Dougie Adam met up on 10th August with Ricky Ross of mainstream pop rockers DEACON BLUE

I glance at my watch and also at the long list of questions in my notes and worry that time is against us and jump to a question about Ricky's personal favourites on the new album. "Well, I suppose 'Laura From Memory' is one of the songs that I really love and it's very personal, about my cousin Laura. Again, a lot of the album is about the band, but Laura was one of the people that championed the band in the early days. We had a demo tape of 'Just Like Boys', 'The Very Thing' and 'Dignity'. I was staying at her house and she went around the house playing it for two days, incessantly playing this. She loved music and it just upset me a lot when she took her own life. My cousin was very, very dear to me and I had kind of always wanted to mark it. I had never done this before but I wrote one song and thought 'Nah, that's not right but I'll take some of the lyrics and I'll try again' and I did. Normally you scrap things when they don't work but I thought, 'No, this is too big'. So I took the lyrics and rewrote the song. Actually it was a real breakthrough song in the writing of the album and I thought, 'This is good. This album is about something that matters'. Then I guess 'The Hipsters' is hard to get round. I'm really pleased with it. It's just poppy and there's hardly any lyrics in it but every lyric counts. I nearly went spectacularly wrong with that song on two counts. One was, on the original version it stopped where the middle eight stops there was a long, long bit that was just going to be a long monologue and Lorraine said 'Are you serious?!' and she was right, it didn't work. Also on the demo it was 20 beats per minute slower. Anyway, at some point you'll hear the demo and you'll see what I mean."

We move on and chat about the recurring themes on the new record. "It's hard when you're starting, you don't know what you're doing. But because I was starting with 'The Hipsters' thing I was making a radio series about interviewing people who were imagining meeting themselves coming back and writing a letter to themselves as if they could talk to themselves, which is quite an interesting exercise, and in a sense that's what I was doing about us in the band. It's really just about this little club of people that went through these things together, that no one else could experience because they weren't there and I'm hoping that might extend to people like yourself who were maybe in the audience and they were part of that and they'll feel included too. But it's really about just that experience. I was saying this to Nicola who was here earlier but being in a band is not like having friends who you sometimes see and don't see. Having a band is like having a family so you have them whether you like them or not. At times when they really, really drive you mad they are still your brothers and sisters. And you love them as well, so if something bad happens to them it just breaks your heart. You want the best for them and if someone has a pop at one of them you feel very protective. We're very like that you know. The album is really about them, it is about my relationship with these people, all of them, Ewen (Vernal, bass player from 1986-2001) and any of them who have been in the band. Ewen and Graeme (Kelling, the band's original guitar player who died in 2004 after a long battle with cancer) as well, very much. Graeme is a part of that whole story, a huge part of the story."

Ricky's open love letter to the band is most evident in the opening "Here I Am In London Town", which he began writing while fooling around on the piano in Jamie Cullum's studio. After improvising the first few lines, "Here I am in London town/Waiting for the world to begin," Ricky was transported back to 1986 and sitting in AIR Studios in London cutting 'Raintown' with producer Jon Kelly and being young and full of confidence that they could go out and win an audience and make a name for themselves. The rest of the lyric is a mixture of reliving that first burst of excitement and idealism and recording how his older self has changed and moved on since those days while holding on to a love for the people in the band and the times they had. On "The Outsiders" another retrospective on the heady Deacon Blue experience is offered up: "We took the road, any road, every road out of here/Forgot the past, cut the strands, made a path, took a stand/Chased the day, raced the night, grabbed our chance didn't look/Back to where we'd come from/So we kept right on running/And this world seemed so much lighter/When we were the outsiders."

If life in Deacon Blue used to be hectic then the same theme permeates the relationships between the characters throughout the songs who often find themselves late at night looking back at how life is unfolding. In most cases the busyness of life and distance sometimes separate the characters and tension creeps in even when they are trying to muddle on through and do the best they can. "I don't know where I'm going/Know full well I can't start caring/Nothing seems to matter more than now/This night sky's full of warning/But I'm going through till morning/Need to stop and think but don't know how/There's hundreds of things to do/But I just want to spend my hours with you" ("The Rest"). If life in the present is often an exhausting blur then there is still hope for the future based partly on escapism and a hope that when people are genuinely trying to give their best things will work out right in the end. "This cruel world seems full of such unhappiness/If our lives collide we may get out of this. . ./We can catch a rocket ship and fly away/Through meteors and moons and galaxies/To the avenue of stars. . . We'll go. . . Tomorrow" ("Stars"). "We trust, we change, we move one place to another/'Cause that's what we can do/We talk, forgive, we give everything that love allows/'Cause that's what we can do" ("That's What We Can Do").

I suggest to Ricky that previous Deacon Blue albums as well as his more intimate solo projects have often wrestled with spiritual issues such as faith and doubt, birth and death and enquire if there were any spiritual themes in the latest offering. "I think in my songs they are all over the place and they are always there. I think the McIntosh Ross album was a funny one in that it was a very overtly spiritual record. We had both done this thing called the Exercise of St Ignatius that made a huge impact on our thinking at the time and we both just splurged all that out in that record. So sometimes you have very obvious records that are like that. I think that with this record nothing has changed particularly for me but there is just that thing of getting older and why you do things. I think one of the key lines in 'Here I Am In London Town' is about forgetting and that's how we survive. I think a really important part of everyone getting older is that you are able just to leave things behind. You have to do it and you have to move on otherwise you're going to be stuck in the past and you have to just somehow allow yourself to forget things. I think that is like a mantra for me now."

Before we move on to talk about the reissues and tour I have to ask Ricky about my favourite unreleased song of his, "Starstruck". When I interviewed him when 'Pale Rider' came out he said he had tried the song at those sessions and hadn't been satisfied with the results and had decided to keep the song for Deacon Blue to record instead. Why didn't it get included this time round? "There were a few songs that never made it. The reason I didn't use it was I have always had this idea of doing a Christmas album or EP. Although 'Starstruck' is one of those songs which comes up that I still want to do something with, I just love the idea of doing something that is a proper Christmas record. Lots of people do Christmas records, like Bob Dylan's where it's all old songs about the Christmas holidays. But I'd like to make a record that's about the real Christmas, so at some point that is my plan, but it's got to get in queue."

The Back Catalogue Reissued
In October Edsel Records are releasing the band's five previous studio albums in a reissues series which sees all the albums, b-sides from singles, remixes and odd tracks from compilations brought together and remastered and released as six multi-disc sets and housed in lavish casebound book packaging. "It's great to get all our material archived and presented in a way which respects the music," Ricky says.

When our interview took place Ricky was still working on some of the tracklistings on the last couple of albums in the series. Those have now been announced. On 22nd October the first three releases in the series are due out: 'Raintown' (3CDs with 49 tracks + one DVD with six promo videos); 'When The World Knows Your Name' (3CDs with 49 tracks + one DVD with six promo videos) and 'Fellow Hoodlums' (2CDs with 34 tracks + one DVD with five promo videos). 'Raintown' almost bombed commercially until CBS made the band re-record and re-release some of the early singles and they finally began to chart modestly. Eventually in time the debut album sold steadily and peaked at 14 in the album charts where it would eventually spend 77 weeks in the top 100. 'When The World Knows Your Name' famously entered the charts at number one, knocking Madonna off the top spot, sold over one million copies and also stayed on the chart for over a year. The album marked the band's commercial peak even if it wasn't their best studio effort. 'Fellow Hoodlums' from 1991 was a return to form and reached number two.

'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing' from 1993 saw the band team up with Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne and change musical direction but the album was a relative commercial flop, 'only' reaching number four and spending a mere three weeks in the top 20 albums and falling out of the charts entirely seven weeks later. This bravest and most underrated album in the band's back catalogue is released on 29th October as a 2CD + one DVD set alongside another 2CD + one DVD compilation, 'The Rest', which collects together the material from 1990's number two hit 'Four Bacharach & David Songs' EP, new material recorded for 1994's number one compilation album 'Our Town', new material and unreleased archive material from 1999's 'Walking Back Home' and finally the new recordings which came out in 2006 as part of the 'Singles' compilation. 2001's 'Homesick' originally made for the ill-fated Papillion label is also released on 29th October in a single disc expanded version which now includes the remastered album and the extra b-sides and radio edits which came out at the time.

I begin by expressing surprise that given how well the albums sold when they were released and the fact that the band still have a loyal and sizeable live audience that Sony never got round to remastering the back catalogue before now. After all in 2006 when they put out the 2CD Legacy Edition of 'Raintown' and the remastered hits compilation 'Singles' they were already a good way down the road as far as the studio albums were concerned. Ricky agrees, "I just kind of thought that they would go on from there and carry on, but they're hopeless! You know, they are nice people but Sony is just a corporation so the thing they wanted was just to pass the back catalogue on to someone we didn't know, and we said if you are going to pass it on, pass it on to someone we'll work with. So we said, 'Right, we'll take charge of this' and fortunately now it has been dealt with. I mean people who bought 'Raintown' remastered might not want to buy this, but they might still buy it because in actual fact it has got more on it, the DVD is on it and so on. I mean, 'Raintown' was done beautifully, I thought Sony actually did that really, really well. There is a new package of 'Raintown' now because it has become a big set now with all the other albums." From glancing at the new 'Raintown' set's tracklist there are another 25 remastered tracks and six promo videos there which weren't on the first remaster, so perhaps the new release isn't such bad value for the avid fan after all.

I ask Ricky how involved he has been with the re-release process and he cackles, "Ask Lorraine! It is impossible not to be involved because you get asked a million questions and unfortunately I am the only person that can answer them." As well as having the final say on the running orders and tracklisting Ricky has also written new liner notes for each set and typed up all the lyrics to all the songs for the package and raided his loft for previously unused photos and other mementos. He gives an example of how time consuming and painstaking his involvement became. "I was in Nashville co-writing in the beginning of June and I am also doing a lyric book which is coming out which is more selective. It has got all the album stuff on it and also songs that probably mean a lot to me. So I had to get all the final copy together for that and checking all the lyrics. The guy who is looking after the back catalogue, Val, said, 'There are 46 lyrics of b-sides that you haven't got' [in the final copy] and I said 'Yeah? We never printed lyrics for them before' and he said, 'But they are coming out in these reissues. . .' so there has been lots of checking and checking and checking. We just signed off on the 'Raintown' set's tracklisting last week and we did the 'When The World Knows Your Name' one earlier this week and it has gone back and forward, back and forward, choosing pictures. It looks brilliant and you get all the b-side lyrics and I've also written liner notes on them all. It has been a massive job and it is still going on. When I go home tonight after I finish today's interviews 'Fellow Hoodlums' is waiting to be checked."

In the run up to the interview my inbox on Facebook was full of questions from fans wanting to know the specifics and minutia of the reissues. Ricky kindly agrees to answer those questions as best as he can even though some of the tracklistings had still to be finalised. I ask whether the albums are going to be released separately or as a box set, or if there could be a box set at some point. He begins, "They are coming out in separate albums initially but you never know what might happen. I'm hoping there might be a vinyl thing as well if demand is there. It's all to do with demand really, how the numbers add up with these things."

What about the DVD content? Is that going to include live footage or concentrate on the promo videos for singles? Ricky explains he is viewing the video content as a bonus or freebie that comes as part of the remastered audio; "It is just the music videos from every album, so it comes free with every album. I don't know how much it costs but it is quite a nice package."

I also mention that Sony had a habit of issuing compilation after compilation - at the last count they had issued no less than 10 Deacon Blue compilations out of material from the four albums recorded with them - and had a habit of missing things out which fans felt should have been included. Ricky assures me, "Everything that ever came out on a single or on a b-side is all going to be on these albums." I know that in many cases he was never a big fan of the extended mixes and remixes of the band's singles and press him on that point for the sake of clarity. Once again he laughs as he begins his answer, "For whatever reason. . . the idea is to put everything together, because if we don't people will say 'Why is this not on it?'"