No hurry for the singer who still craves attention

Then, with his kind of back catalogue it is no wonder he wasn’t in a hurry to make debut solo album What Is Love For, which has him playing The Leadmill next Thursday.

"I was under no commercial pressure, so there were no compromises to be made," says Currie, already underway with the 12-date tour. "I wanted the songs to arrive in their own natural time and not force anything just to meet a deadline.

“I wanted every song to be about a real feeling or event that I felt I owned. I must have dumped 20 songs because they didn't feel true enough. I played every part I could to keep it primitive and then brought in musicians of talent to colour in the spaces."

"More than anything, I think these songs represent the end of my youth. I wanted to allow my world-weariness to roam unchecked. And I wanted to be straight about love - about how I can't explain it, control it or figure it out. I thought, 'This is how I feel, so let's see if any other folk out there feel the same thing’."

But the solo route didn’t necessarily come by design. Currie co-founded Del Amitri with guitarist Iain Harvie in hometown Glasgow while still a teenager and between 1982 and 2002 the band evolved from scrappy indie combo to international hitmakers, releasing six widely acclaimed albums that showcased frontman/bassist Currie's effortlessly expressive vocals and evolving songwriting skills.

In spite of massive and enduring hits Always The To Last To Know, Nothing Ever Happens and Roll To Me, they were dropped by the Universal label in 2002.

"Iain and I looked at what we'd achieved over the past 20 years and we decided we had no desire to keep making those records over and over again,” he recalls. “I took a holiday in Spain where I ended up getting stoned and listening to the Italian singer Lucio Battisti's '70s albums and suddenly decided that's what I should do - big romantic songs with lots of strings. I had this vision and I had a whole host of songs I thought I could make work in that manner, so I came home and started recording. Then it morphed into something different, as things do."

The album is clearly Currie’s voice but alongside the melodic knack that drove albums Waking Hours, Change Everything, Twisted and Some Other Sucker’s Parade there’s a fresh sense of emotional immediacy as well as pensive meditations on love's darker margins. Self-produced and recorded in or near home, it also features Harvie and fellow Del Amitri man Andy Alston.

"I don't think it's a radical departure from the way I've written in the past and the themes are the same as ever. But unlike a Del Amitri album it's not designed to showcase a band or to work as a live show. It's just an attempt to express myself openly and simply. I had four major reference points, Curtis Mayfield's Curtis, John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, Neil Young's After The Gold Rush, and Nina Simone and Piano. Of course, I didn't expect to make an album anywhere near those masterpieces. I just hope it's honest and truthful.

"For me the song What Love Is For? sums up this record in that it's ostensibly bleak, but underneath there's a Morse code melody that's telling you something else.

"It's my Scottish romanticism, heavily clothed in a shrug of resignation. The Scots believe life is pitiless and harsh, but that deep inside us all there's a churning sea of desire and optimism that's usually suppressed by drink, stoicism and bravado.

"I'm more hedonistic, cynical and corrupt than I was when I started - and less idealistic and nakedly ambitious. But I still want to be heard, I still crave the attention of the crowd and I'm still a self-obsessed megalomaniac. And I still desperately want to move people; that's the whole point."

Tickets cost 15 from credit card hotline 0870 400 0688 or online at www.livenation.co.uk