Ricky Ross Seeks Believers In Troubled
Times
The National 15th September 2016
THE Believers, the recent single from Deacon Blue, is right up there with the
strongest songs the pop rockers have done over the last 30 years. A journeying
track based around an ascending piano figure and the steadfast beats of Dougie
Vipond (the very same), the accompanying video by Graeme O’Hara features images
of individuals, often children, set against landscapes and industrial smoke
stacks.
“Who was this child, what was her journey?/Who were her people, what did she
dream of?” Ricky Ross asks.
Blatantly about the ongoing refugee crisis, the criss-crossing strings of guest
ensemble The Pumpkinseeds and the ethereal wash of vocalist Lorraine McIntosh’s
imbue the song with a surprising sense of hope:
“Go on ahead/I’ll be with you soon enough/Go plant a garden/I’ll be walking with
you in the cool of the evening/In the honeysuckle and willow trees.”
Those poignant lines were inspired, not by the countless human tragedies of the
displaced, but from a story Ross read about a priest in Indonesia ministering to
people on death row.
“[He was] trying to explain to a prisoner who suffered from schizophrenia that
he was to be executed,” says Ross.
“He said: ‘I talked to him for about an hour and a half, trying to prepare him
for the execution. I said to him: “I’m 72 years old, I’ll be heading to heaven
in the near future, so you find out where my house is and prepare a garden for
me.’”
Written after completing music for Paul Higgins’ musical The Choir at Glasgow
Citizens Theatre in mid-2015, it was the positive reaction to demos of The
Believers which spurred Ross to work on the remainder of the album in his
favourite writing place – the window seat of the flat in Glasgow’s south side
where he’s lived for the past 22 years.
Deacon Blue’s third album in four years, it follows 2012’s The Hipsters and
2014’s A New House. Recorded, like those two, at Chem19 in Hamilton with Paul
Savage and mastered, like each of the band’s previous seven, by Tim Young at
Metropolis in London, The Believers reaffirms their creative resurgence after a
relatively fallow period in the 2000s following the death of founder-member
Graeme Kelling.
“Since Graeme died in 2004 we had struggled to find the right personnel,” says
Ross. “We felt we either became a ‘real’ band who produced new material or we
gave up. The former was the better alternative. I also have to give credit to
[multi-instrumentalist] Gregor Philp. Gregor came in as a friend of Dougie’s and
quickly became a friend of us all. He helps me hugely with arranging the songs,
we co-write on some songs and he brings a musical sensibility which is fresh and
original. I love him dearly.”
As well as themes of redemption through love (the delicate, devastatingly pretty
I Will And I Won’t) and reflection on times past (the soft haze of A Boy), the
album’s bigger, most immediate tracks are powered by a stoic optimism. Whether
it’s Gone, with its line: “We’re all reluctant travellers trying to get home”,
the big band uplift of Birds (originally titled Birds Over Barlinnie until
Ross’s “trusty editor” McIntosh suggested otherwise) or the Springsteen-style
piano drive of current single This Is A Love Song, The Believers is an album
buoyed by just that – a sense of faith.
“The nagging feeling I had, thematically, was an afterthought from the
referendum in 2014,” he explains. “People make more decisions based on instinct
and heart than they seem to do based on reason. I imagined a world which was
divided by those who feel instinctively hopeful and trusting, working against
one which is fearful and suspicious. I guess a lot of the songs came out of
that.”
That hope is sustaining during a political situation Ross says gets him down.
With the prospect of Scotland being taken out of the EU against the wishes of
more than 60 per cent of those who voted, a hard-right UK Tory government until
at least 2020 and the likes of the PM and Home Secretary Amber Rudd explicitly
taking the UK’s Leave vote as a command to cut immigration, a more humanitarian
approach to displaced people looks unlikely.
“I feel depressed by all of it,” says Ross. “I like being European and I liked
the emphasis on social cohesion the EU brought to the UK. I still want to be
part of the EU and I hope Scotland will still be… we just need to find the right
way to do that. I don’t believe Theresa May will find it easy to organise the
exit from the EU and I suspect there will be another election before any of this
is settled.”
Fingers crossed.
He continues: “People who have fled are remarkable people. I now know asylum
seekers who have been here a long time. They are amazing citizens and all the
more so because of the strength they have shown in escaping their own crises. We
have plenty room and we should be allowing refugees to work and contribute. So
many are stuck in an awful place – willing to work and contribute but barred
from doing so. We should also not be detaining people. It’s wrong.”