— Graeme Kay
In the early part of 1988, Ricky Ross, singer, chief songwriter and leader of Glasgow's Deacon Blue, was just getting to work on his band's second album when he went to a record company meeting. Just two songs — "Real Gone Kid" and "The World Is Lit by Lightning" — had been completed but things already looked promising for a group that had enjoyed critical acclaim a year earlier for their debut album Raintown but had little in the way financially to show for it. An A&R rep for label CBS enthused that the struggling group had at least one big hit forthcoming. "I was quizzical", Ross would later claim, "which one? I had no idea".
Ross must have had poor commercial instincts since it's easy to see which of the two was the potential hit. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the (sort of) "title track reaches for the skies and falls flat", it certainly isn't an especially notable song and wouldn't have been good enough for Raintown. "The World Is Lit by Lightning" has its place on second album When the World Knows Your Name (as you will no doubt see, it isn't the title track at all but it does contain the line "when the world, when the world, when the world knows your name" repeated several times so I suppose it qualifies) as respectable filler but there's not much to recommend it beyond Lorraine McIntosh's angelic backing vocals.
The hit that both a record company flunky and Smash Hits scribe Graeme Kay foresaw, however, was everything that those admittedly top notch 45's from Raintown — the classic "Dignity", "Loaded", "When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring)", "Chocolate Girl" — could only dream of being: it grabbed the listener's attention. If you already happen to be paying attention, then it does so effortlessly; if you happen to be daydreaming or thinking of something else, it still hooks you in via involuntary toe-tapping or singing along without you even noticing it. You may not swoon the way I do whenever I put it on but that's okay.
A common trait of Scottish bands in the eighties and nineties was that they tended to look west rather than south. Wet Wet Wet were all about Marvin Gaye and Al Green. The members of Texas favoured Ry Cooder and, later, Motown. Greg and Pat Kane from Hue & Cry were Sinatra fanatics. Teenage Fanclub and other groups in their circle who never made it (yes, I'm thinking of you, BMX Bandits) were all obsessed with The Byrds and Big Star. Jim and William Reid had a little more interest in English pop and rock but the foundation of The Jesus & Mary Chain was built on The Velvet Underground. Deacon Blue were much the same — they were named after a Steely Dan song for god's sake — only they had much broader influences, particularly when held up against some of their sophisti-pop contemporaries.
This musical catholicism made them harder to compartmentalise. While Raintown had been the child of The Blue Nile's first album A Walk Across the Rooftops (a seminal record, particularly for a generation of Scottish groups), When the World Knows Your Name was all over the place when it came to sources of inspiration. Opener and eventual single "Queen of the New Year" and deep cut "Your Constant Heart" borrowed from country music, while "Circus Lights" is not unlike an anthemic Simple Minds number. Side one's closer "This Changing Light" had guitarist Graeme Kelling doing his best impression of U2's The Edge. "Fergus Sings the Blues" is their own answer to Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing" with a pasty Scotsman fronting an "authentic" soul group. (Their influences are even more pronounced on some of their b-sides: the 12" release of "Real Gone Kid" includes covers of both Sam & Dave ("Born Again") and Hüsker Dü ("It's Not Funny Anymore"); the 12" of follow-up "Wages Day" had a surprisingly sensitive take on Julian Cope's "Trampoline")
"Real Gone Kid" itself is low on roots rock beyond a bit of honky tonk piano played by Jim Prime but it is able to condense stadium rock of the time into something with pop hooks. While U2 were tripping on Americana and the sixties, Deacon Blue were managing something not dissimilar without shoving it down people's throats or pretending what they were doing was somehow still contemporary (I always say that the problem with the John Lennon tribute "God Part 2" is that the line "don't believe in the sixties, the golden age of pop / if you glorify the past, your future dries up" is that it's irreconcilable with the rest of the Rattle & Hum album). While ver Blue had a sizable adult following in Britain from this point on (while the 1988-89 batch of singles performed much better than the earlier bunch, they still weren't megahits, implying that older fans in particular were holding out for the album which wouldn't be released until the following spring), they also appealed to a section of pop kids: those of us who didn't care for metal and weren't ready for indie but still liked guitars. Then Jerico weren't far off from this either but their lyrics weren't as good; Transvision Vamp were in the mix too but Wendy James made it difficult to take them seriously.
Quite how many young people got into them is another matter. The Smash Hits letters page (aka Black Type) would field the odd bit of correspondence from readers inquiring about them and they did all right in the magazine's '89 Reader's Poll coming in seventh and tenth for best group and best album respectively. That said, I knew a lot more people who disliked them than counted themselves as fans (it was basically just me and two other people, one of them being my sister). My friends in the UK at that time, the lousy pals I would return to in Canada that summer, a much nicer group of chums I would cultivate in the subsequent years in junior high and high school, people I have discussed music with here and there, the bulk of Music Twitter, hip and cool music critics: they shared little in common beyond not thinking much of Deacon Blue and wondering what on earth I saw in them. Their young fans must have been out there but I never met any of them.
But that is a vital part of a young person's musical development: finding an artist or group we like that everyone else seems at best indifferent towards. Sure, there was that girl I'd see in the hallways of my junior high who wore a Bauhaus shirt but there's always that person: she just had to find those other alternative rock outsiders and she'd have a community (at least in theory); but in opting for Deacon Blue I might as well have been a Cab Calloway enthusiast in the late-eighties. I tried getting friends and classmates into them ("But I liked it", said an unhelpful Mr Coutts as everyone else in art class demanded it be turned off, even though it was my turn to play a tape), then I used the group's anonymity in Canada to my advantage by keeping them to myself. I would be made fun of for liking lots of music (you weren't even allowed to like the Pet Shop Boys where I went to school) but not Deacon Blue because no one knew who they were. Then I got older and some of the bands I used to be teased for being into were suddenly cool. But, yet again, my favourite Scottish group wasn't part of that revival either.
Still, "Real Gone Kid" was the Top 10 hit that some record label dude predicted and they would go on to have a chart topping album six months later. Hit singles and albums would follow so there were people out there who liked them just as much as I did, if not more so. Quite where these people are, I don't know and at this point it doesn't much matter. I've lived with being just about their only fan I know and if someone cooler than me doesn't like them then that's their loss. Or not.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Hue & Cry: "Ordinary Angel"
Kay's runner-up for Single of the Fortnight and he's spot on here too, even considering the solid competition of Prince, The Human League, Jane Wiedlin, Public Enemy and Tanita Tikaram, who would happen to nab a nomination for Best Single at the notorious 1989 Brit Award along with Deacon Blue. There is the often legit claim that Pat Kane oversings but I think he gets it just right here (though I only just now discovered that he tried to be a "daily genius" rather than a "dilly genius", something I always puzzled over) The tune is sprightly and the addition of a sitar to get it started is one of those chef's kiss things people talk about. A great pop song that just missed out on the Top 40 but they'd have hits the following year with "Looking for Linda", which is every bit as good as "Ordinary Angel", and "Vi-oh-lent-ly", which isn't. An injustice in failure leading to an injustice in success, or something like that.
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