Picture – Justin Currie at Wigtown Book Festival, September 2025. Credit – @gideoncable
You could imagine Justin Currie being a very bitter man.
The Glaswegian songwriter and lead singer of Del Amitri received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s in early 2022 when he was 58. His mother died a few months later, very soon after discovering she had cancer. Then his partner of many decades suffered a debilitating stroke leaving her in need of constant professional care.
But he seems at peace with the world when we talk at the Wigtown Book Festival in September 2025.
How so? The answers may lie in his new book.
He’s to be interviewed on stage later in the day by the journalist and author Rory Cellan-Jones about, “The Tremelo Diaries: Life on the Road and Other Diseases”.
Published in August, it chronicles his reflections during a tour of the US in the year following these momentous events. Passing wraith-like through the ‘circus sheds of America’ he sets down powerful musings on life and loss. Not just the loss of loved ones: the baffling loss of your place in the world as the world moves on; the erosion of abilities that have defined who you are; the erasure of a future once anticipated with excitement. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood and, with no choice, you’re on the one less travelled.
Reading the diaries you might think you find anger. It is cutting, acerbic, sarcastic, and critical at times. There’s a feeling of hidden rage behind the words. But Currie refutes this:
“I would have been much more angry about getting Parkinson’s in my 40s than I was in my 50s.”
During the stage event, Cellan-Jones (“a fellow ‘Parky’” as he puts it) persues this question, quoting from the book some very colourful words and vicious criticism of people in a museum as an illustration of Currie’s enmity for the world.
“I don’t see that as bitter”, replies Currie with a smile, raising a huge laugh from the audience.
“It’s righteous anger about people like me sucking oxygen out of the world. There is a curmudgeonly thing to it, and it usually goes with age, but it’s exacerbated by Scottishness.”
Once you understand this, the tone of the diaries becomes ironic and soulful.
Picture – Justin Currie and Rory Cellan-Jones at Wigtown Book Festival, September 2025. Credit – @gideoncable
Speaking before the event he describes how the book came about.
Currie has published a blog with diary entries since 2008, but this is the first time he’s published a book. At the suggestion of his manager, he collected his diary entries with an eye to turning it into a podcast.
“I was thinking about that and I realised this is not a podcast. The only thing it can be is a book.”
“So I felt justified in taking it to a publisher, in that there’s a bit of a story and it wouldn’t have been before. I would never write a memoir – I don’t have an interesting back story at all – but I thought having Parkinson’s and dealing with my girlfriend [having] a massive stroke at the same time…so it just felt like it had a shape more.”
“So, I thought: Yeah, this is not just vanity publishing…I’ve got something to say.”
I ask what he hopes readers will get from his book.
“I suppose the same way as you write a song: you hope people will be moved in some way. Not, you know, not to be moved to tears, but just moved…so that I’ve put something in the world that improves the world slightly rather than just another pollutant.”
Picture – “The Tremolo Diaries: Life on the Road and Other Diseases”, Justin Currie, Published August 2025. Credit – @gideoncable
We talk about how he avoided becoming bitter.
“I immediately cancelled my old age, and once I adjusted to that, I found it quite easy.”
“My girlfriend used to constantly harp at me: ‘Stop living in the future. Live in the present.’ And I was like: ‘What are you talking about? The future is really exciting!’.”
“I used to look forward to a quite utopian future of maintaining my health to old age and sitting with my girlfriend on a terrace somewhere in the Mediterranean, or some of these sort of fantasies people have about some bucolic future.”
“I’m now finding myself living only in the present. I kinda get what she was saying.”
“I do value the good days more now. And hopefully, I whinge less – though I whinge a lot in this book about other things – hopefully, I whinge about daily life a lot less.”
“I wouldn’t want NOT to have Parkinson’s because I feel like quite quickly it becomes part of your personality. It changes your personality. And in some ways, I think it’s changed my personality for the better. “
“I think I’m just a slightly nicer person. I’m much more aware of the fact that everybody is going through something, you know? And I was really intolerant of people moaning about their afflictions – and now here I am spending half my time moaning about my affliction.”
“I like what it’s taught me…if I’m really honest …no, I don’t regret it. I mean, I’ll be fucking regretting it in a couple of years – believe you me – but still, I’m sort of interested to see what happens next.”
“The Tremolo Diaries: Life on the Road and Other Diseases” is published by Simon & Schuster and is available in bookshops now.
The Wigtown Book Festival continues until the 5th October. Tickets are still available for some events. There are also many free sessions and activities.
