Deacon Blue: "Real Gone Kid"

5 October 1988

"Scottish popstrels Deacon Blue are a bit of a mystery. They've had one medium-sized hit with "Dignity", a minor one with "Chocolate Girl" and now they're about to have a huge one with this."

— 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.

Lloyd Cole & The Commotions: "My Bag"

23 September 1987

Pat: "Whawha guitars and funky clipped chords on a Lloyd Cole record???"

Greg: "And that's because both the drummer and the guitarist used to rehearse with us and they've obviously learnt something."

Pat: "That's the most arrogant statement Hue and Cry have yet made — we taught Lloyd Cole and the Commotions all they know — you print that."

— Pat and Greg Kane (Hue & Cry)

There seemed to be a trend among British pop stars of the late eighties to hate pop music. During my year of being an avid reader of both Smash Hits and Number One, I read a lot of interviews and I was always struck by how little most of them cared for what their contemporaries were doing. They all seemed to worship Marvin Gaye and their musical heroes were largely drawn from old Motown and soul. Rock and metal acts were devoted to old school rawk and coffee house singer-songwriters were all about the previous generation of singer-songwriters who also played coffee houses. But that was about it. Current pop? Pull the other one!

Pat and Greg Kane are brothers from Glasgow and had formed the duo Hue & Cry a couple years' earlier. Like a lot of Scottish acts that tried to brush off the supposed pop naffness of seventies groups like the Bay City Rollers and Silk, they were serious about their craft. Painfully serious. While it wasn't necessarily a rule that Caledonian bands be such humourless tits, the bulk of them were. Some, to their credit, managed to pull it off. I've never been a fan of Simple Minds but I have to admit that their glum approach worked: they did über-serious post-punk that a lot of people to this day rate very highly and they transitioned to stadium rock act without losing a trace of their earnestness. The Blue Nile all wore overcoats and looked like they'd never cracked a smile between them but they did bleak but touching songs.

The 'soulcialist' wing of Scots pop in the eighties, however, seemed buried in their weightiness, when a touch of lightness could have come in handy. Wet Wet Wet were quickly becoming a mammoth act by copying Al Green, a task they were very serious about; they also despised the vast majority of pop in '87. Deacon Blue would prove to be the best Scots group of the year with their excellent debut album Raintown but there was no hiding the fact that they too were low on humour (which makes Ricky Ross' forced chuckle on the single "Loaded" even more inexplicable). Good or bad, these people from Scotland all seemed to be deeply serious while intensely disliking most current pop — and Hue & Cry were right there with them.

A naturally gifted vocalist who could easily have followed the money to lounge singing, Pat Kane was much more rooted in jazz than many of his fellow Scots. He and Greg were talented individuals but much of their material was boring, even if they did have their moments. Their biggest hit, "Labour of Love", tapped into the Red Wedge and anti-Thatcher sentiments of the time and it has a lot more meaning that much of their early material. Like far too many leftist acts of the time, their politics frequently ended up losing out to bland love songs that gave them hits. As with Simply Red and their decent if unremarkable cover of "Money's Too Tight (to Mention)" and the Wets with "Wishing I Was Lucky", the Kane's were at their best when airing their left wing views, something Billy Bragg and The Housemartins never shied from. But why be interesting when you can be doing lame Sinatra pastiche that no one asked for?

Lloyd Cole could have been one of these same earnest Scots. An Englishman, he attended the University of Glasgow in the early eighties right in the midst of the city's post-punk pop boom that produced Altered Images, Aztec Camera and Orange Juice as well as the influential indie label Postcard. These groups were attempting to forge their own sounds and could even be — gasp! — playful in their music and lyrics. Looking like a more well-nourished Morrissey (I'm, of course, talking about Morrissey back in the eighties; he looks like he has enjoyed plenty of vegetarian quiches in more recent years), Cole had the trappings of a guy who wouldn't know a joke if he'd jammed with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band but his songs had wit and the spark of free-thinking individual about them. At a time when anything 'studenty' in pop could be counted on to be sneered at (in contrast to the US where the college rock charts were becoming influential), Lloyd Cole & The Commotions were students who made music for students. They never became a major indie act the way New Order and The Smiths would but they had a loyal following and a generation of British songwriters namecheck Cole as a major influence.

"My Bag" is an engaging record, if not terribly remarkable by the usual standards of the Commotions. Sort of a more-of-the-same record with added bells and whistles to disguise that they were beginning to run out of ideas. As Pat Kane says, the guitars are a departure (as are the 'cha-cha' samples at the beginning, which could have come straight out of a Pet Shop Boys single; the purist Kane's for whatever reason fail to point this out) and could very well have been pinched from groups like Hue & Cry, even if it's just the sort of thing that comes straight out of the Nile Rodgers playbook and had been used on Aztec Camera's superlative 1984 single "All I Need Is Everything". Pat's being facetious, I guess, though since they're normally allergic to any kind of jollity, who's to know?

Though the cult of Cole-Commotion was as loyal as ever, "My Bag" missed the top 40 and the group's subtle creative decline was mirrored by the commercial slide they took with the ironically-titled final album Mainstream. The group would disband in 1989 and Cole would relocate to the US, where he resides to this day. It may have been the fresh environs or having new bandmates to kick ideas around with (or both) but either way the change was good for him as his solo career became much more interesting and his songwriting continued to develop. Meanwhile, Hue & Cry carried on for a bit as a relevant chart act with a level of success comparable to the Commotions before Pat Kane got into journalism. I sure hope he, too, improved upon his craft; maybe he even managed to throw in the odd funny line.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Bananarama: "Love in the First Degree"

Yet another fantastic Narns single dismissed on the Smash Hits singles review page. At least Dave Rimmer had positive things to say about "Cruel Summer" and "Robert De Niro's Waiting..." (and at least he mentions their name, for the love of god) but all the Kanes are able to do here is bash Stock Aitken Waterman. They're either unaware or don't give a toss that Keren, Sara and Siobahn wrote it with SAW and don't even bother giving consideration to its quality. They hate the record simply for political reasons. I guess that's fair enough but they missed out on some top pop while being all high and mighty. Their stint with Britain's dominant songwriting-production team (I had no idea they were already considered ubiquitous back in '87; I wonder how Pat and Greg felt in '89 when their ever-presence had become nauseating and their records really began to suck) didn't always result in classic singles but "Love in the First Degree" is one of their finest moments. A great song from a three-piece that was about to lose Siobahn to marriage and Shakespears Sister. They'd never be the same again.