A few years ago, I stood outside Glasgow Barrowlands with fellow Del Amitri fan Noeleen Kelly following an amazing gig and spoke to keyboard and accordion player Andy Alston. ‘Is Justin okay?’ I wanted to know.
By Miles Salter
I was enquiring about the health of the band’s intriguing and ridiculously talented singer and songwriter, Justin Currie. Currie’s hand shook uncontrollably at the gig, which was one of the best I have ever been to. Alston gave little away but said the band leader ‘has a condition.’
Alston was protecting his bandmate’s privacy, but as time went by Currie became more open about the fact that he has Parkinson’s, an awful degenerative illness. He made a radio programme about it for BBC Radio 4, and started to give interviews, including some for television.
His debut book, The Tremolo Diaries, published a few months ago, focuses on a couple of recent tours – one opening for Barenaked Ladies in America in 2023, another supporting Simple Minds on a European tour in 2024, whilst struggling with the realities of living with Parkinson’s. He’s given his illness a name – Gavin – aka the ‘ghastly affliction.’
The book starts with a note to his long-term partner Emma, asking ‘shall we just start over?’ It ends with a similar kind of nostalgia, Currie imagining he can go back to being 26 again. Both his parents have died, and the grief is held up to the light at points in the book.
Emma has also suffered from ill health, incapacitated from a stroke, and the book is punctuated by Currie’s worry for her. He turned 60 a year ago and is peering into the void. Music keeps him going but he’s painfully aware of the grip that Parkinson’s has on him. ‘My fire is slowly going out. Let it all die,’ he writes at one point.
Currie is a highly intelligent man, and a shrewd observer of the world around him. Anybody who read his online tour diaries over the last fifteen years will know what a funny, acidic observer he is.
The tone of Currie’s writing has not changed that much. He’s a defiant observer, watching the world from a safe distance and spitting into the gloom. His objectivity is one of his strongest points. Flying first class for a gig in Dubai, he marvels at life’s unfairness. ‘Families are being ripped apart on the ground in Gaza while I will dine finely in the kingdom of the air.’
Elsewhere, he’s bracingly funny. ‘Grunge was such a horrible genre. Britpop looks so fresh and fun in comparison. Mind you, so does shingles.’ He’s brilliant at observing masculine behaviour. A tooled up American, complete with hunting knife and holstered pistol, results in a caustic summary. ‘I seethe at this exhibition of wounded, snarling masculinity,’ Currie writes.
I once asked the singer, on the only occasion when we spoke (for a magazine interview), if he believed in God. His answer was emphatic and simple. ‘No.’ Currie’s world view is simple: humankind’s time on earth is, essentially, without meaning. ‘Are you suffering from a deficit of meaning?’ he asks on his website.
The word ‘useless’ crops up in his songs: ‘…the useless descent of the rain…’ he sings on Sometimes I just have to say your Name. In his scathing satire of modern consumerism, ‘No, Surrender,’ he sings ‘so your useless contribution will be remembered.’ This song marks him out as the J G Ballard of the pop world, commenting on modern man’s endless appetite for distraction from life’s harsher realities.
There are traces of this in the book, as Currie contemplates the world’s ghastly future, ecological collapse, and the last days of capitalism. Currie has always been drawn to melancholy.
At one point in the book, he refers to Philip Larkin, the gloomy but brilliant poet, and I can’t help thinking the two artists are closely linked. ‘He made sadness beautiful,’ Clive James wrote of Larkin, but the same could be said of Justin. His solo oeuvre is often despondent and sometimes wretched, but something really life affirming shines through.
Even his anthemic songs with Del Amitri are full of shadows. The lyrics to one of their biggest hits, Always The Last To Know, which sounds abundantly happy, was described by The Scotsman as ‘desperately sad.’
Years ago, I heard Currie being interviewed by Terry Wogan on BBC Radio 2, promoting one of his solo albums. Currie was utterly charming, joking, sparring light-heartedly with the Irish presenter. And yet, his website was full of dark, sardonic rumination. ‘Welcome to hell,’ intones the opening sentence.
It felt like two people were at large, inhabiting the same persona. This turns out to be a theme in his writing. Two People, a song from This Is My Kingdom Now, Second Staircase, and Half Of Me all deal with this theme – the duality, the split personality.
It’s something that has occurred to other artists. Patricia Highsmith, whose most famous invention was the two faced, murderous Tom Ripley, wrote a book called The Two Faces Of January, exploring the theme of duality. Highsmith was not a nice person – some think she was a sociopath. Currie is much more grounded and self-aware, but like Highsmith is drawn to the idea of duality.
This theme crops up in the book, once again. Recalling a childhood holiday with his family, he has mixed feelings about his childhood self: ‘…looking across a timespan of fifty years and I can feel the sweetest traces of that little boy inside me. Sometimes I like him very much. But often I see he was probably a right little c**t.’
Reactions to the book have varied. John Niven, novelist and music fan, reckons it’s brilliant, describing it as ‘one of the most extraordinary rock memoirs I’ve ever read.’ But a fan on social media found it all tedious: ‘boring’ was their verdict. For me, it’s somewhere between these two extremes.
Currie has it in him to write a truly superb book about a life in music. The Tremolo Diaries, unfortunately, is not that book. It’s a little too mundane. All the details of museums he visits, and the people he meets – it’s like a very long postcard that is occasionally stunning.
Sometimes, it feels a bit like deflection, a smokescreen that conceals something far bigger. Currie has whole worlds inside of him, experiencing and reflecting far more than most people, and has lived a compelling life, if a little too influenced by the luxury he’s experienced. (‘Look at me, is it written on my face, the luxuries I’ve known,’ he sang on ‘Just getting by’).
The moaning about second rate food in The Tremolo Diaries wears thin after a while, as does his complaint about not being well paid, recently repeated to Jools Holland. But really, he’s had one hell of a life. First world problems.
When he is revealing about his emotions, or the early history of Del Amitri, the book is compelling. Currie is a private person and clearly wishes not to reveal too much. ‘Talking about life is hard. It does not come naturally when you’ve spent your life scrupulously avoiding discussing your personal life in public,’ he writes at one point.
He wants to be seen but then wants to withdraw. ‘Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide,’ said Donald Woods Winnicott, wisely.
The book is at its best when Currie lets a little fear and vulnerability come through. The second half seems more relaxed, as if he were getting into the confessional aspect a little more, but overall, it feels like he’s chucking out some snacks while holding back the banquet. ‘You can come this close,’ he seems to say, ‘but no further.’
The book would be stronger if he adopted the same vulnerability that infused one of his most revealing songs. In My Heart, The War Goes On, a bonus track from The Great War implied the damaging fallout from his parents’ divorce. It’s typically excellent, and one of his most potent songs.
Vulnerability is costly, but in the end it’s the one true bridge between writer and reader. Nick Cave handles this well in his Red Hand Files, answering letters from fans, leafing through some of life’s big questions.
Publisher Pete Selby says Currie has enjoyed talking about the book at events, and photos of the songwriter with fans on social media have shown a beaming Currie, perhaps more in the moment than he used to be. The author has said that the whole process has been ‘therapeutic.’
All of which gives me hope that, perhaps one day, the stunning book that Currie clearly has inside of him will emerge – the one where he allows the reader into his vast internal universe, and writes beautifully about family, music, love, pain, addiction, friendship, Glasgow, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, his love of New York, fame, ageing and emotion.
One hopes that The Tremolo Diaries is merely a prequel of sorts. You’ve got it in you, Justin. Courage, mon brave.
The Tremolo Diaries is out now, published by New Modern and distributed by Simon & Schuster
An anthology of Justin Currie’s solo songs, They’ll Never Get To Me, is set for release 5 December 2025.
Del Amitri play Glasgow Barrowlands on 23 December 2025.
Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. He fronts the band Miles and The Chain Gang.
