Deacon Blue 25th Anniversary Tour Programme
September 2012
By Paul English
I REMEMBER the exact moment.
Glasgow Green, June 3, 1990. Around 10pm.
A man on stage playing a simple guitar
riff, framed by a single spotlight slicing through clouds of red blaise kicked
up by half a million feet.
Two kicks of a drum.
Tingling. Butterflies. Adrenaline.
Two shadows take their position, centre stage.
Two notes on a keyboard.
Repeating. Louder. Stronger.
Air crackling with the energy of a quarter of a
million people.
A city's desire for a defining moment.
Keyboards, drums, guitar, rushing together now in
thrilling momentum.
The stage flooding with light.
An ocean of bodies, a leaping, rolling frenzy
stretching past the fairground lights in the distance.
And then, an explosion of sheer joy, unleashed
across the city.
Woo-ooo, woo-ooo, wooo-ooo, wooo-ooo ...
The memory of that moment on Glasgow Green with my
four best childhood friends, remains clear and vivid 22 years later, frozen in
time like the Oscar Marzaroli photographs Deacon Blue used as cover art on their
first album and singles.
The clip of guitarist Graeme Kelling opening his
band's headline set with Real Gone Kid at The Big Day before a sea of bouncing
souls still sends a thrill through me, almost as
visceral now as it was to that 14 year old at his first music festival.
It flooded a teenage soul with the love of the live
moment, the love of music and the love of a band which sung about real
streets and real people, and the lives, hope, dreams and fears they carried.
Glasgow, I was suddenly beginning to realise, was a
city to be proud of and excited by.
It was an adolescent awakening, an awareness of the
intoxicating, transformative power of a live performance.
But not just any live performance. This
was something splendid. This was Deacon Blue in their pomp.
The band, Ricky Ross (vocals), Lorraine McIntosh
(backing vocals), Graeme Kelling (guitar), Ewen Vernal (bass), Dougie Vipond,
(drums) and Jim Prime (keyboards) won a reputation for being one of the best
live acts in the country.
From 1985 to 1994, the original sextet had two number
one albums, sold over six million LPs and peppered the singles chart with their
unique sound, from the whoop and holler of Real Gone Kid and the billing and
cooing of Your Swaying Arms, to the summertime heartbreak of I'll Never Fall In
Love Again and the unforgiving snarl of Your Town. Five albums, soundtracking the
life and times of generations of fans.
And now with the silver anniversary of their first
release comes The Hipsters, an album of celebration, of drives in the sunshine
and avenues of stars, sounding so fresh as to make the 25 year span of this
band's history seem somehow impossible.
Deacon Blue's debut Raintown, a bittersweet ode
to Glasgow, has had its legendary status long cemented. Documentaries have been
made, lengthy articles written. It has crossed from art to life and back again:
author Iain Rankin's Edinburgh inspector Rebus famously listened to it when
driving west and a young Glasgow band has taken it as their name.
It spoke of a town toiling with the times, then as
now. Chasing work, keeping faith, loving to dream and dreaming of love, all
under those dark skies captured in those Marzaroli shots.
Skies which, to a teenager growing up on the lower
reaches of the River Clyde, took on an unlikely glamour amid the post-industrial
decline. This band was on the radio in the kitchen, the telly in the living
room and the cassette player in the car, singing about ships called Dignity and
girls made of chocolate. And
all under the same skies as us.
By the time Real Gone Kid arrived at the business end
of the singles chart in 1988, Deacon Blue had expanded those horizons
beyond the city of 'buildings and places, memories and faces'.
Its release ahead of the album When The World Knows
Your Name subsequently dislodged Pop Queen Madonna from her throne, with the LP
entering the charts at number one.
If Raintown was about home, When The World Knows Your
Name was a heady trip away, a skybound journey stretching from the 'Campsies over
Christmas' and out 'over the sea, over the land and the city', to a willing,
growing, audience.
A poster of Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh
from that time hung in my teenage bedroom. Him commanding the audience, floppy
fringed and emphatic pointing finger; her floaty frills and Doc Martens, arms to
the sky, lost in the moment.
It was a sight I first saw for real in 1989 at
Glasgow's SECC, a concert subsequently released, and quickly worn out, on VHS.
Then again at that special night on the Green
headlining a massive musical party to mark Glasgow's status as European City of
Culture. It ended with fireworks and Dignity, as an audience of millions watched
live on Channel 4. My
pal Allan's dad taped it. It was repeat viewing that whole adolescent summer.
The loyal following remained as the years and albums
passed. The downsizing from stadiums to concert halls suited the fiddles
and accordions of Fellow Hoodlums in 1991.
Still everyone stood, everyone danced. You didn't
need a seat at a Deacon Blue concert.
Then again for the surprise gear-change of Whatever
You Say, Say Nothing and its live show spliced with the surreal theatre of
miners, candelabras and mirrors amid the gritty snipe of Your Town and Only
Tender Love in 1993.
I saw them then too, winning a competition on Radio 1
to be flown with a pal to a secret gig in London at
the Clapham Grand. We'd somehow got our hands on an album sampler from Rhythmic
Records in Greenock and flew south thrilled and smug that we knew the words
to Bethlehem's Gate before anyone else did.
As the years passed, the Blue came and went. They
split at the top of the charts in 1994, performing their last gig at Glasgow's Barrowlands in
May, coincidentally on the 18th birthday of that 14 year old boy who'd
experienced a musical rite of passage down the front on Glasgow Green four years
earlier. An adolescence soundtracked and bookended, or so it felt at the time.
In 1999, they reformed, coming in and out of view
ever since. A tour here, a one-off show there, a compilation or two along the
way. Still I, we, followed.
London's Royal Albert Hall, Ricky singing The
Wildness off-mic, 1999. The Homesick album launch, King Tuts, 2001.
Raintown straight through, opening Glasgow's Carling Academy and Graeme Kelling's final
bow on guitar, 2003.
In 2004, they lost him, the man whose simple
guitar riff sparked the start of not only Deacon Blue's biggest gig that night
in 1990, but so too the enduring support of just one teenager among many.
I remember the exact moment, and all it made me
feel.
It's one reason why I keep coming back.
Tonight, I hope you feel it too.
I'm sure you will.
Paul English
September 2012.
Paul English is an entertainment writer with the Daily Record.