Trapped in a comical maze

‘Ten minutes after seeing the neurologist, I can’t get out of the car park. At Glasgow Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, I drive round and around a little multi-storey block for half an hour, unable to discern an exit. [. . .] So, I begin the year of dread and hope, trapped in a comical maze, in a comical car with a quizzical look on my face.’ This is from the diary - recently published in paperback - kept by Justin Currie, a Scottish singer and songwriter best known as a founding member of the rock band Del Amitri.

Currie was born in Glasgow in 1964. His father, John Currie, was an acclaimed choral conductor who served as chorusmaster of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chorus before later becoming music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Music formed part of Currie’s upbringing, although he was drawn more towards songwriting. He formed his first band while at school in Glasgow. 

In the early 1980s, he famously placed a handwritten notice in a Glasgow music shop seeking musicians, an advertisement that led to the formation of Del Amitri, with Currie the band’s bassist, lead singer and principal songwriter. Success came gradually, but albums including Waking Hours, Change Everything and Twisted produced a string of hit singles, among them Nothing Ever Happens, Always the Last to Know and Roll to Me, while Del Amitri ultimately sold more than six million records worldwide.

Alongside his work with Del Amitri, Currie developed a successful solo career, releasing four studio albums between 2007 and 2017. His succes is said to be based on the exceptional quality of his songwriting, admired for its emotional honesty, dry humour and literary sophistication. His lyrics often examine ageing, relationships, disappointment and resilience - all with a rare combination of self-deprecation and poetic precision. 

Following a lengthy hiatus, Del Amitri returned with Fatal Mistakes in 2021, the groups highest-charting record for three decades, before resuming extensive touring in Britain, Europe and North America. In 2022, Currie was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease - after noticing an increasingly obvious tremor in his right hand. Rather than retreating from public life, he continued to perform while adapting to the challenges of the condition. 

However, he also started to keep a diary. The resulting text was first published in hardback by New Modern in August 2025 as The Tremolo Diaries: Life on the Road and Other Diseases.The book, the publisher says, ‘is a beautiful and unique meditation on illness and aging. It is a twilight years reflection on band life in the 21st Century. It’s a travelogue around the world’s art galleries, parks, bars and sites of natural beauty. And most importantly, it is about love and friendship, adversity and courage, life and loss.’

The work has since been released as a paperback which can be previewed at Googlebooks; reviews can be read here and here. The diary itself falls into two sections structured around an arduous American support tour in 2023 and a more rewarding European tour in 2024. The entries are mostly dated ‘Day 1’, ‘Day 2’, ‘Day 3’ and so on although the underlying chronology can usually be reconstructed from the tour itinerary. 

18 January 2022

‘Ten minutes after seeing the neurologist, I can’t get out of the car park. At Glasgow Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, I drive round and around a little multi-storey block for half an hour, unable to discern an exit.

The neurologist, a frank young man whose kind manner was compromised by his surgical mask, had just asked me an odd question. ‘Why are you here?’

It had occurred to me then that he was terrified of dropping the P-bomb.

‘Well, my GP and I strongly suspect Parkinson’s,’ I reply. I can see the mans face, or the sliver of his face that remains uncovered, visibly relax.

‘I can do a brain scan today,’ he says, ‘but we won’t find anything. However, in that event, I will not tell you that you don’t have Parkinson’s. Or I can see you in a year.’

I opt for the year of half-knowing, half-hoping.

As I leave his tidy little room, I say, ‘So, you’re saying I have Parkinson’s, but you can’t confirm the diagnosis for a year. How do you know?’

‘Relax your arms by your side,’ he says, and my right hand gently trembles at my hip, as if it’s remembering something tricky.

‘Now lift your hands to shoulder height.’

The tremor stops.

‘That’s how?’

So, I begin the year of dread and hope, trapped in a comical maze, in a comical car with a quizzical look on my face. And twelve months later, I sail out of the same place secure in the knowledge I’m ill, and emboldened by the pleasant surprise that they have pills for this sort of thing.

I decide I’m going to keep working, keep touring, keep playing, despite the uneasy feeling that another man is growing inside me, slowly seizing the means of control. It’s as if your own shadow has leapt from the ground and buried itself within you. And this shadow has malevolent intent. He may share my shape, but now we’re combined, it’s a fight to find out who has the most valid claim.’

2 June 2023

‘Day 1. It’s 10 a.m. and we’re back in Cincinnati, parked inside the venue compound. I load my backpack and go backstage for a shower, drying myself with paper towels from a dispenser by the sink. I stroll out offsite and pay ten bucks to access an arts and crafts fair set up on the venue’s periphery. It’s a sea of dreadful tat: leather goods, tie-dyed rags and truly repugnant artwork. It’s heaving with bovine white flesh, ambling about in a retail daze. I sit under an oak and gaze at the river, half-boiled in my denim. One good thing: tonight’s shed is covered. But the heat is still fierce, its prison walls all around you, inches from your skin.

A harmony group start up from an open-sided enclosure, warbling a countrified Have You Ever Seen the Rain? Not today, chaps, no. Over my shoulder, I spot a lurid portrait of Elton John rendered in violent puce and electric blue. Jimi Hendrix and Willie Nelson hang beside him, equally disfigured. The band treble and birds sing. The man sharing my picnic bench is speaking in the broad twang of the South and I recall someone telling me that Cincinnati - situated in Ohio but on the Kentucky border - has a dual personality: half Yankee, half Confederate. There are ants and red spider mites crawling through my leg hair and I go down to the riverbank where two large geese guard three fluffy yellow chicks. A red speedboat bumps past and the sun drills down as the boat’s wake laps at the rocks with surprising violence. Seven waves, then silence. The geese take to the water honking a message I cannot fathom. Black spiders judder about at my feet as cotton-tufted seeds stream by on the breeze looking for somewhere to take root. I check out the band - mandolin, guitar and bass fiddle with a distinctly White Christian vibe - but shade is in short supply, so I go looking for the first food of the day. My morning pill has taken hold, so I’m alive for a few hours, the lowering proximity of the Ghastly Affliction held temporarily at bay. Make hay, make hay.

As I wend my way back to Bus World, I search for a hat. I need something straw with a wide brim. All I see are trinkets and future landfill disguised as objets d’art. I weave through baseball-hatted men slurping beer from plastic beakers, their wives in dime-store shorts and T’s, ponytails threaded through white sun visors. It's an army of consumption. Bored and dazed, killing time.’