If ever a song consummated the uneasy Holiday From History ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall, then it was surely Del Amitri’s bouncily ubiquitous “Always The Last To Know”, a soft-rock-shitstain-by-numbers that nonetheless intriguingly envisaged a Hiroshima-style nuclear holocaust enveloping Summer Bay and vaporising the cast of Home and Away, with only Alf Stewart and assorted cockroaches surviving to tell the sordid tale. Everything’s great, liberal democracy emerged triumphant from its half-century confrontation with the cowed Ruskies, but whatever happened to all those nukes?
Anyway, not to worry, let’s return to the matter at hand; from his cortisone-spikingly nauseating transatlantic croon on that one song, I always imagined the lead singer of Del Amitri to look like Bon Jon Bovi, or that imbecile from the Goo Goo Dolls – anaemic, shimmering blue eyes, studiedly unruly dirty blonde mop. The band name alone tells you everything – Latinate, passionate, sophisticated – so surely this is yet more mid-90s Central Perk twatrock, brought to you by bootcut jeans-wearing gigolos from…
Wait, they’re from Glasgow? Yes, as it turns out, it was all smoke and mirrors; the lead singer of Del Amitri is some bloke called “Justin Currie”, a paunchy, pasty-faced Parkhead chippie owner who wouldn’t even trouble to spit on your steak and kidney pie while dourly dumping gravy all over it. But providence chose to bless this unprepossessing, highland-dwelling halfwit with the capacity to write unlimited quantities of sappy balladry, and so a succession of money-grabbing record executives gritted their gold-capped teeth and grimly accepted the unenviable assignment of marketing him as Ganymede-turned-folk-poet.
To make their task even more forbidding, Del Amitri had already blown their load on a debut album built around a mortifying impersonation of XTC, which obviously went down like a lead balloon with the record-buying public. Mercifully, the suits stepped in and forcefully refashioned their kilt-wearing cash cows as a coterie of wounded blokes in plaid shirts doing big hearted radio rock, and as always, the smart people in glass offices were bang on the money, so everyone got rich and lived happily ever after.
Which brings us to Change Everything, Del Amitri’s third album, and their second after selling out. It was released in 1992, the highpoint of Fukuyamian triumphalism, before Kurt Cobain spoiled the mood by offing himself, the selfish twat. The overall sound is… well, do I have to spell it out? The guitars are sometimes jangly, sometimes folksy, sometimes bright, sometimes sad, occasionally they even threaten to get a bit crunchy, but make no mistake, they occupy centre stage from the first to the last second, with regulatory pianos / harmonicas / banjos thrown in for the sake of what might generously be described as “variety.”
The lyrics are Hootie and the Blowfish levels of naff. All of them are about women, and these women are always in control, while Justin appears as a gravelly voiced, heavy-hearted, self-pitying cowboy, shat upon time and again by philandering jezebels who tell him “that they’re bored”, proceed to “make it” with notch-collecting scoundrels, and finally “walk out that door”, leaving him to drearily impart his hard-won learnings about “the first rule of love” – i.e. it’s a murderous addiction, whereby glass-hearted gingernuts get emotionally tortured and then take a terrible revenge by whining about it on MTV.
Ultimately, then, this is pulse-stillingly vanilla, and at no point is the listener in any real danger of experiencing authentic human emotion. At fifty fucking minutes, the welcome is also signally overstayed, and by the final third, it becomes fiendishly difficult to identify precisely which droopy rock ballad you’re being subjected to at any given moment. All the while, the creeping notion abides that what you are really enduring is an unsolicited soundtrack to a Jennifer Aniston Romcom about young divorcees finding love amidst the liquidation of Lehmann Brothers.
Del Amitri are easy targets, then, but does that make them bad? Well, as arduous and samey and cynically unadventurous as Change Everything is, it is also animated by a sustained sense of melody that I, for one, find annoyingly irresistible. Ostensibly trendier Scottish bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain squeezed, at most, two proper tunes out of their Caledonian assholes and onto their artsy masterpieces, but if you want my opinion, records like Psychocandy get very old very fast precisely because it’s all mood and ambience rather than songwriting chops.
Currie, by contrast, could seemingly churn out earworms to order. I don’t accept the oft-repeated thesis that he was a kind of undercover Morrissey, subversively concealing his benighted Glaswegian Weltanschauung beneath bushy-tailed Bon Jovian bottom-feeding, but nonetheless, he deserves some credit for envisioning nuclear fallout amidst summers up beyond the bay. Though if he’s referring to Ayr Beach, would anyone even notice?
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “Always The Last To Know”