When the London-based PR firm called Dougie Adam to say he could spend an hour with RICKY ROSS over coffee the following day he literally dropped everything and set off to meet one of his musical heroes.

DA: Across the album there is a broad range of themes like mortality, love songs, Christmas songs, some unfashionable ones like family life which doesn't generally get nice write ups in the music press. It appears quite an ambitious range of things you've chosen to sing about.

RR: You don't really choose that stuff you know, that stuff chooses you. You just have to write about what is going on. Increasingly, I give the same answer every time I do an interview like this. You write about the same subjects with your eye focussed on the same things but the fact that it is two or three years later makes it sort of relevant. That's the secret of it as far as I'm concerned. And then occasionally some things come round which are twists which you haven't expected and that happens on the record as well but it's not a conscious decision to say "Oh I'm going to write a song about this." The main focus of "This Is The Life" when I started it was deciding "I want to write songs for my friends without them being dead first!" and give these songs to them. So there was a song for my mum and songs for different friends and I thought that was quite a nice idea. It didn't hold together as the whole concept of the finished album but it was always quite a good starting point. This time I didn't really have a starting point but I was just writing and the songs kind of appeared.

DA: There are also some songs which touch on Deacon Blue's original guitarist Graeme Kelling's fight with cancer and his death last summer.

RR: Very much so. "The Streets Are Covered In Snow" is a song which was very directly influenced by Graeme, by a phone call I got from him when his cancer had come back. That was the context of that song, and then obviously a few months after he had died I had been trying without much success to write different things just as you do, to express something. And then "In The End" came along as being the song which dealt with that. I guess that's why "Pale Rider" is at the centre of the album because all that is the background to the album and I think Graeme's story is the biggest background to the album and I hadn't even realised. But when someone you are close to eventually dies and they are the same age as you it does cast a very big shadow over everything you think and write.

DA: One of the songs on the album I wanted to ask you about was "Calvary" which took me by surprise because I assumed from the title it must be about Easter, and then when I heard it I realised its actually more about Christmas!

RR: Your magazine is probably one of the few that will have much of an interest in that song. The starting point was I was writing Christmas songs and this was one of them. Others were written which didn't make the album for different reasons. When I was younger and the kind of faith I grew up in, an awful lot of it was good, but one of the problems with it was they just couldn't get a proper handle on Christmas. They only could understand it in terms of what came later. I remember this particularly loathsome song they'd sing about the "low road leads from Bethlehem to Calvary" and I thought, "what happened there," you know? It's coming up to Christmas and as soon as it arrives you jump straight to Easter! And that's a real misunderstanding. It's a great story and my line on it is to say, "Really look, whether you are of faith or whether you are not of faith, whether you are an atheist or whether you are Islam or Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian the point is that the Christmas story is a great story. It's a great religious story and it's a great human story because if you are going to have the kind of God who decides to be born in a back street stable rather than a hotel then that to me seems quite interesting. Now what do you learn from that? What's all that about?" That's what I think you should be thinking about before you get on to this "road that leads to Calvary" stuff. And I suppose that kind of informed my spiritual journey really and was one of these Damascus Road experiences where I went "I'm uncomfortable with this road leading to Calvary thing," let's just kind of stop here in Bethlehem for a while. That was basically it. It's a little Christmas song with a slight sting in it which says its good enough just to celebrate on its own terms. Christmas has been hugely corrupted. I have to say the older I get the more I think capitalism is evil! There are so many things it is responsible for and not least the huge corruption of Christmas. It is such a great story and one of the reasons I wanted to do a Christmas album was I wanted to write nativity type songs because I think it is a great story.

DA: A couple of years ago I was at a Deacon Blue concert at the Carling Academy in Glasgow when you did another new Christmas song called "Starstruck". I loved that song and thought it was one of the best songs of the night and was hoping it would be on the new album.

RR: Well actually it was recorded as one of the 20 songs or so we tried out. It didn't make it for musical reasons really. The version we ended up cutting. I did a demo of it which Ronan Keating sang on and he really did a nice job on it and I maybe should have stuck with my demo ideas. The song was about five minutes long. So I took the demo in to Deacon Blue and said, "Look, I have this Christmas song, do you fancy doing it?" So we just basically played it as the demo had done and we played it live and thought, "Oh that's quite nice." Scott Frazer and Mick Slaven were in my band on the album and also in Deacon Blue and I said, "You guys know this song, let's just play the song like we did it last Christmas," but for some reason it never quite lit up in the studio in the same way, so rather than just bash it about I thought, "Let's just leave it," because it's one of those songs which either lights up or it doesn't. I love the song and it's going to come out at some point, we'll get it out there. As I say, Ronan did a demo of it and he might still do it, I know one of his A&R guys loved the song. So it will either come out as a Deacon Blue thing or maybe I will do some more Christmas stuff further down the line. I don't worry about that any more because I think that if it is a good song it will come out.

DA: I had been just about to ask if you think you will ever do that Christmas album or not.

RR: I don't know if it would be a Christmas album. I still have these Christmas songs and I'm thinking about maybe doing something with them even this year. I don't know. I think I need to put more writing time into it. The funny thing about it was the time that I got the biggest inspiration to write about it was coming up for Christmas. So then you do it at Christmas and you realise it's too late to release that year. So it's kind of hard to get into the writing mode of it. For a while though I just got really fixated with it. There was a song that nearly made it on the album called "Wandering The World" which we had done live a couple of times. It's really a song about asylum seekers and I just think there is a great connection between asylum seekers and the whole nativity story. That was within a whisker of getting on the album as well so at some point we'll get there.

DA: You grew up in Dundee and your family was part of a Brethren church there. How much of an influence was that on you growing up?

RR: It was a big influence because in most ways it was a very positive influence because it was our life, it was our community. It was a very friendly place and I think looking back on it that was where music happened. There was a lot of music in the church, Sunday school and Bible class, a Bible band that my dad led, my parents had a lot of people back at the house and the piano would be played and people would sing, so I guess a lot of music came from that. And then the other side of it were the entertainers. We went to a lot of events there, a lot of gospel meetings and things and there were these preachers who would come and they would be very. well some of them would be dull as you can imagine, but others were fantastically entertaining and that was probably my first encounter of the stand up entertainment that you kind of have to do as a front person; preachers were more of an influence than anything else.

DA: You still do one of the songs from the album in your solo show, "The Germans Are Out Today". I remember you saying you had written the song for your dad.

RR: It was actually, yeah.