'Parkinson's has highlighted how arrogant I used to be'

Justin Currie of Del Amitri explores his diagnosis with dark humour and sensitivity in his memoir ‘The Tremolo Diaries’. He tells Nick Duerden about finding the positives in tragedy

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In January 2022, Justin Currie, the singer with Scottish band Del Amitri, attended an appointment at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital on the suspicion that he had Parkinson’s.

There, the neurologist explained that a brain scan might not find anything, and that diagnosis could take up to a full year. Nevertheless, he was certain it was Parkinson’s.

“How can you tell?” Currie asked. The doctor instructed him to rest his arms by his side, where his right hand was trembling gently at his hip, as it had been doing for some time. “Now lift your hands to shoulder height.” When Currie did this, the tremor stopped. “That’s how.”

The singer left the hospital officially a sick man. He was 57 years old. In his new memoir, The Tremolo Diaries, he writes that the tremor feels “as if your own shadow has leapt from the ground and buried itself within you. This shadow has malevolent intent. He may share my shape, but now we are combined. It’s a fight to find out who has the most valid claim.”

Few among us would react well to confirmation of a life-changing brain disease, one whose progression would ultimately hamper the ability to keep working, but Currie was determined to plough on. His band had a tour booked, which he intended to fulfil. Initially, then, he told no one about his illness bar those closest to him - with the exception of his mother. “She was in her eighties, and she’d have been devastated.”

Surely she noticed, I say; Parkinson’s isn’t easy to hide. “I think she did, yes, but she just thought I was drinking too much. And to be honest, I’d rather she thought that than Parkinson’s. Anyway,” he deadpans, “she died not long after, rather conveniently.”

Currie has been the frontman of Del Amitri since they formed in the early Eighties. A much-loved band with a modest but loyal following, they first came to commercial prominence in 1989 with