del Amitri: Beating Pop Hands Down 13.09.85. Interview by Roy Moller and Douglas Clark. Spanky Farrell's Interview fanzine.
When Justin, Bryan and Iain of del Amitri came up to Spanky Farrell Office to be interviewed they brought with them a cassette of their new 45 "Hammering Heart" - a standout track on their eponymous debut album, which features on the b-side the Beatlish Lines Running North and an enthusiastic live canter through Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl. This was Bryan's ideas and stagewise is the band's first cover since their essaying of The Kinks' "Tired Of Waiting For You."
Justin: There was a gap in the set when we were on tour, when everything was pretty serious and we wanted a couple of light-hearted things and it always works so well, Brown Eyed Girl" when you do it live and everybody goes (sings) "Sha la la la la la.."
Do you feel you use too many words in your own songs?
Justin: Oh, I take it as a compliment. A lot of that sort of criticism doesn't bother me, like "you use too many words" which is part of what we do, and "your guitars are too involved and too worked out" and stuff like that. We realise that as well, but if we sat down and we said "Let's write slow vocal melodies" so there was less words and "let's make the guitars sound like we can't play them quitw as well", then it would just be really unnatural. If we tried to retreat to that level of pop sensibility or whatever it would sound really pretentious.
Is writing a democratic process?
Iain: It's not so much democratic as a four way war of attrition.
Bryan: Sometimes you go through patches where we'll be really quick - like matbe two in two or three days but it's still democratic and it does take a while because we're fussy...Some of the new songs are a bit more direct...
Justin: We've not concerned ourselves so much with making each second sound right, just let the whole song sound right, which might or might not be an improvement...
Bryan: I think you always have to be aware of the fact that "the age we live in" has a very short attention span. People are saying that you only have a certain amount of time to grab their attention. That is, frankly, a lot of crap...90% of people who make records take the attitude of the lowest common denomenator, like a particular rhythm or whatever, the most cliched words that anyone could sing along to and that's it. That's pop.
How did you feel about being Scottish pop's flavour of the month?
Justin: That process went wildly wrong.
Iain: It seemed like that recently, because the initial being plastered on the front page of Melody Maker...
Bryan: Which was the single most damaging thing that ever happened to us...
Iain: That was just a catastrophe in publicity terms.
Justin: The single got dropped because Chrysalis panicked when they saw us on the cover of Melody Maker and thought we were going to be a big hit and decided to wait until we'd recorded the album to choose the correct single. It just blew the timing.
The dels agree it's no advantage being on Big Star, a pretend indie part of the mighty Chrysalis label.
Iain: We're not even n a pretend independent label...
Bryan: We're on a pretend independent part of a pretend label...The thing was that we were considered like an ersatz indie project as far as Chrysalis were concerned, this little independent credibility thing. I suppose if someone came along, some judge of musical taste and said Chrysalis have got the worst rota of horrible commercial piss in the universe, they could go "No, no, we've got this little independent Scottish band. We'll just sort of dig their tapes out." And the angel of death would pass along to CBS. They've got Santana. This plan was completely scuppered because the guy from the Melody Maker thought we were the best thing ever, ever, ever." I think they're wonderful and everybody had better watch out." And half the people at Chrysalis had never fucking heard of us and they said "Oh God this is one of our groups. We better do something. And they hadn't bothered to promote the single or anything - they were just going to put it out, throw it out the window as a passing shot. But we didn't actually produce anything for two months after that because the record company got cold feet. All our potential fans had lost interest, all the people who had their knives out had been sharpening them for two months.
Justin: The article also perpetuated that sort of wee Glaswegian boy image, that the Melody Maker went in for to give it some kind of zest instead of presenting us as we ought to be presented. These bloody interviews that put in "oohs" and "ayes" when they may not even have been said. It's really condescending.
Speaking of image, how do del Amitri regard The Jesus And Mary Chain?
Justin: The reason people go to see them is because they think it's going to be part of history and it really isn't and the audience think it's going to be an exciting event. But I think when you're actually faced with it, it's actualy pretty boring...Whenever you're involved in that pure negativism thing, anti-pop or whetever, it's so easy to get away with murder. They can say OK we annoyed you but at least it's a reaction...
Bryan: I quite like their records but when I saw them on The Tube I thought they were extraordinarily predictable. They did exactly what you qould expect and in that way they're exactly like Bruce Springsteen.
Justin: Or Lloyd Cole...
Bryan: Lloyd isn't so much a parody. You know Lloyd isn't going to duckwalk across the stage.
Justin: The best thing Lloyd Cole could do is come on in front of a packed house and give it feedback for half an hour, then walk off stage and that would be hilarious. If The Jesus And Mary Chain came on with an incredibly six-month rehearsed dance routine and played reggae songs it would be brilliant, but they're not going to because they've found their little niche and they're going to keep picking it.
Bryan: The Jesus And Mary Chain for a lot of really young naive people in anarchic or as subversive as you can get. The Jesus And Mary Chain are just puppets and puppeteers. Their version of anarchy is a five album deal with Warners and an interview in The Face.
Is the topic of your ex-manager a closed one?
Bryan: Well, what do you want to know?
Just the facts - that's all we want.
Justin: Bastard! When we worked with Tom Verlaine the people who could play their instruments professionally were Paul (Tyagi, the drummer) and Iain and me and Bryan were pretty rotten, but for some reason Paul got all the stick, because the most important thing is to get the drum track right, especially when you're making a Tom Verlaine-type rock record which is what he was after , so Paul was getting so much stick and Tom Verlaine was saying things like "is this guy on a contract because he's going to cost you a lot of money in studios" and nobody has any right to say that to a band, because if we'd been more impressionable we'd have gone "Oh God" and spent two days worrying about it and gone to Paul, "Oh you'll need to leave the band", but we had the sense to know he was talking crap but that happened to everybody and if there's any doubt in your mind, the band's just going to go like that.
Bryan (finally answering our question): One good thing Tom Verlaine did say after Jackie (ex-manager) left was "Who is that guy? Jesus Christ. I tell you if you don't have someone working for you who knows the rip offs you'll get riped off."
How did you meet your current manager, Barbara (Shores)?
Iain: She wrote us a fan letter after the first Peel session and said if you're looking for a manager just get in touch, just as a completely innocent request. We fell out with Jackie and we got to a point where we just couldn't handle the business that was going on around us and we eventually thought, "Right, this guy's got to go", so we asked Jackie to stop managing us which he refused to so for a few weeks: "I'm going to manage you anyway, I'm going to manage you anyway!" (We said) "Jackie, we don't want you to!" That was a bit mad. We just got in touch with Barbara. The only other candidate was John Dingwal.
Justin: Son't print that, don't print that.
Bryan: Yeah, print it. We were going to ask John Dingwall.
Iain: So now we've got Barbara, She's terrific. She goes and beats people up at the record company occasionally, bounces them about....
Here's an incisive overview of Del Amitri's career
Plus two videos: a hairtastic Ian Harvie leading them through a cover of Ace Of Spades by Motorhead....
and, below that visual evidence of their rock god incarnation, a rather more collegiate band, as featured on BBC Scotland's TV show FSD. I think this is from 1986. The song, Life Going Backwards, used to open their sets around then and was the most brilliant thing I saw them play in the fourteen times I caught them live between 1985 and 1992. (1990's stunning Barrowlands set not withstanding - the homecoming conquering heroes opening with a cover of The Boys Are Back In Town, Currie as Lynott on bass, vocals and on-the-up aura). Back in '86, I recorded the audio off the telly and the interview you'll hear (this time by the Beeb, not Douglas and I) and was dubbed in at the time. The visuals are a brief muckabout by me on Windows Movie Maker...
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