Deacon Blue - Caledonian Dreamers
The Telegraph 18th September 2014
After Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games put them back in the spotlight, Eighties pop
stars Deacon Blue are embarking on a second life. Anita Singh meets them
Amid the frothy camp of the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony – Kylie Minogue
reviving The Loco-Motion, a tartan-trousered Lulu – there was one performance
delivered without gimmicks. Deacon Blue played Dignity, the song that launched
their career 27 years ago, in the heartfelt style that has been their trademark.
Never mind the teenagers tweeting: “Who the hell are Deacon Blue?” For those of
a certain age, it was a nostalgia trip and a reminder that this band was still
going strong.
Frontman Ricky Ross may be greying at the temples now but the commanding voice
remains intact, as does the soaring vocal of Lorraine McIntosh. She also appears
not to have aged in two decades, although she laughingly puts this down to a
make-up artist hired at the last minute: “I never have a make-up artist for gigs
but suddenly I thought, 'Hold on a second, this is quite a big gig and quite a
lot of people are going to see this. And I’m sure Kylie will have a make-up
artist.’ ”
The band are getting used to being back in the spotlight. After some lean years
in which they split and reformed, with no one but their most ardent fans taking
much notice, and in which they lost bandmate Graeme Kelling to cancer, they are
back with their seventh studio album. A New House brims with optimism and what
the band sum up as “rekindled passion for the second life Deacon Blue has
embarked upon”. The title track was Radio 2’s Record of the Week and the band –
Ross, McIntosh, keyboard player James Prime and drummer Dougie Vipond – begin a
nationwide tour in November. Together with their appearance at the Games, Deacon
Blue are having a bit of a moment.
“As opposed to a senior moment?” says 56-year-old Ross. “Well, it’s nice when it
happens. People say, 'I heard you on the radio the other day,’ and you go, 'Oh,
really. What was it?’ and it’s one of the old ones. What you really want people
to hear is your new stuff. Sometimes it takes something like the Commonwealth
Games, doing Dignity, to make the connection again.”
Dignity divides opinion: for every person who loves the tale of a binman and his
boat there is another who finds it cloying. Ross was inspired to write it while
sitting in the bay window of his flat in Pollockshields, Glasgow, and watching
council workers leave the cleaning depot at the end of his street. He claims not
to be sick of it. “I never take it for granted. I’m a great believer in pop
music, and popular music by its definition has to be heard.”
The single and the album from which it came, Raintown, made stars of Deacon Blue
at a time when every other band in the charts seemed to be Scottish – Aztec
Camera, Hue and Cry, Danny Wilson, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. “You would go
to a gig and there would be a bunch of A & R guys up from London to see whoever
was the subject of the next big rumour,” Ross recalls of their early days. “And
you’d try to create your own rumour, because this was pre-internet so it was all
just hearsay.
“There was a lot of money around from the major labels. It felt like anything
was possible and that the phone was going to go one day and there’d be someone
saying, 'I want to sign your band.’ One day it did, and it changed our world.”
Deacon Blue’s second album, When the World Knows Your Name, was their biggest
hit, knocking Madonna’s Like a Prayer off the number one spot in 1989 and
spawning the singles Real Gone Kid, Wages Day and Fergus Sings the Blues. But it
is Raintown that stands the test of time.
Listen to it now and it hasn’t dated. The band were tagged as “sophisti-pop” but
from the opening lines of the title track (“It’s a rain dirt town, job hurts and
it don’t pay”) to the black-and-white cover image of Glasgow’s sprawl, it is a
hymn to urban life.
If they were not an authentic voice of working-class Scotland – Ross was
privately educated and working as a teacher when he was signed – they were
certainly Left-wing, performing at anti-poll tax gigs and benefits for
Nicaragua. It is partly memories of that time that have made Ross, and several
of his contemporaries, including Hue and Cry’s Pat Kane and Fairground
Attraction’s Eddi Reader, passionate about Scottish independence. He is a
prominent Yes campaigner, albeit in a measured voice far removed from the “cyber
nationalist” internet trolls who vilified J K Rowling after she donated
£1 million to the rival Better Together campaign.
“Our generation, you’ve got to remember, lived through the Eighties where the
majority of Scotland voted one way and got something else, so that casts a long
shadow,” says Ross, who claims that wanting the Yes vote is “the default
position amongst artists”.
“A lot of people I know really fear what’s going to happen with the next round
of cuts and the austerity that’s controlled from London. It’s about imagining a
better place than we live in at the moment.”
Perhaps naively, he refuses to believe the political divide will leave any
lasting bitterness after the vote. “I don’t see people falling out, I see us all
chatting in a fairly healthy way about it,” he says. The debate has got young
people thinking about politics, and how can that be a bad thing? “All of us,
from all political sides, have the same problem that we’re not getting people to
come and vote. Yet all my children have been engaged with this over the
breakfast table.”
His love for Scotland shines through on A New House. The track Our New Land is
an almost absurdly romantic paean to independence, while another is named after
John Muir, the Scottish-born conservationist. It is also a testament to the love
between Ross and McIntosh, who have been married for 24 years and have four
children.
The husband-and-wife dynamic works pretty well in the band, both say, although
they admit it became a healthier atmosphere when they began pursuing their own
side projects, Ross as a solo artist and songwriter for the likes of James Blunt
and Jamie Cullum, McIntosh as an actress, appearing in Ken Loach’s My Name is
Joe and the television series Taggart. As McIntosh, 50, puts it: “If Deacon Blue
stopped tomorrow we do have lots of other things going on in our lives and
careers that would keep us going.”
Not that they want to stop. “You don’t get to this age without looking back with
a certain amount of nostalgia at your life, and that comes through on this
record,” says McIntosh. “But it’s also a joyful record, so it’s marrying those
two emotions – looking back on youth and all the things you’ll never experience
again and saying, 'Celebrate them, but know that there’s still brilliant things
to come.’ ”