Del Amitri

Glasgow, 1980, and a very slow start

Del Amitri formed in Glasgow in 1980 around Justin Currie, who was then still a teenager, and guitarist Iain Harvie. The name came from a film producer's credit, misheard and then misremembered until it stopped meaning anything at all — which suited a band whose early records sounded like nothing much else on either the Scottish post-punk circuit or the charts.

Their self-titled debut arrived in 1985 and did not sell. What followed was one of the longer gaps in British rock between a first album and a career: four years before Waking Hours in 1989, by which point the jangle had been replaced by something closer to country-inflected guitar pop with a sour tongue. Waking Hours reached No. 6 in the UK, and in 1990 "Nothing Ever Happens" — a song about provincial boredom that has outlived most of what surrounded it — reached No. 11.

Currie was born on 11 December 1964. By the time the band broke through he had spent most of his twenties waiting for it.

The chart years and the records that hold up

Change Everything in 1992 peaked at No. 2 in the UK and remains the band's commercial high-water mark; Twisted followed in 1995 at No. 3 and carried "Roll to Me", a two-and-a-half-minute throwaway that became their biggest international hit, reaching the top 10 in both the United States and Canada. Some Other Sucker's Parade reached No. 6 in 1997. Can You Do Me Good? came in 2002, and then the band stopped — not with an announcement so much as a drift.

Across that run they sold more than six million records worldwide and put five studio albums into the UK top 10. Currie spent the dormant years on solo records: What Is Love For in 2007, The Great War in 2010, Lower Reaches in 2013 and This Is My Kingdom Now in 2017.

The band reconvened for live work in 2013 and eventually made Fatal Mistakes, released in 2021 — their first studio album in nineteen years, issued through Cooking Vinyl, and a No. 5 UK entry. A companion set of Outtakes & B-Sides followed in 2022, as did the live album Every Night Has a Dawn. Fatal Mistakes material has stayed in the set rather than being politely retired after one tour, which is unusual for a band with this much back catalogue to defend.

The diagnosis, and the book that came out of it

Currie was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2022, having first suspected something was wrong when he struggled to hold a guitar plectrum. He made it public in March 2024 in a BBC interview on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, saying he could no longer play the way he would expect to and that he knew the condition would eventually stop him.

The diary he kept became The Tremolo Diaries: Life on the Road and Other Diseases, published by New Modern on 28 August 2025. It alternates between a 2023 American tour and a 2024 European run supporting Simple Minds, threaded through with his mother's death and his partner's stroke. It was a top-five Sunday Times bestseller, was named Music Book of the Year by The Herald and Classic Pop, made year-end top fives at The Guardian, Mojo and Uncut, and was shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2026. The Independent called it the finest music memoir of recent years.

At the Wigtown Book Festival on 27 September 2025 Currie talked about the practical arithmetic of carrying on — the shoelaces as much as the singing — and said he relies on his bandmates to tell him honestly when to stop. He asks them, fairly often, whether he is getting away with it. At the same event he confirmed the band were working on a new album and intended to tour behind it the following winter.

Where they stand in October 2026

The touring half of that plan has happened. Del Amitri played the United States in June 2026 for the first time since 2022, taking in South Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, Providence, Boston, New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia, selling out The Atlantis in Washington on 21 June.

The UK run was announced on 24 February 2026 and went on general sale on 27 February at 9.30am. Billed as Past To Present — Four Decades Of Their Greatest Music, it runs 17 dates from York Barbican on Monday 16 November to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Sunday 6 December and Glasgow Barrowland on Tuesday 8 December, with Sheffield City Hall, Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, Cambridge Corn Exchange, Bournemouth O2 Academy, London Roundhouse, Birmingham O2 Institute, Bath Forum, Manchester Bridgewater Hall, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Newcastle O2 City Hall, Edinburgh Usher Hall, Perth Concert Hall, Aberdeen Music Hall and Dundee Caird Hall between them. A further London date at O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire on 14 November sits outside that main sequence. Support was confirmed on 14 September 2026: the Glasgow five-piece Former Champ on every date bar 14 November, where Iona Luke opens.

The album itself has not been announced. Currie has said the band are attempting a double in the old shape — five songs a side — and that he is not certain they will manage it. Writing the diaries delayed the record, and the condition has slowed the work. At least one unreleased song, "War on What I Want", was already in the live set across the American dates in June.

What the show is now

The 2026 band is Currie on lead vocals and bass, Harvie on guitar, Andy Alston on keyboards and accordion, Kris Dollimore on second guitar and Jim McDermott on drums. Alston's accordion does more work than it sounds like it should, and is the thing reviewers keep singling out on "Nothing Ever Happens", "Be My Downfall" and "Tell Her This".

The American shows were lean and unfussy — no production to speak of, Harvie playing Washington in a black kilt and a leg cast, Currie's between-song talk noticeably more clipped than it used to be. The reviews from that run were not hedged or sympathetic: his singing was described as still expressive, and his bass playing as undiminished.