Music review: Deacon Blue, Hydro, Glasgow

As frontman Ricky Ross wryly observes, Deacon Blue are approaching pensionable age. And yet this homecoming tour bookend was the biggest show of their three-decade career, a true love-in with their fans whose voices lifted the eternal ship Dignity on the Clyde once again.

Deacon Blue

Music review: Deacon Blue: To Be Here Someday – 30th Anniversary Tour, Hydro, Glasgow ****

A fresh-faced vision of stonewashed denim and optimism, footage of the band’s eighties touring heyday backed the elegiac but upbeat, rhythmically thumping That’s What We Can Do, bolstering the sense of accomplishment as they continue breaking new ground, preparing to gig across Spain for the first time next year.

Real Gone Kid is still particularly vital and galloping, Ross and Lorraine McIntosh’s unbridled whoops echoing around the auditorium.

Bittersweet sketches, indie-flecked pop with socialist grit, it’s the choruses of tracks like the anthemic Wages Day and Chocolate Girl that have so forcibly endured, some of the latter’s underlying spikiness mellowing as it segued gently into Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend.

Likewise, the yearning When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring) wasn’t overshadowed by Ross turning it into a blue-eyed soul rendition of The Chi-Lites’ Have You Seen Her? Elsewhere the melodic A New House envisioned new beginnings, with childhood horizons expanding, only to be followed by the softly chanted, downbeat Loaded.

After Dignity and Twist and Shout, the encore predictably climaxed with a rousing Fergus Sings the Blues, before a last reappearance in which the entire band took their turn delivering lines from a stripped-back rendition of Always on my Mind, reaffirming their connection with their faithful following. - Jay Richardson