Del Amitri — Great Songs!

If You don’t belong to that group of people so called the Generation x, you may still remember that Del Amitri had already played in Portugal! Long time ago, long time ago, this scottish band filled, in a distant December, the soo famous “ROCK RENDEZ VOUS”. The tickets costed 650esc (about 2#) and they enchanted the audience with their semi-acoustic songs and guitars that performed most part of the gig. This band in the early begining lined up with Justin Currie (voice, piano, bass) and his friend Iain Harvie. Later for the release of “Sense and Sickness”, Brian Tolland (guitar),and Paul Tyagi (drums) joined the band. Under the “protection” of John Pell, soon they became a sort of cult band doing the first halfs of The Smiths and The FAll (for example). “Kiss This Thing Goodbye”, “Nothing Ever Happens” and “Spit In The Rain” were some of the hits that this band gave us. Now they are back with a new work and this is a good opportunity for those who never heard of them to start to treat the Dels “by you”. ” Some Other Sucker’s Parade” it’s the name of their recent album that gathers 14 songs that can cut everyones breath. “Not Where It’s At”, “Some Other Sucker’s Parade”, “Won’t Make It Better”, “What I think She Sees”, “Medecine”, “High Times”, “Mother Nature’s Writing”, “No Family Man”, “Cruel Light Of Day”, “Funny Way To Win”, “Through All That Nothing”, “Life Is Full”, “Lucky Guy” and “Make It Always be Too Late” are the songs that Andy Alston, Ashley Soan, Jon McLoughlin, Iain Harvie and Justin Currie have to show us in this Lp recorded between November 1996 and January 1997. Produced by Mark Freegard, “Some Other Sucker’s Parade” obeyd to some rules. In the words of the DEl’s guys:”We had two rules for this record: not having acoustic guitars because we are starting to be fed up with the label of “folk-rock” band that some people stucked on us and that all the songs must had more than 3 minutes long. These rules are obviously to be broken but from the 14 songs only 3 got acoustic guitars!” The irony, the non-sense and the powerful lyrics that they got us used to are quite present in here!

Submitted and translated from Portuguese by Rute Ventura

VoxPop July/August 1997