Del Amitri - Past To Present

Del Amitri play the Perth Concert Hall on Wednesday 2 December, part of their Past To Present UK tour. It's a night they're framing as a celebration of four decades of songs, stories and live shows, so it's a look back across the whole of their career rather than a focus on one particular record.

To get where they are, it helps to know where they started. The band formed in Glasgow around 1979-80 when Justin Currie, James Scobbie and Donald Bentley got together as school teenagers, and they did so as a reaction against the rest of the school's rockers. Even the name was a bit of a joke: they chose it because it meant nothing but sounded like someone's name. At first, they kept the band a secret from the rest of the school, rehearsing in Currie's parents' house and later in a space behind some storage cartons in the basement of the now-defunct Glasgow Art Centre.

Their first drummer was Paul Tyagi, and their first recorded track, 'What She Calls It', came out as the B-side of a flexi-disc given away free with the Stand and Deliver fanzine. Bentley and Scobbie left for university in 1982, and the line-up reformed with Iain Harvie and Bryan Tolland. Currie and Harvie were the only two members to stay throughout the band's history, and they were its main songwriters. That's a long run for any band, and the Past To Present tour is built around that span of forty years.

The show is in the Gannochy Trust Auditorium at the Perth Concert Hall on Mill Street, PH1 5HZ. It starts at 19:00, and tickets are £53.50 or £48.50, both including a £4 booking fee per ticket.