We’re not REAL GONE KIDS just yet...
They may have been around since the 1980s, but Deacon Blue are not about to be consigned to the nostalgia bin
IT’S not every day that a band in their 33rd year get compared to the likes of young gunslingers like Arcade Fire — but this is what happened to Scottish rockers Deacon Blue recently.
A newspaper report went so far as to liken Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh, the husband and wife team at the heart of Deacon Blue, to rock’s married couple du jour, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne.
‘I’d say we’re better live than Arcade Fire,’ jokes McIntosh. ‘Honestly though, I was very complimented by that. I love their records.’
For Deacon Blue’s die-hard fans — and these days, they are a very broad church — Lorraine’s joke has a ring of truth about it. It’s on stage where they feel at home, and onstage where, Lorraine says, they can really prove their horsepower as a band.
‘We do a great live show,’ Lorraine admits. ‘A couple of years ago, we did Glastonbury, and as we hadn’t played live there in such a long time, we were very nervous. Well, it turned out to be the best gig of our entire careers. More and more young people were streaming into the tent. All we heard after the show was, ‘Wow, that was such a young audience’.
‘A lot of the people who come to our concerts tend to be the fans who have come on at different stages over the years,’ she adds. ‘We hear of people who have been there for 30 years, some who came to us five years ago and might have heard of our music through their parents. It’s a lovely thing.’
And Deacon Blue’s rousing live show is bound for this month’s Punchestown Music Festival, where they will share a stage with Village People, All Saints, Boney M, Tom Jones and Dr. Hook over the weekend.
The festival’s official tag is ‘Relive the magic’, and unofficially it promises to be a brilliant slice of sheer nostalgia.
Yet Deacon Blue are not a band willing to be consigned to the ‘nostalgia band’ category just yet. In fact, the six-piece, despite a break-up and several hiatuses, are on something of a creative roll of late.
Starting with 2012’s album The Hipsters, the title a nod to guitarist Graeme Kelling, who died in 2004 of cancer (‘he was the only hipster in the band’), the band have delivered a brisk three albums in four years.
‘The nostalgia tag doesn’t bother us too much,’ shrugs Lorraine. ‘In fact, I’m quite honoured to be sharing a stage with Culture Club.
‘There’s a festival in the UK which really tends to be bands from the 1980s that might not be big enough to go out on their own,’ she adds. ‘We’ve been asked to do it and we’ve always said, “Absolutely, no”. We sell tickets to our own shows, and at the last show we did, 75% of it was songs from the last three albums. But because of the way the show builds, we always do the hits.’
AND there have been plenty of them down the years: ‘Dignity’, about a street sweeper who saves up to buy a dinghy, was released in 1987 and proved to be the band’s breakthrough hit.
A year later, Real Gone Kid became the band’s first Top Ten smash and remains a pop staple to this day, latterly appearing on a Boots advert. I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, released in 1990, climbed to Number 2 in Britain’s singles charts. The album it came from, When The World Knows Your Name, pushed Madonna off the top of the charts.
The late ‘80s were a particularly heady time for Deacon Blue. At the time they were skirting up the charts for the first time and found themselves as the rare urban soul gunners in a stew of bubblegum pop.
‘It’s funny, we were loved by the music press like the NME, and then you get your first big hit single, and that all kind of goes,’ reflects Lorraine. ‘We never thought we were cool; in fact we always thought we were outsiders.’
Outsiders, though, that were sharing the charts with the Stock, Aitken & Waterman-produced popstars of the day: Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley, Sonia.
‘On Top Of The Pops, you’d see all these other bands — young kids, really,’ recalls Lorraine. ‘We never felt any snobbery towards them or anything like that, as we were very much doing our own thing.
‘I look back on those Top Of The Pops moments now though and think, “What the hell was I wearing?”’ Lorraine adds with a laugh. ‘I wish someone had told me to make an effort. I look like I’m walking out of a park.’
The vast difference between popstars then and now hasn’t been lost on Lorraine.
‘In the late ‘80s it didn’t seem that you were judged solely on your looks, and I see that this is a real pressure for younger female artists,’ she says. ‘Women weren’t selling their bodies in a way that Beyonce or Rihanna do. I totally respect their right to wear as much or as little, but there is often pressure, usually from a man in a record company, to wear as little as you can.’
IN the late ‘90s, and brimful of promise, energy and potential, Deacon Blue signed to CBS, then the biggest label in the world. McIntosh, and Ross in particular, were enthralled by the label’s illustrious history. ‘Oh, we were so naïve and foolish,’ laughs Lorraine. ‘We thought, “This is fantastic!” (Bruce) Springsteen had been on the label, (Bob) Dylan had been on the label… over the years we got to work with some fantastic people there, but at the end of the day, it was a massive corporate record company. When you stop making them the amount of money they think you’re supposed to, you get dropped. That’s how it is.’
The band split in 1994 when drummer Dougie Vipond quit to pursue a career in television (he has since returned to the fold), and CBS continued to make music with Ricky. He went on to record a solo album in 1996, What You Are, but it was the beginning of the end of his relationship with CBS.
‘When CBS didn’t renew Ricky’s contract, that did hurt,’ admits Lorraine. ‘It was like, “This band was making you a lot of money, and one album doesn’t do as well, and this is what happens?” It was nothing personal, but still, pretty brutal.
Of today’s music industry, Lorraine is pragmatic.
‘We don’t have too much to do with the industry as we’re on a lovely record label based in Germany, but when I hear people say, “It’s all about X Factor these days”, I think, that’s a TV thing, not a music industry thing. Nowadays you have people on YouTube putting up posts and getting discovered, which means that in some ways it’s a more exciting time in music. In our day, everyone relied much more on the London record company, and A&R men having to travel to the far reaches of Glasgow to discover you.’
As one might expect from a 32-year history, there have been many ups
and downs in the band. A 2001 “comeback” album, Homesick, was described by Ross as ‘The record we never should have made’. Deacon Blue wouldn’t release another studio album for 11 years. Graeme’s death in 2004 was a devastating blow.
And during the band’s quieter chapters, both Ricky and Lorraine pursued endeavours of their own down the years. The two still live in Glasgow, and their three grown-up daughters are living abroad. Ricky would go on to write for (and with) James Blunt, Ronan Keating, KT Tunstall, and Will Young.
Lorraine, meanwhile, decided to pursue a long-held interest in acting.
‘We would definitely see [working and being together as a married couple] an advantage, but we started to see that everything that we did, we did it together,’ recalls Lorraine. ‘Once Ricky had his solo stuff, and I was acting, all our eggs weren’t in the same basket and there was a bit less pressure there.
‘It had always appealed when I was younger,’ she says. ‘In 1998, I was home with young kids and not working, and someone told me about a Ken Loach film (My Name Is Joe) that was happening in Scotland. I thought it sounded like a great thing to do, and I was a huge fan of his. It turns out that it’s something that I’m good at.’
Lorraine has certainly been in demand as an actress: she played Alice Henderson in the Scottish soap River City for eight years, and has appeared in Taggart and BBC One’s comedy drama Hope Springs.
‘The only disadvantage is when I get asked to do a job in acting and then I realise that I can’t take on a 12-week run of a play or something because of one Deacon Blue date in the calendar,’ she explains.
‘That can be a bit frustrating, but you move on and you’re thankful for the fact that people are even asking you to do these things, and that you can even pay the bills.’
Much of Ross’s productivity has been influenced by the current political climate, and his thoughts on asylum seekers and refugees loom large on 2016’s single Believers. But then, Deacon Blue have always boasted a keen political bent: 1992’s Your Town was a brooding response to the Tories’ hold on Westminster at the time.
‘You can’t have sat at home for the last three years and not be aware of the scenes of utter destruction on the shores of Europe,’ notes Lorraine. ‘You must be dead inside if you’re not. But we watched people washing up on our shores, people with hopes and dreams. We got involved with a local asylum project in Glasgow. And your first response as a songwriter is to write something.
‘We’re not saying they are songs about asylum seekers, but they’re more about what Deacon Blue have written about for years,’ she concludes.
‘Just as we have always done, we are writing about ideas of home, faith and work. How people make their way in this world, really.’