There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Currie: Driving recklessly through provincial France in a fancy convertible whilst listening to classical music with his young lover, Paul Decourt—loathsome, rich and arrogant—runs down and kills our hero’s son on a quiet village intersection. The Beast Must Die. And so revenge is embarked upon. Claude Chabrol is always claimed to be the French Hitchcock, but the thrillers he made from the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s are stranger and more morally ambiguous than Vertigo or Psycho. Chabrol is less concerned with Freudian nonsense than with the imperative of his character’s actions. His heroes and heroines are rarely wholly untainted and often motivated by the yellower side of their psyches. I was enthralled by the relentlessness of this film. All appear to be rushing impetuously to their doom. And would you believe it: The original story was written by that mad ham Daniel Day-Lewis’ dad.
Video after the jump.
