Towards the end of their two-hour set, Deacon Blue play a song from their most recent album, The Great Western Road, called Late ’88. A sweet slice of disco-infused pop, it is about the moment that Deacon Blue’s career took off, in the wake of their debut album Raintown, a point rammed home by the stageside screens, which show the band in their youth: a veritable riot of white denim, leather jackets and questionable millinery. “We seemed to do it all and it all seemed so easy,” sings Ricky Ross, his voice echoed by that of co-vocalist Lorraine McIntosh, as indeed it was then.
You can’t really blame Deacon Blue for re-asserting how successful they were. They are the kind of band pop histories generally overlook – squeezed out of the late 80s narrative by the rise of acid house and Madchester at one extreme and Stock Aitken Waterman at the other – but they were, by any metric, both huge and inescapable: when they play their 1989 hit Fergus Sings the Blues, you find yourself automatically imagining it coming out of a radio, so omnipresent was it on BBC Radio 1 at the time.
