I was born in India. When I turned two, I moved to Singapore, before schooling in Boston, then Washington D.C. I returned to Singapore for high school, then studied law in Cambridge, England, more law in Singapore, and still more law in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After working in Singapore, and then at Harvard, I finally landed in New York, where I’ve now spent nearly half my life.
So, it’s only logical that many of my favorite bands hail…from Scotland.
I first encountered Del Amitri (fronted by the charismatic Justin Currie -- great initials BTW) in 1992. Change Everything, their third album, came out in June, just as I completed conscripted service with the Singapore army. After two and a half long years, my days once again belonged to me. I spent most of them distance swimming and contemplating my transition to college in the UK later that year; providentially, a series of improbable events led to an introduction to my future wife. On weekends, I hung out at record stores, picking out a soundtrack to accompany my newfound freedom, and the early tickle of our blossoming romance. I was probably one of the first people in Singapore to buy Change Everything. There was no buzz about the album at all: Del Amitri were, and remain, in relative obscurity outside the UK, and with nobody promoting or talking about the album, it earned zero radio time. So it was a minor miracle that it even came into my hands at all.
Before the convenience of iTunes, shopping for music involved sampling the physical discs, played back over headphones, at a brick and mortar store. Older readers may remember taking ritual pilgrimages to the music meccas of HMV and Tower Records. Of course, the adventurous listener still needed a way to pick out which albums to try out, from the thousands scattered across the store. Never one to care for the opinions expressed in sales charts, my method was to look at the song titles and scan the lyrics in the CD liner notes (so quaint!). Did the songwriter’s poetry jump out at me? Could these words make a good song? Could I conjure a tonal image from the instrument list?
As soon as I popped it into the CD player and hit play, something in Change Everything connected. Odd band name, boring cover, no prior hits - but I was smitten right from the first track. As fate would have it, during my freshman year, Del Amitri came to my college town to perform in a cozy local venue, the Cambridge Corn Exchange. It was one of the best concert experiences of my life, yet also very alien, because here I was, a foreign kid-sort-of-from-Singapore, remnants of an American accent from early childhood, now studying law in England; older than my cohort for my years in the military, juggling a new long-distance relationship, I was a banana peel, floating in a human sea of Scottish alternative rock thrumming between the walls of an ancient grain market.
Though it’s hard for me to pick out a favorite Del Amitri song, at gunpoint I would go with “Driving with The Brakes On”, the final track on their fourth album, Twisted. “Driving” tells the story of a man struggling with his lover’s decision to have an abortion -- even though he wants to keep the baby. Justin Currie, considered by fans to be one of Britain’s finest songwriters of his generation, expresses the heart-wrenching confusion that ensues:
She’s got the wheel/And I have nothing except what I have on…
It’s hard to say you love someone/but it’s hard to say you don’t…
And we might get lost someplace…
So desolate that no one where we're from, would ever come…
“Driving” reminds me that this controversial topic has a very human dimension, one that is often lost in the political posturing and cultural contentiousness. It is worth a listen and, as good art should, hopefully provokes some reflection. To me, it offers a deeper, more nuanced exploration of the subject than Madonna’s more commercially successful “Papa Don’t Preach”.
“Love and Regret”, by Glasgow-based Deacon Blue, still reels me in, even now, a quarter century on. It poignantly captures the songwriter’s admiration of his lover’s innocence, or perhaps, naiveté. Such delicate, yet complex, sentiments are rarely captured in today’s music, in which relationships somehow are dismissively reduced to narratives of agency, power and will (see; Taylor Swift, “Fortnight”, 2024: “My husband is cheating, I wanna kill him/I love you, it's ruining my life.”) But in the 80s-90s, bands such as Deacon Blue wrote about relationships through a different lens – that of the messy chaos of the human heart.
Ricky Ross’ aching, almost tentative, rendition of the chorus (over Lorraine McIntosh’s enchanting backing vocals) always teleports me:
I know so rarely/That things come your way
Your ways are tender/And your paths are straight
Your mind’s not lived in/The way ours are set
Your heart is open/To love and regret
Have you been there? In that place where time slows, and you observe so closely the intriguing and lovely things about a special someone? The things perhaps only you, in that time and place, might notice: the mannerisms that tease your heart, that make falling in love an unexplainable inevitability? But do you also remember how even then, deep inside, dwelt the lingering trace of cold fear, rooted in the knowledge that sweet and fragile things are casually bruised by the cynical, buffeting winds of the world? “Love and Regret” presented love not as a brash declaration of devotion or an angsty anthem of resentment, but the impossible marrying of infatuation and vulnerability. When did we stop writing, and celebrating, songs such as this? Not so long ago, apparently even Taylor knew how to (consider “Tim McGraw”, 2006: “He said the way my blue eyes shined/Put those Georgia stars to shame that night/I said, "That's a lie"”).
For some reason I can’t quite fathom, regret seems to be a big theme in late 20th century Scottish rock. “Be My Downfall”, the opening track of Del Amitri’s Change Everything, is about a lover’s internal conflict weighing whether to give in to the temptation of infidelity; “Always the Last to Know”, which peaked at #2 on the UK charts, is about the loss of his lover to another, more deserving, man, following just such a moment of indiscretion. It’s almost as if in the past, art imitated life; but in today’s TT-and-IG-propelled influencesphere, imitation life is what passes for art.
Among the most obscure purveyors of Scottish regret rock is Roddy Frame, the one-man show behind Aztec Camera. I like many of his songs, but I recommend “Killermont Street” (Love, 1990). If “Driving” skates the knife edge of a relationship in the breaking and “Love and Regret” skates the knife edge of a relationship in the making, “Killermont Street” is a knife into the soul; much more intensely introspective -- and comparably harder to fathom. In a 1999 episode of the BBC’s “Songwriter’s Circle”, Roddy was invited, with Neil Finn of Crowded House (“Don’t Dream It’s Over”) and Glenn Gould of 10cc (“I’m Not in Love”) to play an unplugged session. Before his rendition, Roddy explains that Killermont is the street in Glasgow where he would catch the bus to his home town; it is a time capsule of that period of his life. I always wondered what memory 23-year old Roddy was capturing with these lyrics:
And with collar upturned/I made it south to see
That the love I had spurned/Was just the hate in me
There it is again: regret. We all live with regret in life. Clocks we wish we could turn back, moments we would wipe from the tape. Self-control is not easy, whether in life or in love. Why this playlist of my young adulthood has a Scottish connection is a bewildering question to ponder. There was no Glasgow musical movement or rock renaissance that I know of. Perhaps it was just an exceptional generation of singer-songwriters, one which understood the rhythm of cause and effect, of desire and remorse, of chances and lapses, and was gifted with the musical talent to dial it all in.
We all have songs that take us back. Some bring us to a happy place, some are tinged with nostalgia, others to a time of brokenness. Each memory is a battle scar: What happened to those happy times? Were things better back then? Why did that bad thing have to happen? Sometimes, a trip down memory lane leaves me asking the questions I asked myself in my youth: Why am I here? Am I doing the right thing? Where does all this wrangling lead to? Though I believe myself to be wiser and more experienced today, I continue to wrestle with such questions.
Do you?
Grace & peace, J
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