 www.myspace.com/justincurrie ------------------------------ End of oppositeview-digest V9 #66 *********************************