Del Amitri
Change (mostly) everything

I should have actually listened more carefully. The facts were already there, right in front of me. Finding love was always going to be like trying to tell the clouds not to pour. Like trying to drain a swimming pool with a spoon. But the older me can see that I missed these messages which were right there in front of me, written by, in my view, the finest songwriter of our time. But it’s easy for an older me to open the mason jar and reflect on those long-pickled memories and realise this in hindsight.

The release of Change Everything actually escaped me, I’m sorry to say. By ‘92 I had hair down my back, piercings in places not designed for piercings, and spent most of my own time channelling my own teenage failings with words and acoustic guitar or rocking out on bass in an indie band around Scotland. Pearl Jam’s Ten had picked me up and shaped who I was becoming. Docs and Shorts and band tees and grimaces-not-smiles ….. And … And I still dress like that. Anyway! I was proper finding myself. I thought I’d found myself. I was wrong. I never will.

However, the Dels were still right there. I still related to those lyrics. I still related to the sonic foundations provided by the band, with Justin’s amazing vocals woven absurdly well into the mix. They were like an old friend. I could go several weeks without listening then the minute I went back it was as if I’d never been away. But somehow, the release of Change Everything just wasn’t visible to me. Media just wasn’t ubiquitous in those days, as it is now. We live in a modern society saturated with instant gratification, filled with throwaway everythings. Media is all around us and yet they drown one another out. We can see all of them simultaneously, and, as a result, we see none of them at all. Creation gone crazy. In those days we had to hunt and find. Or be introduced to something wonderful by a kind friend. Someone who can’t stand to see a friend go home without a new band to love.

I would borrow tapes from Carnoustie Library. This was in the distant past when phones were attached to walls. When the only way to get a book or an album was to physically do so. With every part of your body, not just your thumbs. And for real, physical money to change hands. The days when music was an experience. Tapes and vinyl were a thing. We paid with a tangible thing for a tangible thing, and also for an experience, not the right to indefinitely rent a handful of disposable ones and zeros. The only relevance the word spotify had in my life was the description of my blossoming teenage complexion. We could listen to the radio in the hope to hear a track from THAT upcoming album. Is this them? It sounds like his/her voice! I hope [The DJ] tells us who this is? This is them, I know it!

Then the bus ride. The album is out today. I needed to get the bus to Dundee. But when I had the album, I still couldn’t listen! Damn! Bus. Ride. Home. Faster. Driver. Please. In through the door. Release the black circle from its holding cell and onto the freedom of the spinning platter. I could smell it. The plastic. It was glorious. Then, a few crackles later, and there it was. I was listening. To the song the band wanted me to hear first! And I was lost in the music, reading the inlay and album cover as I listened. Nothing else mattered.

Even the tapes from the library were an experience. Apart from the Robert Plant one I borrowed, that experience involved going right back with it. The library was my YouTube. It was my way of finding something new. The Record Shop (Chalmers and Joy) allowed me to own what I knew I wanted and the library allowed me to find something new I wanted. Judging the tapes by their covers, when I couldn’t see an album I fancied I would borrow a compilation. I can’t remember which compilation it was but I remember getting home and slipping the tape into my player and listening to the first few tracks. Nothing grabbed my attention. And then… “Snow in a soulless city covers up the cracks in the road”. Wait. What? I know that voice. That finely crafted prose is unmistakably my mate and big brother, Justin. Why did he not tell me they were back!?

I’m trying to be a grunge indie kid, but this will be my downfall. This changes everything.

Like spit in the rain those days have now faded. Be my downfall and Surface of the moon still blow me away. I love the whole album, but from my, purely subjective view of the Del’s albums it’s not my fav. However, I love the fact that this one is at the top of some people’s lists. I don’t know if it’s because I felt a little like I’d lost them at this point. Not because they released the album without personally notifying me, but because Just like a man and Always the last to know seemed, suddenly, to belong to other people. If you mentioned Del Amitri those were the tracks they would know.

For me, as I continued to grow, continued to try and continue to fail it was Twisted which would next take me to another place. But, like the other albums and b-sides since, Change Everything has stayed with me as I’ve become older and no wiser. The journey I would share with Justin and Iain and company would continue to be described in detail by my idol, with some of that advice being lost on me. At my age, I understand it now. I guess an older me is old enough to know.