Tour Programme 2013
Paul English August 2013
Facebook. 24 April 2012.
Messages.
Ricky: You free
tomorrow? Coffee and a song or two? Ricky.
Me: Of course. Where am I going?
Ricky: Come over to mine and I’ll play you a couple. Just don’t tell a soul
yet.
I was definitely free for that.
Driving across Glasgow from the
Daily Record’s offices the next day, I felt like a character in a Nick Hornby
novel. The lead singer in the first band I’d ever seen live, whose albums I’d
saved my paper round money to buy, whose poster covered my high school English
folder, had invited me up to his house to drink coffee and listen to their first
record in 13 years, before anyone else had heard it.
A privileged
position.
I’d interviewed Ricky Ross many times since I stopped
delivering and started writing for newspapers, having grown up with his old
songs and grown into his new ones. But this wasn’t a promotional tete a tete.
There was no tape recorder on the table, no question and answer dance.
The invite was to the eager fan first, journalist second. I was the crash test
dummy.
A precarious position.
What if, a lifetime later, I was
left grappling for platitudes, angling towards the door, pining for the blind
spots of my fan-boy youth when all this was just posters, sleeve notes and vinyl
instead of real people?
What if I didn’t like it?
Ricky opened his
Mac and set the volume. The first darting strings of The Hipsters surged into
the room and two voices sung in a shimmering blend about shining, falling,
glistening, diving.
I should always have known, of course.
This
was going to be good.
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The comeback album, like the return of a star centre forward for a second
chance at the club where he first made magic happen, often suffers under the
weight of exact demands. Lives have been lived and memories measured against
such heydays, and anything less in the present risks sullying the past.
During 2012’s promotional interviews for their 25th anniversary year and
comeback album The Hipsters, the members of Deacon Blue acknowledged as much.
Experiences and anecdotes about the recording of debut album Raintown a quarter
of a century earlier were shared, heady times now treasured as fondly by them as
the tunes themselves went on to be by others.
It was a theme that emerged
throughout The Hipsters.
Here I Am In London Town, a tentative
scene-setting ode to youth, unfolded with the same subtle sense of expectation
Born In a Storm had formed on Raintown.
The Outsiders, a
heart-on-the-sleeve career retrospective, recalled the excitement of a young
Scottish band’s early days in the record industry, the thrill of possibility,
naivety and hope.
Ricky described the process of writing and recording
their sixth album as a gradual realisation that he was penning “a love letter to
Deacon Blue”. It seemed almost as if he saw himself as an outsider looking in on
25 years of experiences that happened to and for other people. Number one
albums. Millions of sales. Splitting up. Grieving for a founder member.
Reuniting. Recording. Remembering.
The Hipsters is nostalgic but not
mawkish, familiar but not formulaic. And as the band themselves noted while
making the album with producer Paul Savage in Glasgow, it sounded, in Lorraine’s
words, “like a Deacon Blue album.” It had those key defining characteristics.
The sparkling title track, the frenzied celestial escape of Stars, the wounded
heart of Turn, the hurt and healing of Is There No Way Back To You. These songs
did what fans hoped they’d do, putting them back on the radio, in the charts and
on the road.
Four singles - Turn, The Outsiders, That’s What We Can Do
and The Hipsters - were A listed by Radio 2. The LP gave them their first Top 20
placing in almost 20 years including the unlikely accolade of a No1 slot in the
UK indie charts, a cute irony they’d never have expected. “We were never
hipsters,” they’d insisted of the album’s tongue in cheek title.
The autumn
and winter 2012 tour sold out from Aberdeen to Plymouth, with founder members
Ricky, Lorraine, Dougie and Jim reinvigorated by the addition of guitarist
Gregor Philp and bass player Lewis Gordon. Reasserting the reputation they won
in the 80s and 90s as one of the country’s most entertaining and energetic live
acts, this band on whom the critics had sharpened their pens decades before the
Mumfords and Coldplay, were now the subject of ungrudging praise in review
columns.
In Spring 2013, more live dates were announced, including main stage
slots at the V Festivals and a debut at the 20th year of T In The Park. Their
biggest tour in over a decade commences in September and ends in December,
taking in a return to London’s Royal Albert Hall, bookended by two very
different venues in Raintown: the hallowed sweatbox of King Tut’s and the vast
futuristic showpiece The Hydro. As Ricky himself said ahead of this summer’s
festival dates, even five years ago Deacon Blue couldn’t have played the gigs
they’re playing now.
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Fifteen months on from that afternoon in Glasgow, I watched from the wings
of the T In The Park main stage with a handful of others as the darting strings
of The Hipsters surged into the Balado airfield, and two voices sung in a
shimmering blend about shining, falling, glistening, diving.
Tens of
thousands had gathered in the arena, a new generation of teenagers now, on each
other’s shoulders, arms aloft, singing songs written before they were born,
phoning them home to their folks and bringing this remarkable year of silver
anniversary celebrations full circle.
Deacon Blue should always have
known, of course.
This was going to be good.
Paul English
August 2013
Paul English is an entertainment journalist for the Daily Record.
A version of this article appeared in the Deacon Blue Tour Programme in late
2013