The Reinvention Of Ricky Ross
Glasgow Herald 2nd April 2017
RICKY Ross has killed a man. The victim, a Dundonian in his early 30s, had
long hair, strong views and a loud mouth. The man was a popular figure in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, appearing regularly on television, radio, in
newspapers and magazines across the country. He sang well, danced badly, was
loved by some and loathed by others. The killer, though, remains
unrepentant. “I didn’t really like him,” he says. “So I had to kill him off.”
It’s almost 27 years since Ricky Ross stood on Glasgow Green in front of 250,000
music fans, stuck out his jaw and let rip with a full-throated attack on
Scottish Westminster Labour MPs on the biggest stage of his career at the time.
The Deacon Blue frontman was the leader of Scotland’s most prominent pop band in
1990. He and his mates hadn’t long pushed Madonna off the top of the charts with
their second album When The World Knows Your Name, and had consequently been
chosen to headline the biggest free music festival the country has ever seen.
The Big Day, on June 3, 1990, was an ambitious international musical jamboree
which spilled out across the city, in a day-long summertime celebration of
Glasgow's status as the European City of Culture featuring the likes of Big
Country, Texas, The Associates, Wet Wet Wet and Hue and Cry. It was a time of
political agitation. Demonstrations and marches were commonplace, whether
against nuclear weapons on the Clyde, or for the release of Nelson Mandela on
the other side of the world. Most pinned their hopes on the Labour Party
to speak for a de-industrialised nation on the ropes. But not the guy from
Dundee on stage with the microphone. “I want to dedicate this to people of
Motherwell and Ravenscraig who soon will have no jobs and won’t be able to
afford a home to stay in,” went Ross, his rabble-rousing captured in grainy
YouTube footage. “And to the people of Scotland who for the last 10 years have
been lied to and sold down the river by their own people, by the leaders of the
Labour Party who don’t even ask questions on your behalf down in Westminster.”
Channel 4 broadcast the whole angry thing across the UK. Down on Glasgow Green,
the crowd roared their approval of the Scottish guy giving the finger to the
Establishment on network television. The clip is described on YouTube as “an
anti-Tory rant”, but it is no such thing. This was a call to action, delivered
25 years before Scotland returned 56 SNP MPs in Westminster and 27 years before
the clamour for a second independence referendum a few short years after the
first one was lost. It was delivered by the same man who will casually admit, in
his 60th year, to having “admiration” for a succession of Tory leaders.
“That was impulsiveness,” says Ross, pondering his political maturation over
lunch near his home on Glasgow's south side. “I’m not the guy at The Big Day any
more. I couldn’t be. I’m much more reflective, and I think as you get older, you
have different responsibilities. One of the things I feel increasingly drawn
towards now is people talking to each other. “That was a long time ago. You
change a lot of your personality, and hopefully everybody does. But I wouldn’t
want to change me then. I’m quite happy that I did that when I did.
“I went skiing with my 16-year-old son recently, this fearless guy, zooming off
down slopes, and I can’t do that either. It’s that impulsive youth thing. Fine
as a one-off, but sometimes you’re going to need a map …” There was no map, but
some might say a few roads were dug by key figures on the journey to the modern
Scottish independence campaign. Ross was pivotal in the Artists for Independence
movement in the early 1990s, hosting an indy come-all-ye at his house with the
likes of wife and fellow Deacon Blue member Lorraine McIntosh, Elaine C Smith,
David Hayman, William McIlvanney, Edwin Morgan, Alasdair Gray, Michael Marra,
Stuart Cosgrove and Liz Lochhead. Some have gone and some remain, but their
ultimate quest remains unfulfilled.
As recently as several weeks ago, Ross stated it was too early for another
Scottish independence referendum. By the time he’s posing for our photographer
round the back of the Glad Café in Shawlands a few weeks later, he’s changed the
words to that tune.“I don’t think there’s much choice. I said no a couple of
months ago, but it’s moving by the day and by the hour. When things are moving
so quickly it’s hard to put a blanket statement on things,” he says. “The option
of staying in the union could be made to seem attractive in 2014. Staying in
Europe, solidarity across countries. “But it seems all the good bits of that
aren’t very visible to Scots at the moment. There’s something very different
about this Conservative government and the way they’re likely to govern for what
could be a long time. I think people are saying they don’t want to be a part of
that.”
In 1992, Deacon Blue released the single Your Town, a brooding response to the
Tories’ hold on Westminster. It spoke of a people using pictures, songs and
words, doing what they could to ease the pain of life in post-Thatcher Scotland.
The song included a prophetic venomous strike at the Iron Lady. “When you’re
gone they will curse you,” snarled the singer, “and raise the tide against you.”
Its sentiments could be easily transposed 25 years into the future, but their
author has tethered his lash. “People don’t like this, but I have a great
admiration for Theresa May, David Cameron or whoever else it is,” Ricky says.
“These people are putting themselves on the line. People might think they’re out
to feather their nest or whatever, but I think they could have an easier life,
and probably a more prosperous one, outside politics.”
Even Thatcher? “Yes, and I’d say that to anyone. But I don’t necessarily have to
have agreed with her.” Could Big Day Man have made such a comment? “No!” he
says, snorting at the suggestion. “He’d never have said that. You wouldn’t have
got that far with him, he’d have shouted you down.” The band’s most recent work,
though, suggests he hasn’t been silenced altogether. Believers, their eighth
studio album, was their biggest commercial success in over 20 years, entering
the album charts at 12. Its title track, a declaration of unerring hope in
response to the refugee crisis, provoked a mixed reaction on the band’s social
media streams with some dismissing its message as “liberal pap”.
Does he feel it’s a safe gamble to introduce contemporary politics into a back
catalogue of songs so well-worn as to have become items of nostalgia in the
lives of their fans? “We are who we are,” he says. “The me you get on stage is
because of what I believe. I’m a songwriter, not a politician. But I’m also the
way I am because sometimes I get confused, sometimes I think out loud, sometimes
I’ll react to something the opposite way I did five years before. “But I’d never
have written Dignity, or Wages Day, or Chocolate Girl or Your Town if I wasn’t
someone who got up in the morning interested in what goes on in the world.
That’s always been a big part of my songwriting, and I think people know that.”
The crescendo in his band’s most famous song, Dignity, about a street sweeper
who dreams of saving up to buy a dinghy, sees the character thinking about home,
faith and work from his boat on a faraway sea Ross's own home is in Glasgow with
wife and bandmate Lorraine and teenage son, his three grown-up daughters now
living in America, China and Australia. Faith and work have become increasingly
intertwined. Raised in the Christian Brethren, his religion and faith have
shape-shifted over the years. He and his wife sent their children to Catholic
school and he converted to Catholicism in his 50s.
Ross sold seven million records as a pop star, having quit his job as an English
teacher. The morning of our interview, he’d been visiting St Joseph’s Primary in
Clarkston, and discovered why celebrity status is incompatible with classroom
work. “I was talking about Saint Ignatius and was trying to allude to Pope
Francis,” he says, smiling over the recollection. “So I asked them who the most
famous Catholic was. One wee boy put his hand up and said, 'You!’ I told him if
he thought that, then he was in big trouble.”
Why did he convert at a comparatively late age? “It goes way back,” he says.
“When we studied the Reformation at school, I remember being excited about it,
but being drawn to the other side, thinking it’s a shame they’d taken all the
stuff out the churches. “I think the spirituality of it really drew me in, and
as I grew older I was drawn to what a priest friend refers to as 2000 years of
spirituality. Lorraine grew up Catholic and she felt happy to return there. But
I have no desire to make one religion better than the other.”
His conversion recently saw him follow in the footsteps of his late aunt
Margaret and uncle Jimmy, both Brethren evangelicals who devoted their lives to
spreading the Gospel in Africa. Ross travelled to Zambia with Catholic
charity SCIAF, promoting their Wee Boxes campaign and harvesting stories for his
radio show. “It was a very personal one for me," he says. “It was great
experiencing something that another generation had experienced. I was surprised
how basic it still was. “But the attention wasn’t on me. Imagine this team from
SCIAF coming to a village in the middle of nowhere, ‘We’re here to help you …
and by the way he’s a singer.’ So I passed myself off as a radio journalist. It
was much easier for me just to relate to people as someone who was taking their
story and passing it on.”
His work as a Radio Scotland presenter has seen him explore home, faith and work
with people from all creeds and corners. It’s also the reason why, unlike in the
run-up to 2014's referendum, he might absent himself from the public debate on
indyref2, in keeping with BBC guidelines on impartiality. “I have no plans
to get involved at the moment, simply because if I do I might need to step away
from my Sunday Morning show. I haven’t asked the question yet, but there’s a
little bit of magic that happens in my life when I do that programme.”
The songs from his four solo albums have long been shot through with
spirituality and he speaks of a new one called Only God And Dogs, inspired by a
homeless Glasgow man’s devoted pet. Some have even experienced transcendence
with Deacon Blue up the Gallowgate. “A friend of mine, Father Willie Slaven,
once told me at a wedding that he’d been there the night we ‘died and went to
Heaven’.” says Ross. “I had no idea what he was talking about until he explained
he was the priest at St Alphonsus behind the Barrowland and came to see us on
our last night round the corner.”
Since that finale in 1994, Deacon Blue have split up, reformed, released a duff
comeback album in 2001 (Homesick, “the record we should never have made”), lost
guitarist Graeme Kelling to cancer, toured sporadically, formed Deacon Blue Mark
II with guitarist Gregor Philp and bassist Lewis Gordon joining Ricky, Lorraine
and remaining original members Jim Prime (keyboards) and Dougie Vipond (drums).
After 11 years they made a new record in 2012, The Hipsters, and another two
since, A New House and Believers, sparking a renaissance which has returned them
to arenas like the Royal Albert Hall, SSE Hydro and Hampden Park, where they
performed at the closing ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
It has also brought them “home” to the Barras, the legendarily ramshackle venue
inextricably linked with their start 30 years ago. “We were one of many bands
who people remember having special nights there,” says Ross. “I think people
just ignore all the bad bits and think about the good bits. People talk about
the atmosphere, but it actually sounds very good, too. It’s a great room. And it
still has that ability to punch you in the chest sonically.” Figuratively
speaking, of course. At 59, the singer appears to be in the shape of a man half
his age. He’s a runner and gets gym-fit before tours, but executing pop star
stagecraft doesn’t get any easier. Even if he has killed off Mr Angry.
“I love playing live, but I could easily give it up,” he says, stretching out
the fingers of his hand. “But increasingly as I get older, I get aches and
pains. I feel my fingers and my hand sore after playing piano. “A lot of
musicians do. Look at Bob Dylan, he can hardly move his hands and yet he
obviously still loves doing it. “I would be sad if I wanted to do it and I
couldn’t physically. If someone said I couldn’t do this any more, as much as I’m
sure I’d miss it miss it, I can imagine accepting it. “You forget about
gigs, they’re such passing things. I rarely remember them. But records, they’re
there forever.” Paul English