It’s been a busy time for Deacon Blue – and it seems like that’s set to continue.
“We’ve got a lot ahead of us,” said Ricky Ross the last time I spoke to him, before his appearance at the A Night for Keith charity night at Dundee’s Caird Hall earlier this year, and looking forward to what was to come.
“This is a quieter time for me, I’ve got little projects I’m working on, but the main thing will be working with Deacon Blue in the second half of 2023 and into the beginning of ’24,” he said.
“We’ve got a big box set coming out in the summer and a Greatest Hits coming out soon, then following on from that we’re on tour from September right through to the end of the year, in the UK and abroad.”
We hope Ross, his wife Lorraine McIntosh and the rest of their bandmates took advantage of the peace and quiet, because he wasn’t wrong about having a lot on.
A packed archive
Following the UK top five success of their 2020 album City of Love, then another chart entry for its companion piece Riding on the Tide of Love in 2021, this year has seen the Scottish band dig deep into their archive of lyrics for two perfectly-titled new releases.
One is All the Old 45s, taking its name from their hit Real Gone Kid, is a more straight-up Greatest Hits package, while the You Can Have It All boxset (this one borrowing its title from their song Wages Day) collects pretty much everything they’ve ever done in one intensely fan-pleasing collection.
The accompanying tour, which has been picking up great word-of-mouth across the country – although any long-serving Deacon Blue fan will know what a perfect atmosphere of nostalgia and immediacy they create – has its penultimate date in Aberdeen this week, then from next month heads off to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa for the winter.
‘All I wanted to do was make this album’
With them, they’re taking a sublime, emotional greatest hits set decades in the making, which contains something of the fire of youth and the wisdom of experience within its songs. “You’d be amazed how little we knew about anything when we recorded Raintown,” says Ross in the sleevenotes to the new collection, speaking of the band’s 1987 debut, their first of eleven albums.
“All I wanted to do was make this album, and everything else got lost. We didn’t give the idea of hits any thought at all. That’s probably why, the second time around, I really felt that we needed singles. I knew we had to hit the ground running.”
They’re on such an intense schedule right now, in fact, that the band aren’t doing interviews while they’re on the road, but Ross gave a preview of what to expect in his pre-publicity for the tour.
Greatest hits with a difference
“We’ve decided to play a Greatest Hits show with a difference,” he said. “Yes, we intend to play all (or nearly all) the old 45s, but we also want the first half of the evening to be an intimate acoustic performance, the band gathered round the piano with acoustic guitars and whatever Dougie (Vipond, drummer) decides to hit.
“We’ll play some album tracks and reinterpret a few favourites from the back catalogue. We’ll take a short break then come back and make a lot of noise. We hope you can be part of that noise.”
Deacon Blue play P&J Live, Aberdeen, on Friday, October 13. All the Old 45s: The Very Best of Deacon Blue and You Can Have It All: The Complete Albums Collection are out now on Cooking Vinyl, for more information go to deaconblue.com
