THEY have lain in storage for decades, the manuscripts for some of the most successful pop music to emerge from Scotland.
Now the haul from the personal collection of Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie is set to be auctioned to help raise money for a US-based epilepsy charity.
Handwritten lyrics, personal notebooks and a comprehensive cache of backstage ephemera have been plundered from the band’s archive by an American fan hoping to raise funds in memory of his son.
Michael Gomoll, from the US city of Madison, Wisconsin, met Mr Currie in Scotland to take items the singer’s rich back catalogue of memorabilia back to the States.
Among the collectables are handwritten alternative first draft lyrics to one of the band’s hit singles Be My Downfall, and the singer’s personal notebooks.
A Fender guitar signed by the band, as well as handwritten lyrics and chord sheets for album tracks such as Behind The Fool, and as Soon As The Tide Comes In also feature in the online auction.
Father-of-three Mr Gomoll’s son Joey died from epilepsy in 2010, aged four. The child suffered from Dravet Syndrome, a rare form of the neurological disorder. Mr Gomoll established The Joseph Gomoll Foundation as a way to help process his grief.
He said: “When Joey died in 2010, just shy of his fifth birthday, I had two choices – crawl inside a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black or try and raise some money.
“Like my two other children, Joey was adopted from Guatemala. His sister Julia is now 18 and his brother Sam is 17. He had his first seizure at six months and was debilitated by them regularly until his death in March 2010.”
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The former nightclub DJ and music promoter, 57, has also orchestrated the release of a series of albums featuring songs from members of REM, Rosanne Cash, The Jayhawks and Crash Test Dummies. A previously unreleased Del Amitri track, If Your Tears Don’t Make a Sound, featured on the charity’s 2011 release.
Mr Gomoll said: “We mainly raise money with concerts. I am a long-time friend of record producer (and drummer for rock band Garbage) Butch Vig, and we put on a benefit concert in Madison every year with various guests from our pool of Joey’s Song friends. We’ve raised $250,000 in nine years.”
Former IBM executive Mr Gomoll, who is also the executive director of The Epilepsy Foundation in Wisconsin, met Currie at a Del Amitri concert in Chicago in the mid 90s at the height of the band’s US success. He said: “We’ve kept in contact since then. I was over in Glasgow last fall and Justin and I tore apart his garage and found a ton of old Del memorabilia that we are auctioning and raffling to help raise some money.
“We started digging through stuff and I expected some old tour merchandise. He found notebooks and folders with pages and pages of lyrics and handed them to me. I was both stunned that he would give them to me and not surprised in the least at the same time. I have known him for 25 years and he is the first one to pull out his wallet at the pub.”
Del Amitri were one of Scotland’s most successful bands in the 80s and 90s, with a string of hits including Always The Last To Know, Nothing Ever Happens and Roll To Me and Scotland FC’s official World Cup 98 anthem Don’t Come Home Too Soon.
Currie added: “I’ve kept everything since I was 14.
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