TRACK REVIEW: Deacon Blue - City of Love

TRACK REVIEW:

Deacon Blue

City of Love

8.9/10

The track, City of Love, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-kwypo7qcc

GENRES:

Pop/Rock/Blues

ORIGIN:

Glasgow, U.K.

The album, City of Love, is available here:

https://open.spotify.com/album/75RG9WCDjD3hyNlppcArck?si=B06kaENaS9Kr0SgQ6WFt7Q

RELEASE DATE:

6th March, 2020

__________

I have always admired Deacon Blue…

and held their music very dear (and they are named after my favourite song). Maybe it is the fact the band named themselves after a Steely Dan song (Deacon Blues is from their 1977 album, Aja), or because I have always felt uplifted by their music. I can recall one of my first music memories; I heard their track, Twist & Shout when I was a child whilst my family were leaving Madame Tussauds. I have a fond respect for Real Gone Kid, as it was one of those massive songs that was part of my childhood. Although a lot of Deacon Blue songs looked at the political, they were able to bring in the personal and do so by providing these incredible choruses, singalong moments and timeless moments. Some might argue their peak was in the 1980s, but the band are still performing and have just released the album, City of Love. Ricky Ross leads with Lorraine McIntosh, James Prime, Dougie Vipond, Gregor Philp, Lewis Gordon and Timbo Jones part of the band. The Glasgow legends are still going strong, and there are many different things I want to cover off before I review the title track from their latest album. It is International Women’s Day and, as such, it is a time to highlight brilliant women in music whilst also asking for equality and change. I am publishing a feature later pertaining to my favourite female artist, but I hope days like today push the industry into action; so that women are not denied and overlooked like they are now. I think one of Deacon Blue’s greatest strengths is the fact McIntosh provides this female perspective. There has always been a close creative and vocal bond between her and Ricky Ross, and a lot of Deacon Blue’s finest moments happen when Ross and McIntosh are side-by-side; where you get these two singers weaving in and out of one another. Most of the bands I grew up listening to in the 1980s and 1990s were male. There were some female-led bands – like Republica; female bands such as The Bangles -, but most of what was being played was male bands. Aside from acts like Prefab Sprout, I did not often hear bands where there was this vocal harmony between a male and female singer.

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

More than merely having Lorraine McIntosh and Ricky Ross sharing vocal duties, the two are married, and there is that huge respect between them. McIntosh is an essential part of Deacon Blue, and I think the band have got to where they are because of her invaluable role. She is an incredible force and voice, and someone who adds so much to the best Deacon Blue songs. I also think Ross, as the primary songwriter, approaches a lot of tracks from a female perspective, knowing McIntosh is by his side. On the new album, City of Love, there are a lot of personal moments, and McIntosh sounds as rich, dynamic, and stunning as ever. I was not expecting a Deacon Blue album this year, but the band has been concocting the stunning City of Love for a long time. In this interview, they talked about the process and discussed how things have changed regarding recording:

“When did you start working on the songs for City Of Love?

“It was a long process, actually. We’d only put out Believers in 2016 and I was writing solidly again by the summer of 2017. Writing without much of a goal or an end date. We initially planned to record in the summer of 2018, but I wasn’t sure we had what we needed, so we just kept going…”

Did that mean you ended up with a lot of songs?

“We always have a lot of songs. It’s always been that way. Gregor (Philip, guitarist) and I always seem to end up making a lot of demos. This time though we had the two singles right from the off, ‘City Of Love’ and ‘Hit Me Where It Hurts’, so they were a real ballast to build the album around.”

It’s an 11-track record though, were you quite brutal about what made it?

“If anything, I think we overcut! There are a few songs that will definitely still come out and we’ll hope to release them in time.”

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

Has the process of recording changed much for Deacon Blue over the years? Or is it a similar way of working?

“Weirdly, we’ve come back to the way we made Raintown all those years ago. We try to do things as live as possible and to keep the overdubs to an absolute minimum.”

You self-produced the album, what did you decide on that approach?

“We’ve worked a lot with Paul Savage over the years and we felt that we’d got as much as we could from that. We had a great engineer and the demos Gregor and I had made were sounding so strong and focused that we weren’t sure what a producer could bring.”

Was it strange working without a producer?

“A bit strange. I do like having someone around to be a sounding board. But the most important thing in making a record is that you’ve got a clear sense of what you’re doing and what you want. Sometimes you need a producer to help you get there, but we had such a strong sense of where we wanted to be that it worked with just us.”

What kind of album is this lyrically? Is there a theme?

“The springboard was all from the song ‘City Of Love’. I’d discovered that the bones of Saint Valentine are kept in a church in the Gorbals part of Glasgow, which is where we’d made the album. That gave the album a feeling. It’s a feeling of reconciliation and bringing people back together. I wanted to tell different stories of love. That really anchors the record, you’ve got the title track opening it up and then ‘On Love’ closing the album.”

IMAGE CREDIT: Classic Pop

Was the album always going to be called City Of Love?

“It was there from early on. If you get something like that, something to build around, then it’s great to have it and really work to it. We had that this time, but you don’t always get it. Sometimes we’ve had the album done and been looking at the artwork before we’ve chosen what to call it.”

You’ve got a big tour ahead of you in the autumn, how’s your live set coming together?

“It was interesting, we were in Australia when the first single dropped and we put it straight in the set and people really went for it. Over the last few years, I feel like we’ve got a real momentum about the new material and we’ve reflected that in the set. That said, you always want people to go home thinking they’ve heard a ‘Greatest Hits’ set. We’ll be trying to do that too.”

Finally, last time you were back writing a few months after the album dropped, are you already collecting songs for the next run?

“I am collecting songs again. But not for Deacon Blue…”

I wanted to bring in that interview, as it gives context regarding the album. If you are not familiar with Deacon Blue, albums like Raintown (1987) and When the World Knows Your Name (1989) are great starting places. Although the band is older than they used to be, there is still that distinct sound and brilliance that was evident and strong decades ago. Rather than review a song and tip to the album, I wanted to go deep and shine a spotlight on Deacon Blue. I think their popularity on the road, and the fact they appeal to different generations, means they will always have a place in people’s hearts. A lot of their songs do tug on the heart, but it is the feel-good factor that balances with that which is particularly potent. I have not seen Deacon Blue perform, but I will try and catch them on the road when they come to London next. I will conclude by talking about their touring plans for this year, but anyone who has ever seen the group on stage will attest to the fact they produce a hell of a show! I found this review from 2018, where the band played the SSE Hydro in their native Glasgow:

“Oh, there are singalongs. You can imagine. Thirteen thousand people hollering 'Real Gone Kid', 'Wages Day', 'Fergus Sings The Blues', 'Loaded' and 'Dignity' is a communal thrill for the audience, and for the band, going by Ricky Ross's reaction. (Has a man ever shouted the word 'Glasgow!' into a crowd, and been met with such a rapturous rammy, or broken into a wider smile?)

More than anything, they feel like home. At one of many lovely points in this celebratory show, that very word – 'Home' – flashes up behind the band in neon, and incites both a deafening cheer and an onset of greeting across the arena.

But while they're familiar, and still elicit unbridled affection, Deacon Blue will never settle for retreading old steps, or shadow-dancing with old songs. They casually shirk the heritage route by interweaving 80s and 90s favourites with tracks from excellent recent albums The Hipsters, A New House and Believers, all released in the past six years.

Further defying the passage of time, the silhouettes of original members Ricky Ross, Dougie Vipond, Jim Prime and Lorraine McIntosh cut as youthful a dash as ever, presumably due to something in the water. Probably the rain.

A point to note about Lorraine. When the band broke through, in the late 80s, one of the things that elevated them from their fellow Glasgow melodists was the fact Deacon Blue had a female voice and vantage point. Singer, musician, dancer, muse, feminist and force of nature: she'll always be a well-loved linchpin brandishing a tambourine. To quote a somewhat enraptured man in front of us on Saturday night: 'She's still amazing and totally on it.' Well, quite”.

The fact that review mentions McIntosh as a central force and essential female perspective comes back to my first point regarding Deacon Blue’s key strength. They are, as the review also states, so youthful and they have not really slowed that much since the 1980s. I will come to the present day very soon, but I am going to step back to 2012 in a second, as there was this gap in the timeline where the band sort of stepped away. The Hipsters arrived eleven years after 2001’s Homesick. I want to source from this interview, as it provides some context, and explains why there was this pause from the band:

“We turn our attention back to Deacon Blue and speak about the fact that it has been 11 years since their last full length studio album and two and a half years since Ricky announced the band were taking time off from their concert schedule to make time to write and record a new album. I ask if the process took longer than expected. "Yes, it has taken a while," he laughs. "I initially thought that if we did an album it would come out last year. I kind of knew that 2012 was an anniversary year even though the anniversaries are a bit vague.

Did we get together in '85? Yeah, kind of." The first Deacon Blue gigs took place that year even though the line up changed right up to the release of 'Raintown'. "We sort of got together in '86 but our first album came out in '87." It was only after the debut album's release that Lorraine became a permanent member of the band. "So this is sort of the 25 year period. We wanted to do something around this time and if we were going to do a tour - I just felt that we could tour and a certain amount of people would come and see us doing old material, but I felt that to go out and tour with old material again would be really hard especially when we are always writing new songs and not to do any of that stuff would be really hard. I just thought that's depressing and you don't want to go out on a tour and feel like that. Much as it was really lovely to do some of these things, it was always good to do new material whenever you had it."

Ricky begins to chart the long and winding process which led to the album being written, demoed and recorded. "It was about two years ago in the summer I had a meeting with the guy who was going to become our manager, and he did it for a year and then it didn't work out but in a very amicable way. But he sort of inspired us and said, 'You've got to make a Deacon Blue record'. I was really going in to talk about the next McIntosh Ross record as Lorraine and I had a couple of songs already demoed and we had some stuff written for that and I was thinking that was the next project. As it happened he said, 'No, you've got to make a Deacon Blue record'. I thought, 'Well if we're going to make a Deacon Blue record I'm damn sure we're going to make a good one and I really need to knuckle down'.

I just thought if it's a Deacon Blue album we've really got to concentrate on it. I sort of control my own schedule. Normally I would be writing for other people and I just thought, right, Lorraine's going off on tour, she's off in a play, I'm just going to put the next few months aside and work on writing songs and every few days or so I would get one down and I'd phone Gregor and say 'Do you fancy coming through, Lorraine's away and I'm looking after the kids, come and stay and we'll work on songs'. So it was great. I would get up in the morning and get the kids to school and Gregor and I would work and we'd stop at tea time then later on get Seamus to his bed because he's the youngest one and then invariably we'd go back and start recording again. So it was really great for working, having the studio in the house. That was really when a lot of the work was done, 2010 and 2011, I would say".

I think the band is often considered as a produce of threw 1980s, or that they are out of step with the music of today. Although their music is more at home on BBC Radio 2 – nothing wrong with that! -, they write music, I feel, that is deeper and more compelling than a lot of what we hear elsewhere. They have that history and experience that means they can speak to their existing fanbase, yet they are bringing in younger fans and new support. I feel a lot of people are too narrow regarding tastes, and they will often rubbish a band like Deacon Blue because of their age or the fact they are not fresh on the block.

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

At a time where a lot of the best music is happening away from the mainstream, I feel music listeners in general need to throw some respect the way of bands who have been grafting for years. It is hard to endure in the music industry, and so many bands split up and struggle to remain afloat. There are others that break away and come back together, but Deacon Blue have had this family bond and solidity for decades. Although they have seen some members come and go, the core of Deacon Blue remains pure and solid. If some of the best moments from Raintown are defined by social commentary and politics, the new album, City of Love, seems more about the personal. Maybe it is an over-simplification, but I do feel that the Deacon Blue of today still has that fire in the belly. As a Scottish band, the subject of independence must be of importance. We have a Tory government, and they will be among many who feel aggrieved we have left the E.U. In an interview with The Big Issue a couple of days back, Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh talked about changing politics and how they approach what is happening at the moment:

“I think a lot of people think, undoubtedly, that we are in a horrible position politically at the moment, because we have a Tory government in control. Even people who don’t believe in independence as an idea seem to think of it as the direction of travel now.

“There’s a lot of stuff to learn before you get to that point. There’s hope, definitely, but you have to reflect and change, adapt to the circumstances. You have to deal with the government that’s there, because they’re there for five years, maybe 10. You can’t just go on a constant ‘anti’ stance.”

It’s as true for their fanbase, too – a large and loyal following, which has, over the last 10 years, returned them to arenas like Glasgow SSE Hydro, Liverpool Arena and London Royal Albert Hall, where they’ll play on their winter European tour.

The enduring appeal of their music is in no doubt – the new album’s title track City of Love was on the Radio 2 A-list for four weeks over Christmas – but, in Brexit Britain, political presumption is less predictable, as they discovered on tour in 2016.

McIntosh says: “When you start off you have nothing to lose. You can be who you want and say what you want. Ricky would talk about politics all the time, we’d go to towns in the north and he’d be campaigning for Labour, talking about Margaret Thatcher, and you felt that these people were all with us.

“But things have become much more complicated. A few years ago, when we did the song Birds [from the band’s 2016 album Believers, their most successful release in 25 years] Ricky talked about refugees washing up on the shores of places like Italy, and one night on the tour someone shouted, ‘Send them home.’ That really depressed us. It reminds you that things aren’t black and white, left and right.”

Many of the songs on their 10th studio album, their fourth LP in eight years, deal more in the intimate and the personal, than the ostensibly political.

In Our Room peeks through the window on the early days of the couple’s relationship (their marriage is Ross’s second, and they now have three grown-up children), sleeping on mattresses on floors of tenement flats with stains on the ceiling. Intervals is the lightest of pre-fledging parental reassurances to a young adult; Weight of The World a shimmering eulogy and last act of remembrance for a lost soul.

Yet it’s the album’s finale, On Love, which most catches the breath. Delivered partly in spoken word by Ross, it’s a seven-minute sepia-toned daydream of autobiographical reveries on lost love.

Wistful and unconventional, it’s one of the most affecting songs in the band’s 30 year catalogue, a universe away from Greatest Hits territory.

“When I was a student English teacher, there was a guy I worked with who’d talk about some of the essays he got as ‘a stream of unconsciousness’,” he says, with tongue in cheek self-deprecation.

“It’s a series of events from childhood to my early life, which are ostensibly all disconnected,” explains Ross. “But it’s why I consider this to be the album of my life – it’s allowed me to tell the stories I’ve held back from Deacon Blue before.”

It is, he hopes, also an album in which the essence of a hymn he sang in his childhood, Away Far Beyond Jordan, resonates, too.

“I always thought it had a poignancy to it, that part about ‘if you get there before I do, look out for me, for I’m coming too.’ It’s a simple childlike verse but I think it’s the hope that everyone has”.

I will move on to review the title track from City of Love – which has been out for a while, but it is a song that I am keen to explore -, and I would urge people to spend some time with Deacon Blue, exploring their new album and their past material.

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

City of Love, one might expect, would start with a gentle coda or building introduction. Instead, there is this symphonic rise from strings, and a firm heartbeat that provides this urgency and sense of acceleration. At once, one is picturing all sorts of scenes as the music swells and takes you away. Ross, as a vocalist, sounds richer than he ever has. I was intrigued by the first verse: “Lost the will for keeping on/Just as the winter is dragging/What can I do with all of this?/Where can I put what I'm carrying?”. I assume there is a general weariness emanating from Ross; the lead is feeling a certain fatigue that is hard to ignore. Maybe Ross is feeling the effects of changing politics and division that is happening around him. It seems that the city of love is all that remains. Whether he is referring to Glasgow, or whether it is a general concept, one feels lifted by the chorus. He has not given up hope that there is connection and affection, but it hard at the moment. Deacon Blue have always been able to combine the personal with the spirited, and City of Love switches from the heartfelt to the uplifting with nary a moment to spare. Ross and McIntosh’s voices combine in the chorus, and that stunning composition continues to elicit shivers and it keeps the blood pumping! I think the energy and drive of the song is one of the biggest assets. Ross is propelled and compelled; he speaks of carrying on and not giving in at the end of the day – “No one can stop you, not until/You reach the end and lay down your burden”.

Many people will be able to identify with the lyrics and, the more the song progresses, I feel the city of love being referred to is more of a feeling of hope, rather than a defined geographical location. The chorus is not among the catchiest the band have penned, but it is definitely one that stays in the mind and gives City of Love a huge sense of importance and memorability. There are some lyrics that are not as direct; those that make you wonder what is being referred to. “Hold on/He said/She knows/It made sense/Don't go/Too far/You can't know/What matters” got me thinking. I love the way the lines are delivered, and the fact there is this sort of cryptic angle. The familiar and warm blend of vocals one hears definitely creates a smile, but I kept coming back to City of Love regarding lyrical interpretation. Of course, the whole story of the City of Love cannot be distilled to a single song: one must listen to the whole album to get the bigger picture. I think the title track is one that reacts to the public and personal struggles of today, and lets us know that togetherness and understanding is all that is left. The simplicity of the sentiments and the directness of the messages fuse with some more complex and oblique words. All in all, City of Love is a great song that shows Deacon Blue are still essential and can pen songs that are different to anything else around. I have listened to the whole of the City of Love album, and there is barely a weak moment to be found. There is so much variety, and so many fascinated songs to highlight. I want to focus on the title cut, as it is highly memorable, and a song that keeps me guessing. It is good to have another album out from the Scottish band. Let’s hope they keep releasing music for a very long time to come!

In terms of gigs, keep an eye on their schedule, and go and see them if you can! It is a few months until they are back on the stage, but I will go and see them when they come down to the South. I have been a fan of theirs since the 1990s, and I cannot wait to see where they head next. Of course, there is no reason to believe they will stop making albums, as they have a lot to say. I have talked about City of Love as being personal, but there are more political moments. Politics will always be crucial to the band, and they cannot ignore what is happening to the country. I feel a lot of modern music is pretty heavy and serious, and artists are all keen to explore politics, mental-health and the state of the world. That is fair, but when you have so many people doing it, it can get a bit much and hard to digest. One looks for something more spirited, or music that has a more tender and soft side. Deacon Blue are masters of the upbeat, and they blend that with songs that get under the skin and move you. City of Love is a fantastic album that has garnered some strong praise, and it is clear that Deacon Blue have a huge fanbase. I will leave things there, as I have talked about the band a lot. I do think radio stations need to be a bit more flexible regarding playlists and the type of artists they play. This assumption bands like Deacon Blue are reserved for a set demographic is a bit ridiculous! Their music is not only for those of a certain ilk or persuasion; instead, it is designed…