Our time on this plane of existence is vanishingly short; life flashes by in the blink of an eye; just when you think you’ve learned how to use it, it’s gone. So a casual observer might consider it slightly perplexing that some random 40-year-old would dedicate several hours of the precious and mysterious and fleeting gift of consciousness to exploring and even chronicling the back catalogue of Del Amitri, Del A-fucking-mitri, long-forgotten purveyors of mid-90s “adult alternative rock music” who, like Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, made almost no impression on the collective memory despite being responsible for extensive and well-documented crimes against humanity. Yet the present author elected to embark upon precisely such a project, dear reader, and all for your sick satisfaction. So let’s, uhm, get cracking, shall we?
Del Amitri (1985)
After Margaret Thatcher established her Fourth Reich and fucked the Scotch over good and proper, unprepossessing human bag of pork scratchings Justin Currie and Highlander extra Iain Harvie took a terrible revenge by recruiting a bunch of interchangeable session musicians and forming Del Amitri in rainswept Glasgow. It started out all artsy and shit, as vanity projects are wont to, and the result was this execrable debut album, released to precisely zero fanfare in what, north of Hadrian’s Wall, passed for “the spring” of 1985. Suggestible music reviewers exultantly pegged them as “the bastard sons of XTC and Elvis Costello” but, if you want my opinion, Del Amitri is a bag of spam from start to finish, half an hour of tuneless, inexpertly made Smiths-adjacent folk-and-jangle pop with try-hard and frequently nonsensical lyrics written by a charity shop sweater-wearing Creative Writing undergraduate. Get it out of my sight.
Rating: Zero stars
Waking Hours (1989)
The suits swiftly realised that any royalties generated by whatever the fuck they just listened to wouldn’t cover the cost of a battered Mars bar, so Justin and his “team” wisely elected to change things up. The resulting rebrand is so breathtakingly cynical that it’s occasionally unclear if we’re even listening to the same vocalist, which is by no means a bad thing, given that the clever dick student union croon of the debut made me want to garrot myself with piano wire. Gone is the Montrose Morrissey, replaced by the Renfrew Rod St… no wait, Stewart’s already Scottish, isn’t he? Alright then, replaced by Rod Stewart, fronting 45 minutes of competently made and mostly forgettable Sitcom Rock. In light of the cacophony served up four years previously, it’s strikingly, almost suspiciously melodic, and closer “Nothing Ever Happens” is where the kilt-wearing cretin does Bob Dylan and proves that he had a way with words after all, god love him.
Rating: * *
Standout track: “Nothing Ever Happens”
Change Everything (1992)
They surely chose that title on purpose – not so much as an in-joke, more as a mordant middle finger to the record buying public. Because, of course, nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, changes on 1992’s Change Everything. As if to underscore the obvious fact that their spectacular reinvention from first to second album was driven purely by commercial considerations, Del Amitri defiantly stuck with the exact same money-spinning formula for record number three; by which I mean, a further fifty minutes of Central Perk Romcom Rock. The lyrics continue to narrate the perspective of a morose, spurned, but basically big-hearted and soulful bloke in a plaid shirt, and overall, an unsuspecting listener could be forgiven for thinking that said bloke looks and acts and emotes like John Rzeznik, rather than a whisky-quaffing wastrel who hasn’t seen the sun since 1976.
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “Always The Last To Know”
Twisted (1995)
You can tell that grunge had come and gone by this point, because the guitars on Twisted are thicker, and it occasionally sounds a bit like Soundgarden at their most wincingly corporate. And, ah yes, this album features the dreary and overrated “Driving With The Brakes On”, as well as “Roll To Me”, their biggest hit in the US, and one of the most abhorrent pieces of music ever recorded. One for your Christmas stocking, then, but anyway, why do Del Amitri’s album covers comprise images of “the band” glowering at you like thick-as-thieves outlaws ready to “take on the world”? The disingenuous pricks never kept the same lineup from one record to the next; it was always Currie and Harvie churning it out, then filling in the gaps with big haired, barely literate session musicians. Were they actually guitar-playing record executives who decided to cut out the middleman? If so, the resulting lack of personality explains why they sold fewer records than the frigging Lighthouse Family.
Rating: * *
Standout track: “Start With Me”
Some Other Sucker’s Parade (1997)
What I find striking, even intriguing, about Del Amitri is the sheer lack of mythology or backstory to their records. There’s no Billy Idol doing a load of Class As and detonating his cushy pop-punk career with a deranged concept album based on a William Gibson novel; no Radiohead cantankerously following up an art rock masterpiece with some noises what they made on their laptops. Del Amitri just soldiered on relentlessly, like Sisyphus heaving a boring radio-friendly boulder up an increasingly unaccommodating pop chart. Every two years, they retreated to some grim recording studio, dutifully fashioned twelve sub-Sixpence None the Richer rock songs, hawked them around established touring circuits like a reliable local construction company, and then proceeded to repeat the entire infernal process from scratch. How was anyone supposed to find the resulting “art”, or the persona attached to it, in any way compelling? Beats me, but what I do know is that, after 1997’s irredeemably dull Sucker’s Parade, the small number of people who gave a shit dwindled to precisely zero.
Rating: No.
Standout track: No.
To be continued in part NEVER, because I wouldn’t listen to Del Amitri’s post-2000 albums if the fate of the fucking universe depended on it.