On the Road With a Semi-Hit Single : Pop music: Scottish band Del Amitri’s first excursion to the States was done on a shoestring budget. Things are a bit better this time.

The Scottish band Del Amitri is still playing mainly small clubs as it tours America, but things are quite different from its first U.S. tour. In 1986, finding itself without a record deal, the band took up a network of American fans on their offer to house and feed the lads, help them borrow instruments, and arrange their shows. The shoestring excursion actually ended up losing only a few dollars, and it kept the group alive.

“The object was to prove to ourselves that there were still people out there who were into the band,” says Del Amitri’s singer and main songwriter Justin Currie, who will front the folk-flavored pop-rock group at the Roxy tonight. “The reception we received when we got over here was such that we were convinced that we were complete rock gods, and that kept us going for at least two years.”

The ’92 edition of Del Amitri (Currie and co-founder Iain Harvie have a new lineup this time around) is touring on a different kind of fuel: a semi-hit single, “Always the Last to Know,” which has moved up to No. 30 on the pop chart.

The catchy exploration of infidelity, which is on the current album “Change Everything,” is the decade-old Del Amitri’s first sign of commercial life in America, but don’t look to its creator to explain its presence on the mainstream radio format known as CHR (contemporary hits radio).

“Top 40 radio’s a bit of a mystery to me, because nobody that I know who lives in America listens to it,” he said during a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Dallas.

“And not many people who come along to our shows heard us on pop radio. That’s not how they got into the band. It’s really nice to be played on the radio, I’m really glad we’re being exposed to a wider audience, but when we go on the road we don’t really see any visible effects of it.”

Pop radio might be an unlikely destiny for Del Amitri, but the group’s influences are so varied that anything is possible: Beatles and Dylan, Rod Stewart and mid-’70s Stones, the acoustic thrust of John Mellencamp’s “Lonesome Jubilee” all figure in the sound, and while the ‘70s punk-rock explosion inspired Currie into action, its stylistic impact is negligible.

“Ever since we made the last album (“Waking Hours” in 1990), we’ve always thought we’re a mainstream band--there’s no point in pretending to be particularly ‘alternative,’ ” he said. “The music is accessible rock-pop music. We’ve never been part of a movement as such. I don’t think we’ve ever been on the cutting edge of anything, I don’t think we’ve ever played a gig that would have encompassed that feeling or that spirit. I think we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought different.

“I think we’re just trying to make albums that come close to the albums that we revere--well, hopefully we’re not too reverent about these things. But if we ever come within a mile of making a record that’s half as good as ‘Revolver,’ we’ll be very pleased with ourselves.”