Deacon Blue : Back To The Old School?
CD Review July 1989
Deacon Blue has, in two short years' gone from critical acclaim and
a string of flop singles to a second album which entered the charts on its
week of release at No.3 Dave Judgement asks Ricky Ross what turned them
around.
Would you buy a used syllabus from these people? Maybe not, but their mainman,
"Honest" Ricky Ross, was indeed an English teacher when he moved from the
town of Dundee to the throbbing metropolis of Glasgow in 1985. "I went primarily
to take up another teaching job," recalls the 30 year-old singer, "but it
was also in my mind that Glasgow has a thriving music scene, somewhere I
could get a band together. " The band he got together was called Deacon Blue
and, after a shaky start creatively (they had intended to be a country band)
and commercially (their early singles sold very poorly), they're now established
as prime movers in the adult rock album stakes. In fact, even before Deacon
Blue went Top Ten with the single Real Gone Kid last October, their debut
album Raintown was selling slowly but steadily, amassing a staggering 350,000
sales without scoring the usual three hit singles which the industry believes
almost essential before an album can chalk up decent figures. Ross started
the group with drummer Dougie Vipond, slightly adapting the title of a Steely
Dan song, Deacon Blues, to give themselves a name. "I identified with the
character in that song," recalls Ricky. "He's a hungry sort of guy, restless.
He wants to lose himself in this rock'n'roll mythology, drink a lot, play
the saxophone and die behind the wheel of his car. He wants success, and
so do we".
Their impressive single and album chart statistics suggest they they've already
found success, and Ross thinks he knows why. "Word of mouth". We played a
lot of gigs and people told their friends. Those friends came to the next
gig and more bought the album and so on. As a result of all that, the radio
picked up on Real Gone Kid and then the biggest factor has to appearing on
Top Of The Pops in front of ten million people. You can't underestimate that."
Essentially, he's describing the traditional rock route to the top - gigs
and word of mouth - which broke Deacon Blue when the undeniably powerful
marketing expertise of a major international record company, CBS, was finding
it an uphill struggle to manufacture the significant daytime airplay that
could be turned into chart success.
Having taken their name from one Steely Dan song, it sometimes seems as if
they're consciously reiecting the lyric of another. In My Old School, the
Dan's Becker & Fagen sing of "never going back to my old school", but
Ross seems determined to cast Deacon Blue firmly in the old school of traditional
rock, despite having certain reservations about the sytle. "Rock has become
a dirty word in the last few years," he condsiders, "probably because a lot
of its attributes are mundane and reactionary, and many of the lyrics re-affirm
redundant ideas about sexuality. "We actually went out to California to do
some recording, looking for a poppier, singles feel but, while we were there,
we discovered, that's not for us. We're a vibey, live, honest-to-God rock
band. It was a good experience because we learned from it, but LA is the
kind of place that can suck the life out of you." The new album, When The
World Knows Your Name, certainly rocks harder than Raintown. "It's much more
how we've always wanted to be," explains Ross. "We're beginning to discover
that our instincts about what we want are more often right than the things
we're told about how it's done. We should have more faith in ourselves. "Too
many bands," he reckons, "have lost the sense of belonging to a tradition,
like the folk tradition of handing down songs from'one performer or one
generation to the next."
The thousands who have seen Deacon Blue live should find the new album a
more direct reflection of that exhilerating experience than Raintown. "That
was the trapped Glasgow album, but this new album is inspired by a much wider
canvas. It's still about Glasgow, but influenced by the amount of travelling
we've done in the last couple of years. Also, we've consciously tried to
capture the energy level of our live shows." In this aim they've succeeded
admirably but, even so, the songs retain a subtle air of mystery, as if there's
more going on than first meets the ear. "I feel no need to spell things out
in my songs," says Ross. "Many of the bands that I love, I know nothing about
but I identify with something in the songs. Sometimes, if my stuff seems
mysterious, it's because I've used the device of speaking with several different
characters' voices in one song. "It's a technique we take almost for granted
in film or theatre ... like ... Tom Stoppard's play Travesties has several
different characters' points of view being expressed at once. Once you begin
to realise that, you can make more sense of my songs, but it really doesn't
matter. People can take them at face value or look for something deeper if
they like. If they can't identify with something in the song, then I've failed."
In the early days of the group, Ross was keen to emulate the likes of Green
Gartside (Scritti Politti) or Paddy MacAloon (Prefab Spout), by becoming
a studio bound songwriter-cum-intellectual using the band image merely as
a front. Nowadays, however, he's more likely to cite heavyweight rock Performers
like Bruce Springstein as his songwriting influences. "I like the way Springstein
brings his own background into his songs. For years I thought my background
was very dull, very strict, but now I realise it had its strengths and I
can draw inspiration from it." Another songwriter he admires is folk legend
Woody Guthrie, whose "hard realism" he feels is missing from most rock songs.
Other names that crop up are Van Morrison, Elvis Costello and, perhaps a
little more left-field, American cult-rockers Husker Do, whose song Its Not
Funny Anymore, turned up on Deacon Blue's first album.
The words "honesty" and "realism" crop up again and again in Ross's conversation.
"I like to put real people in my songs. Real Gone Kid, for example, is actually
about Maria MacKee of the Los Angeles band Lone Justice. I saw her live at
The Marquee and I was totally blown away." Someone else that blows Ross away
is America's charismatic black political and religious leader Jesse Jackson.
"I'm fascinated by people like Jackson, or Martin Luther King. When they
speak, I'm drawn totally into their world. I get a real excitement, and I
think that's crossed over into my music. I like to tell a story in words,
to paint a picture with my songs, the way they do when they speak."
Given Ross's early years, it's hardly surprising. The "very dull" background
he referred to earlier was in fact as part of a strict and religious family
in Dundee. The first music he can recall hearing was hymns. "I wasn't allowed
to go out and play football on Sundays, but my mother used to sing hymns
around the house, things like Deep And Wide. We'd go to the gospel hall in
Dundee and hear the preachers and all sorts of things flow from that." Things
like religious faith? "You mean God?" he asks. "Yes, I think I'm religious,
but it's something I need to understand in good human terms. Christ-like
images appeal to me more than this spiritual concept of an eternal God."
It has taken only four years for Britain to fall for Deacon Blue, but later
this year they're off on a major tour of the land whose music has been Ricky
Ross's greatest inspiration, the USA. Success in Britain is a fine thing
to achieve, but success in America is the ultimate goal of any traditional
rock outfit. My bet is that America will be even more receptive to their
talents than we were.
Dave Judgement