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: Television and film drama is full of brilliant acting performances that are never celebrated because they serve the lead players so effectively they become invisible to the audience. I love Laurie Metcalf and have ever since I first encountered her shoring up Roseanne Barr’s limited acting ability in her eponymous sitcom. She is the only actor I have ever seen convey the agony of being shot (in Mike Figgis’s Internal Affairs), and she almost makes Kevin Costner’s wooden district attorney believable in the scenes she shares with him in JFK. Actors like her probably do their finest work in the theatre, but those glimpses we get on the periphery of certain pictures are the only thing that makes watching mainstream Hollywood fare bearable.
Video after the jump.
