There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Currie: Sure, it’s the purest from of satire, and it’s certainly brave and very funny. But what separates South Park from its less acerbic competitors is its profanity. It is scintillatingly profane, majestically profane. Using such young characters is a clever device that gives Trey Parker and Matt Stone great freedom because their form of profanity is at once both innocent and entirely subversive of the adult world it satirises. And like Chris Morris, the U.K.’s only true satirist, South Park lampoons the medium at the same time as the subject matter. It tells you that nothing is to be trusted. And, as far as I am aware, they are the only people (apart from the U.K.’s Private Eye magazine) who took on the Danish cartoon controversy and made sense of it.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buWnC8U5v_E
