Scottish rocker shares his Parkinson's journey

Del Amitri lead singer Justin Currie opens up about living with the disease in a new book.

- BY STUART MILLER

ANDREW BENGE Redferns via Getty Images JUSTIN CURRIE performing with Del Amitri in Leeds, England, last December.

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.