Del Amitri’s Justin Currie chronicles struggle with Parkinson’s, grief

When Scottish rock band Del Amitri set out to tour America in 2023, its main songwriter and lead singer, Justin Currie, had just endured a devastating blow. And then another. And then another. In the wreckage, the horizons of his life were shrinking rapidly. This would be his last major tour with the band.

As Currie chronicles in “The Tremolo Diaries,” his journal of that journey started when a neurologist informed Currie, then 58, that he had Parkinson’s disease — Currie dubs it the Ghastly Affliction and refers to the shake in his right hand as Gavin, writing that he’s “a traitor who comes and goes … an underminer and an intermittent reminder that I’m ill and unsteady.”

Then his mother died, three years after his father had succumbed to COVID-19. On the heels of that loss, Emma, his life partner for decades, suffered a debilitating stroke that has left her in constant need of professional care with limited hope for the future. (She has since been walloped by more setbacks.) Seeing her decimated (and her son reeling) was harder to handle than his own illness, leaving Currie feeling helpless.

Currie had already suspected Parkinson’s — tremors suddenly made playing guitar and bass parts challenging and even walking and singing required more conscious effort — but the confirmation was a blow anyway.

“A suspected diagnosis keeps the crack in the door open, but this was grim,” he recalls in a video interview from his home in Glasgow, Scotland. “I immediately went into a psychological shock.”

His initial depression lasted a couple of months, followed by a dose of denial. “A year ago I’d still be bubbling with nervous energy and be a bit more dismissive about the psychological impact of going through three horrible things at once,” he says.

But the sledgehammer of enduring what he calls “the semi-grief” of watching his beloved lose not just her mobility but “huge parts of her personality” finally hit home a year after her stroke while Del Amitri was in limbo between that American tour opening for Barenaked Ladies and a European and United Kingdom leg opening for Simple Minds, which comprises the second half of the book.

That depression “was different and hit much harder. I couldn’t organize my thoughts or think straight,” he says, adding that it’s only now that he feels more “clearheaded.” (Positive remains too upbeat a word.)

While the book includes his morbid thoughts, like the vague hope to die “before it gets too bad” perhaps via “a gentle drowning,” Currie says that he’s not experiencing suicidal ideation, just “fantasizing about the ultimate escape from worry, pain and anguish.”

Indeed, “Tremolo Diaries” doesn’t diminish Currie’s woes, but it is not a wallowing — he never averts his gaze from how his body betrays him and what that does to his music and his soul, but he also delights in roaming streets, shops and museums between gigs, offering a running commentary on modern life.

Currie says that while Scots can be dour and cynical, underneath there’s often “a romantic optimism that the world is a beautiful place and that there is poetry in the world.” He treasures that trait even as he has hidden it beneath armor to avoid “being too badly mauled by the vicissitudes of life.”

He’s especially sharp in the first half of the book when the band’s in America, savaging the unfettered capitalism even as he admires the hustle and individuality, and frequently mocks his own judgmental attitude and ignorance.

“I know I’m cynical about America in the diaries, and I’m going to be honest about the absurdities,” he says, but adds that as the country has lurched rightward he feels compelled to remind his friends in the U.S. that “it’s an amazing place, the only country in the world replete with opportunity and a freedom that you don’t find anywhere else.”

Currie didn’t write seeking catharsis but found the process therapeutic. “It allowed me better ways of articulating how the disease feels rather than boring my mates off,” he says.

He eschewed a memoir because he had a “happy and culturally rich, privileged childhood, so it wasn’t terribly interesting.” Glasgow is proud of its shipbuilding working-class heritage, but Currie’s father was a classical musician and choral conductor while his mother had done some acting, and he remembers seeing her in Noël Coward plays.

“I acted in school plays and joined a drama club because I wanted to meet girls, and I got cast in lead roles because I was quite brazen, but then I realized I can show off but I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “But with music I could get my rocks off standing onstage and being looked at, and writing songs was much better self-expression than reading lines from a play.”

The Beatles and Bob Dylan shaped his songwriting as did his mom’s tape of “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.” He also loved prog rock, but that had made a music career seem unattainable. “Punk rock changed my life because it allowed you to form a band without really being able to play and told you to just get on a stage and sing whatever you want to sing,” he says.

Del Amitri only charted three singles in America and is largely defined by its one Top 10 hit, “Roll to Me,” but in the United Kingdom it’s had six Top 10 albums and 11 singles that broke the Top 30. It started with their second album, “Waking Hours,” which went platinum in the U.K. in 1989 and yielded the hit single “Nothing Ever Happens.” An elegiac hymn to the dead end of hometown life, the song captures Currie’s ability to wrap melancholy lyrics in a catchy melody.

Currie says the band never got bigger in America partly because “the huge artistic compromises didn’t hold much appeal for us.” (For starters, he disdained the requirement of scantily clad women in music videos.) “Perhaps a terrible flaw but we felt perfectly satisfied with playing to a few thousand people and we were a bit snooty about it also,” he says.

Parkinson’s has made Currie even more grateful for what he does have. He’s still writing new songs on his own and with lead guitarist Iain Harvie, the band’s other original member. (He knows he may have to moderate the melodies because Parkinson’s affects the muscles he uses to sing.)

“Playing live is much more difficult, but I really enjoy just getting through the gigs, and now when people say afterwards, ‘That was great,’ it’s much more satisfying and confidence boosting than it used to be.”

The disease also forces him to live more in the present. “I was never particularly nostalgic but I always lived in the future — thinking or worrying, ‘Can I write a better song? Can we play a gig we’ve never done before?’” he says. “Now I can’t afford to because the future is unknown and that makes it frightening. So now I’m living in my current space and enjoying what I’m doing and the fact that I’m working.”

He recently celebrated his 60th birthday with a big party that featured a band and where all the guests sang Beatles B-sides or Scottish pop songs. He performed Pilot’s “January” (Pilot’s David Paton was playing bass that night) and the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”

Del Amitri has a couple of gigs planned in Scotland and Currie is managing his decline well enough, for now. Yet he can’t think ahead to next year, much as he’d love to plan more. “I can ask, ‘Can you tell me when I won’t be able to do up the buttons on my shirt or operate a phone?’” he says. “Those questions are quite desperate but also quite sensible. But they won’t know.”

Still, he hangs on tightly to that romantic optimism about finding joy in just being here. “I’m not looking forward to my disease getting worse, but I’d rather experience that than not experience it at this point,” he says. “It’s not that everything’s going to be alright, but that life is an extraordinary adventure and it’s really worth being in life.”

When Scottish rock band Del Amitri set out to tour America in 2023, its main songwriter and lead singer, Justin Currie, had just endured a devastating blow. And then another. And then another. In the wreckage, the horizons of his life were shrinking rapidly. This would be his last major tour with the band.

As Currie chronicles in “The Tremolo Diaries,” his journal of that journey started when a neurologist informed Currie, then 58, that he had Parkinson’s disease — Currie dubs it the Ghastly Affliction and refers to the shake in his right hand as Gavin, writing that he’s “a traitor who comes and goes … an underminer and an intermittent reminder that I’m ill and unsteady.”

Then his mother died, three years after his father had succumbed to COVID-19. On the heels of that loss, Emma, his life partner for decades, suffered a debilitating stroke that has left her in constant need of professional care with limited hope for the future. (She has since been walloped by more setbacks.) Seeing her decimated (and her son reeling) was harder to handle than his own illness, leaving Currie feeling helpless.

Currie had already suspected Parkinson’s — tremors suddenly made playing guitar and bass parts challenging and even walking and singing required more conscious effort — but the confirmation was a blow anyway.

“A suspected diagnosis keeps the crack in the door open, but this was grim,” he recalls in a video interview from his home in Glasgow, Scotland. “I immediately went into a psychological shock.”

His initial depression lasted a couple of months, followed by a dose of denial. “A year ago I’d still be bubbling with nervous energy and be a bit more dismissive about the psychological impact of going through three horrible things at once,” he says.

But the sledgehammer of enduring what he calls “the semi-grief” of watching his beloved lose not just her mobility but “huge parts of her personality” finally hit home a year after her stroke while Del Amitri was in limbo between that American tour opening for Barenaked Ladies and a European and United Kingdom leg opening for Simple Minds, which comprises the second half of the book.

That depression “was different and hit much harder. I couldn’t organize my thoughts or think straight,” he says, adding that it’s only now that he feels more “clearheaded.” (Positive remains too upbeat a word.)

While the book includes his morbid thoughts, like the vague hope to die “before it gets too bad” perhaps via “a gentle drowning,” Currie says that he’s not experiencing suicidal ideation, just “fantasizing about the ultimate escape from worry, pain and anguish.”

Indeed, “Tremolo Diaries” doesn’t diminish Currie’s woes, but it is not a wallowing — he never averts his gaze from how his body betrays him and what that does to his music and his soul, but he also delights in roaming streets, shops and museums between gigs, offering a running commentary on modern life.

Currie says that while Scots can be dour and cynical, underneath there’s often “a romantic optimism that the world is a beautiful place and that there is poetry in the world.” He treasures that trait even as he has hidden it beneath armor to avoid “being too badly mauled by the vicissitudes of life.”

He’s especially sharp in the first half of the book when the band’s in America, savaging the unfettered capitalism even as he admires the hustle and individuality, and frequently mocks his own judgmental attitude and ignorance.

“I know I’m cynical about America in the diaries, and I’m going to be honest about the absurdities,” he says, but adds that as the country has lurched rightward he feels compelled to remind his friends in the U.S. that “it’s an amazing place, the only country in the world replete with opportunity and a freedom that you don’t find anywhere else.”

Currie didn’t write seeking catharsis but found the process therapeutic. “It allowed me better ways of articulating how the disease feels rather than boring my mates off,” he says.

He eschewed a memoir because he had a “happy and culturally rich, privileged childhood, so it wasn’t terribly interesting.” Glasgow is proud of its shipbuilding working-class heritage, but Currie’s father was a classical musician and choral conductor while his mother had done some acting, and he remembers seeing her in Noël Coward plays.

“I acted in school plays and joined a drama club because I wanted to meet girls, and I got cast in lead roles because I was quite brazen, but then I realized I can show off but I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “But with music I could get my rocks off standing onstage and being looked at, and writing songs was much better self-expression than reading lines from a play.”

The Beatles and Bob Dylan shaped his songwriting as did his mom’s tape of “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.” He also loved prog rock, but that had made a music career seem unattainable. “Punk rock changed my life because it allowed you to form a band without really being able to play and told you to just get on a stage and sing whatever you want to sing,” he says.

Del Amitri only charted three singles in America and is largely defined by its one Top 10 hit, “Roll to Me,” but in the United Kingdom it’s had six Top 10 albums and 11 singles that broke the Top 30. It started with their second album, “Waking Hours,” which went platinum in the U.K. in 1989 and yielded the hit single “Nothing Ever Happens.” An elegiac hymn to the dead end of hometown life, the song captures Currie’s ability to wrap melancholy lyrics in a catchy melody.

Currie says the band never got bigger in America partly because “the huge artistic compromises didn’t hold much appeal for us.” (For starters, he disdained the requirement of scantily clad women in music videos.) “Perhaps a terrible flaw but we felt perfectly satisfied with playing to a few thousand people and we were a bit snooty about it also,” he says.

Parkinson’s has made Currie even more grateful for what he does have. He’s still writing new songs on his own and with lead guitarist Iain Harvie, the band’s other original member. (He knows he may have to moderate the melodies because Parkinson’s affects the muscles he uses to sing.)

“Playing live is much more difficult, but I really enjoy just getting through the gigs, and now when people say afterwards, ‘That was great,’ it’s much more satisfying and confidence boosting than it used to be.”

The disease also forces him to live more in the present. “I was never particularly nostalgic but I always lived in the future — thinking or worrying, ‘Can I write a better song? Can we play a gig we’ve never done before?’” he says. “Now I can’t afford to because the future is unknown and that makes it frightening. So now I’m living in my current space and enjoying what I’m doing and the fact that I’m working.”

He recently celebrated his 60th birthday with a big party that featured a band and where all the guests sang Beatles B-sides or Scottish pop songs. He performed Pilot’s “January” (Pilot’s David Paton was playing bass that night) and the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”

Del Amitri has a couple of gigs planned in Scotland and Currie is managing his decline well enough, for now. Yet he can’t think ahead to next year, much as he’d love to plan more. “I can ask, ‘Can you tell me when I won’t be able to do up the buttons on my shirt or operate a phone?’” he says. “Those questions are quite desperate but also quite sensible. But they won’t know.”

Still, he hangs on tightly to that romantic optimism about finding joy in just being here. “I’m not looking forward to my disease getting worse, but I’d rather experience that than not experience it at this point,” he says. “It’s not that everything’s going to be alright, but that life is an extraordinary adventure and it’s really worth being in life.”

When Scottish rock band Del Amitri set out to tour America in 2023, its main songwriter and lead singer, Justin Currie, had just endured a devastating blow. And then another. And then another. In the wreckage, the horizons of his life were shrinking rapidly. This would be his last major tour with the band.

As Currie chronicles in “The Tremolo Diaries,” his journal of that journey started when a neurologist informed Currie, then 58, that he had Parkinson’s disease — Currie dubs it the Ghastly Affliction and refers to the shake in his right hand as Gavin, writing that he’s “a traitor who comes and goes … an underminer and an intermittent reminder that I’m ill and unsteady.”

Then his mother died, three years after his father had succumbed to COVID-19. On the heels of that loss, Emma, his life partner for decades, suffered a debilitating stroke that has left her in constant need of professional care with limited hope for the future. (She has since been walloped by more setbacks.) Seeing her decimated (and her son reeling) was harder to handle than his own illness, leaving Currie feeling helpless.

Currie had already suspected Parkinson’s — tremors suddenly made playing guitar and bass parts challenging and even walking and singing required more conscious effort — but the confirmation was a blow anyway.

“A suspected diagnosis keeps the crack in the door open, but this was grim,” he recalls in a video interview from his home in Glasgow, Scotland. “I immediately went into a psychological shock.”

His initial depression lasted a couple of months, followed by a dose of denial. “A year ago I’d still be bubbling with nervous energy and be a bit more dismissive about the psychological impact of going through three horrible things at once,” he says.

But the sledgehammer of enduring what he calls “the semi-grief” of watching his beloved lose not just her mobility but “huge parts of her personality” finally hit home a year after her stroke while Del Amitri was in limbo between that American tour opening for Barenaked Ladies and a European and United Kingdom leg opening for Simple Minds, which comprises the second half of the book.

That depression “was different and hit much harder. I couldn’t organize my thoughts or think straight,” he says, adding that it’s only now that he feels more “clearheaded.” (Positive remains too upbeat a word.)

While the book includes his morbid thoughts, like the vague hope to die “before it gets too bad” perhaps via “a gentle drowning,” Currie says that he’s not experiencing suicidal ideation, just “fantasizing about the ultimate escape from worry, pain and anguish.”

Indeed, “Tremolo Diaries” doesn’t diminish Currie’s woes, but it is not a wallowing — he never averts his gaze from how his body betrays him and what that does to his music and his soul, but he also delights in roaming streets, shops and museums between gigs, offering a running commentary on modern life.

Currie says that while Scots can be dour and cynical, underneath there’s often “a romantic optimism that the world is a beautiful place and that there is poetry in the world.” He treasures that trait even as he has hidden it beneath armor to avoid “being too badly mauled by the vicissitudes of life.”

He’s especially sharp in the first half of the book when the band’s in America, savaging the unfettered capitalism even as he admires the hustle and individuality, and frequently mocks his own judgmental attitude and ignorance.

“I know I’m cynical about America in the diaries, and I’m going to be honest about the absurdities,” he says, but adds that as the country has lurched rightward he feels compelled to remind his friends in the U.S. that “it’s an amazing place, the only country in the world replete with opportunity and a freedom that you don’t find anywhere else.”

Currie didn’t write seeking catharsis but found the process therapeutic. “It allowed me better ways of articulating how the disease feels rather than boring my mates off,” he says.

He eschewed a memoir because he had a “happy and culturally rich, privileged childhood, so it wasn’t terribly interesting.” Glasgow is proud of its shipbuilding working-class heritage, but Currie’s father was a classical musician and choral conductor while his mother had done some acting, and he remembers seeing her in Noël Coward plays.

“I acted in school plays and joined a drama club because I wanted to meet girls, and I got cast in lead roles because I was quite brazen, but then I realized I can show off but I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “But with music I could get my rocks off standing onstage and being looked at, and writing songs was much better self-expression than reading lines from a play.”

The Beatles and Bob Dylan shaped his songwriting as did his mom’s tape of “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.” He also loved prog rock, but that had made a music career seem unattainable. “Punk rock changed my life because it allowed you to form a band without really being able to play and told you to just get on a stage and sing whatever you want to sing,” he says.

Del Amitri only charted three singles in America and is largely defined by its one Top 10 hit, “Roll to Me,” but in the United Kingdom it’s had six Top 10 albums and 11 singles that broke the Top 30. It started with their second album, “Waking Hours,” which went platinum in the U.K. in 1989 and yielded the hit single “Nothing Ever Happens.” An elegiac hymn to the dead end of hometown life, the song captures Currie’s ability to wrap melancholy lyrics in a catchy melody.

Currie says the band never got bigger in America partly because “the huge artistic compromises didn’t hold much appeal for us.” (For starters, he disdained the requirement of scantily clad women in music videos.) “Perhaps a terrible flaw but we felt perfectly satisfied with playing to a few thousand people and we were a bit snooty about it also,” he says.

Parkinson’s has made Currie even more grateful for what he does have. He’s still writing new songs on his own and with lead guitarist Iain Harvie, the band’s other original member. (He knows he may have to moderate the melodies because Parkinson’s affects the muscles he uses to sing.)

“Playing live is much more difficult, but I really enjoy just getting through the gigs, and now when people say afterwards, ‘That was great,’ it’s much more satisfying and confidence boosting than it used to be.”

The disease also forces him to live more in the present. “I was never particularly nostalgic but I always lived in the future — thinking or worrying, ‘Can I write a better song? Can we play a gig we’ve never done before?’” he says. “Now I can’t afford to because the future is unknown and that makes it frightening. So now I’m living in my current space and enjoying what I’m doing and the fact that I’m working.”

He recently celebrated his 60th birthday with a big party that featured a band and where all the guests sang Beatles B-sides or Scottish pop songs. He performed Pilot’s “January” (Pilot’s David Paton was playing bass that night) and the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”

Del Amitri has a couple of gigs planned in Scotland and Currie is managing his decline well enough, for now. Yet he can’t think ahead to next year, much as he’d love to plan more. “I can ask, ‘Can you tell me when I won’t be able to do up the buttons on my shirt or operate a phone?’” he says. “Those questions are quite desperate but also quite sensible. But they won’t know.”

Still, he hangs on tightly to that romantic optimism about finding joy in just being here. “I’m not looking forward to my disease getting worse, but I’d rather experience that than not experience it at this point,” he says. “It’s not that everything’s going to be alright, but that life is an extraordinary adventure and it’s really worth being in life.”

When Scottish rock band Del Amitri set out to tour America in 2023, its main songwriter and lead singer, Justin Currie, had just endured a devastating blow. And then another. And then another. In the wreckage, the horizons of his life were shrinking rapidly. This would be his last major tour with the band.

As Currie chronicles in “The Tremolo Diaries,” his journal of that journey started when a neurologist informed Currie, then 58, that he had Parkinson’s disease — Currie dubs it the Ghastly Affliction and refers to the shake in his right hand as Gavin, writing that he’s “a traitor who comes and goes … an underminer and an intermittent reminder that I’m ill and unsteady.”

Then his mother died, three years after his father had succumbed to COVID-19. On the heels of that loss, Emma, his life partner for decades, suffered a debilitating stroke that has left her in constant need of professional care with limited hope for the future. (She has since been walloped by more setbacks.) Seeing her decimated (and her son reeling) was harder to handle than his own illness, leaving Currie feeling helpless.

Currie had already suspected Parkinson’s — tremors suddenly made playing guitar and bass parts challenging and even walking and singing required more conscious effort — but the confirmation was a blow anyway.

“A suspected diagnosis keeps the crack in the door open, but this was grim,” he recalls in a video interview from his home in Glasgow, Scotland. “I immediately went into a psychological shock.”

His initial depression lasted a couple of months, followed by a dose of denial. “A year ago I’d still be bubbling with nervous energy and be a bit more dismissive about the psychological impact of going through three horrible things at once,” he says.

But the sledgehammer of enduring what he calls “the semi-grief” of watching his beloved lose not just her mobility but “huge parts of her personality” finally hit home a year after her stroke while Del Amitri was in limbo between that American tour opening for Barenaked Ladies and a European and United Kingdom leg opening for Simple Minds, which comprises the second half of the book.

That depression “was different and hit much harder. I couldn’t organize my thoughts or think straight,” he says, adding that it’s only now that he feels more “clearheaded.” (Positive remains too upbeat a word.)

While the book includes his morbid thoughts, like the vague hope to die “before it gets too bad” perhaps via “a gentle drowning,” Currie says that he’s not experiencing suicidal ideation, just “fantasizing about the ultimate escape from worry, pain and anguish.”

Indeed, “Tremolo Diaries” doesn’t diminish Currie’s woes, but it is not a wallowing — he never averts his gaze from how his body betrays him and what that does to his music and his soul, but he also delights in roaming streets, shops and museums between gigs, offering a running commentary on modern life.

Currie says that while Scots can be dour and cynical, underneath there’s often “a romantic optimism that the world is a beautiful place and that there is poetry in the world.” He treasures that trait even as he has hidden it beneath armor to avoid “being too badly mauled by the vicissitudes of life.”

He’s especially sharp in the first half of the book when the band’s in America, savaging the unfettered capitalism even as he admires the hustle and individuality, and frequently mocks his own judgmental attitude and ignorance.

“I know I’m cynical about America in the diaries, and I’m going to be honest about the absurdities,” he says, but adds that as the country has lurched rightward he feels compelled to remind his friends in the U.S. that “it’s an amazing place, the only country in the world replete with opportunity and a freedom that you don’t find anywhere else.”

Currie didn’t write seeking catharsis but found the process therapeutic. “It allowed me better ways of articulating how the disease feels rather than boring my mates off,” he says.

He eschewed a memoir because he had a “happy and culturally rich, privileged childhood, so it wasn’t terribly interesting.” Glasgow is proud of its shipbuilding working-class heritage, but Currie’s father was a classical musician and choral conductor while his mother had done some acting, and he remembers seeing her in Noël Coward plays.

“I acted in school plays and joined a drama club because I wanted to meet girls, and I got cast in lead roles because I was quite brazen, but then I realized I can show off but I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “But with music I could get my rocks off standing onstage and being looked at, and writing songs was much better self-expression than reading lines from a play.”

The Beatles and Bob Dylan shaped his songwriting as did his mom’s tape of “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.” He also loved prog rock, but that had made a music career seem unattainable. “Punk rock changed my life because it allowed you to form a band without really being able to play and told you to just get on a stage and sing whatever you want to sing,” he says.

Del Amitri only charted three singles in America and is largely defined by its one Top 10 hit, “Roll to Me,” but in the United Kingdom it’s had six Top 10 albums and 11 singles that broke the Top 30. It started with their second album, “Waking Hours,” which went platinum in the U.K. in 1989 and yielded the hit single “Nothing Ever Happens.” An elegiac hymn to the dead end of hometown life, the song captures Currie’s ability to wrap melancholy lyrics in a catchy melody.

Currie says the band never got bigger in America partly because “the huge artistic compromises didn’t hold much appeal for us.” (For starters, he disdained the requirement of scantily clad women in music videos.) “Perhaps a terrible flaw but we felt perfectly satisfied with playing to a few thousand people and we were a bit snooty about it also,” he says.

Parkinson’s has made Currie even more grateful for what he does have. He’s still writing new songs on his own and with lead guitarist Iain Harvie, the band’s other original member. (He knows he may have to moderate the melodies because Parkinson’s affects the muscles he uses to sing.)

“Playing live is much more difficult, but I really enjoy just getting through the gigs, and now when people say afterwards, ‘That was great,’ it’s much more satisfying and confidence boosting than it used to be.”

The disease also forces him to live more in the present. “I was never particularly nostalgic but I always lived in the future — thinking or worrying, ‘Can I write a better song? Can we play a gig we’ve never done before?’” he says. “Now I can’t afford to because the future is unknown and that makes it frightening. So now I’m living in my current space and enjoying what I’m doing and the fact that I’m working.”

He recently celebrated his 60th birthday with a big party that featured a band and where all the guests sang Beatles B-sides or Scottish pop songs. He performed Pilot’s “January” (Pilot’s David Paton was playing bass that night) and the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”

Del Amitri has a couple of gigs planned in Scotland and Currie is managing his decline well enough, for now. Yet he can’t think ahead to next year, much as he’d love to plan more. “I can ask, ‘Can you tell me when I won’t be able to do up the buttons on my shirt or operate a phone?’” he says. “Those questions are quite desperate but also quite sensible. But they won’t know.”

Still, he hangs on tightly to that romantic optimism about finding joy in just being here. “I’m not looking forward to my disease getting worse, but I’d rather experience that than not experience it at this point,” he says. “It’s not that everything’s going to be alright, but that life is an extraordinary adventure and it’s really worth being in life.”