From The Desk Of Del Amitri’s Justin Currie: Association Football

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: I don’t know of any other competitive sport whose rules are so simple and elegant that they allow the genuine artistic invention of participants (individually or collectively) within a free-flowing system to affect the outcome. Possibly tennis can produce such moments of inspiration, but not in the sustained and unpredictable way that football can. I’ll grant that most of the time, as with all sports, it is tedious and pointless in the extreme. But having watched Barcelona all this season on TV, I can tell you there are such regular moments of eye-watering beauty on the soccer fields of Spain just now that a grown man might weep for the joy of it. It’s like watching Picasso fell heavyweights with a few strokes of a brush.

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMyvBEGB7JU