Deacon Blue on celebrating 40 years and getting back on the road with their Edinburgh gig

Lorraine McIntosh and Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue, who have a new album, The Great Western Road, out now. Thanks to Cafe Gandolfi, Glasgow | John Devlin

Lorraine McIntosh sings quietly to herself, a sound that lightens the room on a wet Raintown morning, as she hefts a small bar table in place for us all to sit for an interview and photoshoot and it’s clear from the start that we’re in the presence of professionals.

She’s already slipped from dark jeans into a gold lame skirt, and with curls pinned up and makeup applied, slides onto a chair opposite husband Ricky Ross who pushes his table to touch hers, removes his glasses and straightens his dark jacket.

“Look, you’ve got a line from your glasses,” she says smiling, reaching over to smooth the shorn sides of Ross’s sharp haircut, still with trademark quiff, and he smiles back, their easy intimacy speaking of their decades together both personally and professionally.

It’s 40 years since Ross launched Deacon Blue with drummer Dougie Vipond and with McIntosh by then onboard they went on to release the hit debut album Raintown, over the years amassing seven million album sales, 12 UK top 40 singles including Raintown, Dignity, Real Gone Kid, and two number one albums, so it’s appropriate that we’re meeting in another Glasgow institution, Cafe Gandolfi.

Today Deacon Blue are still going strong as they release a new studio album - their tenth - entitled The Great Western Road. The current line up of vocalists Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh, keyboard player James Prime, drummer Dougie Vipond, guitarist Gregor Philp and bassist Lewis Gordon are taking it on the road with five theatre shows kicking off in Edinburgh next week, followed by 15 arena shows across the UK & Eire and ending back in Glasgow in October.

Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh of Deacon Blue | John Devlin

The Great Western Road features 12 new songs with the first single Late ‘88 in the top 40 and hailed by BBC Radio 2 as a record of the week. It has the unmistakable Deacon Blue rock and pop mix with Ross’s unique voice and McIntosh’s soaring vocals on anthems and more intimate soulful tracks. Produced by Ross and their latter-day bandmate and guitarist Gregor Philp, the songs are all written or co-written by Ross, four with Philp and one with McIntosh, and saw them working with engineer Matt Butler, who worked with the band on their hit debut album Raintown.

The title track of the album, The Great Western Road, has a literal geographic inspiration in the grand avenue that starts in the heart of Glasgow and leads out way beyond, as well as being a metaphor for the band’s journey to and from where they are now.

“Probably 90% of the time I start with a title and then I work backwards from there and it just fills your imagination,” says Ross, “ and it came to me one day when I was driving and thinking about these brilliant avenues that lead out from Glasgow.

“When we started, Great Western Road was our hangout. We’d meet there and jump into a wee minibus and set out to do a gig. Also it was exciting as a place, the West End was where you wanted to hang out. And it’s a metaphor for a road that leads out of that place into an unknown, into the wilderness, and eventually up into the Highlands. It just goes away somewhere else. I think that became a metaphor for where we are now in this later phase of life. It’s an exciting phase and an exciting time, but it’s a completely different time.”

Deacon Blue at King Tut's, Glasgow, in the 1990s. | PA

With so many decades under their belts, what do they think is the secret of their longevity?

“I think everything about Deacon Blue comes back to having a great songwriter and great songs at its heart,” says McIntosh “and I think we have a great group of musicians who are very talented, who bring these songs to life. I think we’ve worked really hard at it, but really the start is the songs. You can’t go out and do a great gig if you’ve not got great songs.

“I think we always were a really good live band, but we’ve got better because we really pride ourselves on putting on a great show and giving people a great night, because you’re taking people’s money, you’re taking their time. They could go and see a million other shows but they come and see us so every time we go out there’s that feeling that we want to win this tonight.”

The Deacon Blue sound is unmistakeable, their music passing into the cultural soundtrack of the last 40 years, but how would Ross describe it?

“I don’t really. I think we do what we do. I think like lots of bands from our era we were influenced hugely by the music that came before us and that’s a really wide range but with songs at the heart of it, songs with lyrics that mean something. People often say about, for example Dignity, that it’s become a sort of folk song and I think it is, and I think that kind of folk tradition has influenced me hugely. They are songs that people can sing.”

“There’s a definite sound,” says McIntosh.

“Yeah,” says Ross. “It’s really important for me to say it only happens with these guys. I try to do things on my own sometimes for a change or something, but it’s just not got the same dynamic. There’s a magic there.”

Lorraine McIntosh and Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue, who have a new studio album, The Great Western Road, which they are taking on the road. With thanks to Cafe Gandolfi, Glasgow. | John Devlin

Seeing Ross and McIntosh together, they’re easy as a couple who have been married since 1990 and between them have four children now adults, but is it hard living with someone you work with and working with someone you live with?

“No,” they say in unison, then laugh.

“I think we like each other, and we enjoy spending time together,” says McIntosh. “I mean we do go off and do our things. I think if we were just doing Deacon Blue that would maybe get a bit intense. But no, we love it and we value the fact that now our kids have all left home, even though we missed them when they went, there is a new stage when we’re actually thinking it’s really nice to just have us to think about at night, what are we going to eat, what are we going to do, what are we going to watch on the TV, you know, we’re loving it.”

‘Going off and doing their own things’ amounts to Ross hosting his Americana and alternative country BBC Radio Scotland show, Another Country with Ricky Ross and teaming up with Glasgow playwright Frances Poet to write the musical Small Acts of Love, inspired by the friendships forged between the people of Lockerbie and the relatives of those who died in the Pan Am 103 atrocity in December 1988, to be performed at the refurbished Citizens Theatre in September.

“I’ve written the songs and Lorraine sang in the workshops, but we’ll be away on tour when it’s on. It’s been an amazing collaboration with Frances and I think it will be very moving,” he says.

McIntosh, meanwhile has a parallel acting career, with a string of TV and screen credits stretching back to Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe in 1998 through Taggart to River City and more recent appearances in crime series Shetland and the current Scot Squad comedy spin off with Jack Docherty, The Chief.

“The acting thing has just been a real blessing that came along in my life,” says McIntosh. “I was asked to be in a Ken Loach film when I was already 34 and had two kids and was at home, the band had split up for a while. I thought that’s brilliant, I’ve always thought I could probably act when I was growing up but didn’t know how to ever access that, so that was a lovely. And it was brilliant to work with Ken Loach and Peter Mullan and all those people and then I went on from that. It’s hard to fit things in but it’s lovely when something comes along, like a few days on The Chief. I always like to keep my hand in and I love doing comedy especially, so it’s been brilliant.”

Jack Docherty and Lorraine McIntosh in BBC comedy The Chief | ALAN PEEBLES PHOTOGRAPHY

Would she ever follow Ross by writing a memoir? His Walking Back Home was published in 2022?

“Well… I am writing one. I wanted to write not really an autobiography but about my childhood to try and make sense of it because it was very kind of mixed up but whenever I started to write it, I thought this is too depressing.”

McIntosh’s mother died when she was 11 and her father struggled to cope and the family went through hard times.

“But the reality is there were a lot of funny things in my childhood as well, so I thought I’m just going to write it for me, and if my kids want to read it, it’ll help them understand. But who knows? My mum died and it didn’t go well and my dad couldn’t… and all that stuff, and I don’t want it to be a misery memoir but I do want to… What inspired me was reading Foster by Claire Keegan who does it through the wee girl’s point of view, just the facts and I thought I would like to try and do that. So I am writing it and I am enjoying it.”

“It’s very, very good,” says Ross.

Since we’ve got them both here, face to face across a table, what would they say are each other’s best and worst qualities, a question that provokes an immediate response from both sides.

Ricky: “Well, I’ll start…”

Lorraine: Oh, will you?

Both: Laughter.

“The thing about Lorraine is … well, first of all, when Deacon Blue started, and continued, I always wanted brilliant people that were better musicians than I was, and that’s not false modestly, I wanted people that were really, really good at what they do, and Lorraine’s thing is she’s a brilliant singer, very, very musical, and she’s got also brilliant timing, which I haven’t got, so all round musically it’s great.”

Here he switches to addressing her directly, as they often do with each other when answering a question.

“But the great thing to me is your understanding of the songs, and even at early stages she’ll be able to say to me, that doesn’t work or doesn’t move me, go back and work on it and I’ll say ‘well come in and help…’ and she’ll say no, you just go’ and she’ll leave me for an hour and I’ll come back and say ‘here’s another go. So I have that in-house.

“What’s my worst bit though?” says McIntosh, jumping in. “I think you’d say my impatience because you say that every day.”

“Yeah, she’s very impatient,” says Ross. “There’s a lot of hanging around involved in music, doing this kind of thing, waiting for trains, waiting for planes, in studios, and you want to get on with things, sound checks…”

“Impatience,” confirms McIntosh, and in an apposite demonstration cracks on with her Ricky best and worst.

“So I think the best thing about Ricky - obviously there’s lots of good things about you - but I think your drive and ambition is really so different from me. I would be a person that would love to do loads of things in life, but you… loads of people want to write but very few actually go and do it, and Ricky takes things by the horns and has always been determined, and your focus is really, really incredible to me.

“I think the downside of that is your absolute obsession about things. About small details about your radio show, or something that didn’t go right or you don’t get time to do. I think you’re a bit of a perfectionist which is a good thing but also a bad thing.”

So they complement each other?

“We do,” says McIntosh and then they both say in harmony: “We’re very different.”

Talk turns to the tracks on the new album and what inspired them.

Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh from Deacon Blue performing on the main stage during the 20th T in the Park music festival at Kinross in 2013. | PA

“Late 88 was our reflection that when you’re younger, there’s a fearlessness, you could take things on,” says Ross. “And I wanted ‘big fat synths and something exciting and you always think it would be good to have something that goes on the radio, but there was also this Jackson Brown record Late for the Sky that influenced me.

“With How We Remember, I knew at the time that you don’t write that song every day. And The Great Western Road, if I was run over by a bus tomorrow, that’s the song I’m most pleased about - in this recent period,” he says.

What about If I Lived On My Own?

“Yeah I was asking you that the other night,” says McIntosh and laughs.

“Well, musically I love records like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, where it goes from big pop songs to lovely intimate moments, but it’s really about a guy steeling himself for the inevitable, the reality that when you love someone and spend your life with someone, as you get towards the end of the Great Western Road, at one point one of you is not going to be there.”

There’s a pause as the rain patters on the skylight windows.

Going back in time along The Great Western Road, who was Fergus, as in Fergus Sings The Blues?

“He wasn’t really anyone,” says Ross. “It was two steals, the Joni Mitchell song Furry Sings the Blues, a slight pun on that…”

“I never knew that!” says McIntosh.

“... It was meant to be an allusion,” says Ross, “and then Michael Marra’s song that I really like called Gaels Blue about a guy from the Highlands that became a soul singer, and I thought it was a funny idea.”

And who was the original ‘Real Gone Kid?’

“Originally, it was reading Kerouac’s On The Road,” says Ross, “and they would stop at various points and encounter be-bop or see a saxophonist and go ‘real gone kid, real gone cat’ and I liked idea of being blown away by events and music and people.”

“And seeing Maria McKee perform was the trigger point,” says McIntosh.

Now that McIntosh is in her late fifties and Ross in his sixties and the rest of the band of a similar vintage, has their tour rider changed?

“Epsom salts,” says McIntosh. “My osteopath said if you’ve got anything sore you need to put a whole bag of Epsom salts into your bath, so that is on our rider, a kilo of Epsom salts to help your muscles when you’ve been jumping about for two hours. I wear my fitbit on stage and do 23,000 steps, so we’re knackered after. So we try and get a bit fitter before we start a tour.”

Another challenge for Ross is learning all the new songs, even though the lyrics are his own, as he wants them to come naturally.

“There’s no autocue,” says McIntosh, “and he’ll change every chorus slightly with one word different in it, and I’m like why could you not just have five choruses the same?”

“I say that to myself all the time,” says Ross.

Lorraine McIntosh and Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue. Thanks to Cafe Gandolfi, Glasgow. | John Devlin

Talking about the release and tour, the air of anticipation has built in the room and it’s clear they’re itching to get out on the road once more.

“When you’ve made a record it’s a nice time before it’s out, because no-one can judge it, but it’s exciting to eventually get it out there,” says Ross. “And it never feels it’s really out there until you’ve played some of the songs live. That’s what we do.”

Thank you to Cafe Gandolfi, 64 Albion Street, Glasgow, cafegandolfi.com

The Great Western Road is available now through Cooking Vinyl www.cookingvinyl.com

Deacon Blue perform on Sunday 30 March at Edinburgh Usher Hall; Friday 10 October and Saturday 11 October at Glasgow Hydro.