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: One of the standout tracks on the album was "Bethlehem's Gate" which is another of your songs which has a nativity theme running through it.

RR: Yeah, well it touches on everything really. It's a bit of an obscure song. Again it's the kind of song I wouldn't necessarily write today. It's funny to look at your own songs and look back. Sometimes because I do the solo show you sit down and you sing this song at the piano and you think, "Its funny, I wouldn't write this lyric now." But that's kind of what happens when you are moving on I suppose. That song jumps around. The first verse is about an event in Loch Lommond where we had a lot of friends and family gathered together and then it moves on to the crucifixion on the wasteland and all that kind of stuff. But what I think really I was trying to get at was an atmosphere about the possibility of things. Again it goes back to where I am with "Calvary", you know, don't overlook optimism because Christmas is the beginning of things. It's great to hone in on that. People often kind of look at the world as it is. You must do it if you are a youth worker I guess. There must be times when you despair. I don't really have any agenda about this. I have a Christian faith that's very real to me but I have no pretensions, that I don't have any desire to proselytise. I meet great people out there who have fantastic humanity and I really do believe that. I know what I feel is right but I have no sense in which I would say that is the thing. But I do think sometimes that the imagery that I understand from that, the beginnings of things, the full possibilities of what human life can be, in that nativity story is a great starting point for that and is a great inspiration.

DA: In 1998 you went out to Brazil with Christian Aid. What impact did that have on you?

RR: A huge impact. In fact one of the biggest disappointments was that yesterday one of the cardinals who might have been elected pope was the cardinal from Brazil and he has actually been a big supporter of the MST, which was the movement I went out to see. Had he been chosen, it would have been quite exciting I think because I suspect all of the others are a bit down on liberation theology but someone coming from that background would have been good. Latin America is an amazing place. I think on this side of the world we don't know much about it. I've been reading Motorcycle Diaries recently and I was just thinking, "Wow, it's an amazing place." It has just been carved up really by the Western world in the last three centuries but basically they are all one people. Brazil's an amazing place - it's just mind-blowing. The conclusion I came to when I came home is that everyone of all ages should try and get out to the third world at some point in their lives. Unfortunately it has been something which I haven't been able to follow through myself since then. It was an amazing experience, a great experience.

DA: When Deacon Blue played at the SECC as part of the recent tsunami benefit gig you spoke a bit about the Make Poverty History campaign. Is that something you are hoping to get involved with?

RR: I have said we would help out wherever we can with that. I think it's a really good campaign. I went to see Ronan Keating who I work with and he was doing a gig in December and he stopped his gig for 15 minutes to talk about Make Poverty History and his visit to Ghana. And I thought, "Wow, Ronan would pride himself on being well in the mainstream and he has a whole lot of hits to play in his show, so to stop the show for 15 minutes and show a film on Make Poverty History is something." If Radiohead did it the NME would have it on the front cover! It's fantastic! So basically I thought there was a great opportunity there at the tsunami benefit which was a very important thing. It's always important to respond when such a terrible, terrible thing happens, but the trouble is the gig was so long that after the event you think "how do you reposition and try and bring out something people can aspire to from this?" So, I was really pleased to re-emphasise the Make Poverty History campaign. Who can argue with it? I think people will look back and our children and our grandchildren will ask us, "How could you live like that, so comfortably, when all these people you knew were hungry and exploited? It's not like we have any excuse. You see it on the television all the time. How can you actually live the way you did and you actually relied on cheap labour." I feel very guilty about it now. I think it will be almost totally similar to our reaction to how could people live with slavery. I think that we will look back on it in the same way as our generation looked back on slavery or apartheid.

DA: Looking back to your solo albums now, 'What You Are' sounded like a break with the Deacon Blue sound.

RR: It was a bit like 'Fellow Hoodlums', it was a reaction to everything which had gone before. Well, it wasn't quite, because the previous Deacon Blue album had been quite guitar-y, but it was more forced than any album I've ever made. Eventually one of the Robb Brothers who produced it said, "What is it about you don't want to have any keyboards on this album? Did you murder someone and bury their piano?!" I said it was just to get away from the sound of Deacon Blue albums. Of course sometimes that's good and healthy in some ways. But I think sometimes looking back on it, it was more forced than it needed to be.

DA: There still seemed to be songs on the CD singles which I could imagine a lot of Deacon Blue fans enjoying like "In The Pines" and "The River Is Wide".

RR: Yeah there was a lot of good stuff there. Looking back on it I really like the sound of that album, it's a great sounding record. I love the playing on it. "What You Are" and "Cold Easter" were some of the really good songs on it. But I think I went in a little bit naively on that album. I think I needed to come out with something more guaranteed to bring success or at least a hit single that was going to move things on. I went in guns blazing and was just trying to do something different and I think that was why commercially it was just too much. My initial instincts when I came out of the band were what I wanted to do was just build slowly up, go to a small label but at the time I couldn't get off Sony, and it would have been so much better. We could have just done a small album on a small label and built things up again. But that's kind of what happens, you know. I have no time for regrets about things.

DA: On your official website there is a desk recording of one of your Jazz Café gigs and before you sing "Cold Easter" you mention that your father's death had a big impact on your thinking about faith at that time and that album was a darker album of doubts and questioning.

RR: Yeah it was a very doubting, questioning album. There were darker songs than actually made it on to the album. There were a lot of songs where I thought, "I can't put that on or it will be becoming too gloomy this whole thing." There is a song called "Death Work Song" which we recorded live and was a real turmoil of very ghostly dark images. There was a real feeling in my life at that point that "I've buried my father" and it never occurred to me before then that you put a body in the grave and that's the end of it. And it made me question is that what I really think? I realised that I hadn't really thought faith through. It was very interesting to come to that point actually. I had always trundled along and had never expected to question things and then when I did question it, it started to reawaken things for me.

DA: Towards the end of the Jazz Café gig you said that by the time you made 'New Recording' you had rediscovered faith again.

RR: Yeah because I wrote a song on that album called "Ash Wednesday". Although it is a ramblingly long song, I actually regard it as one of my best songs. It has in it the expression of a lot of things I wanted to say about faith and the faith I managed to understand. I remember talking to someone who I am really very close to, an admired theologian, and he said, "Put it this way, to me if someone came along today and said there wasn't a literal resurrection or a literal virgin birth, that wouldn't bother me." I'm not saying that that's what I think. I'm just saying that this thought intrigued me because I think a lot of people's hazards with faith are to do with the miraculous and I'm not sure the miraculous is that important. Miraculous faith isn't maybe what people have today anyway, so why is it that important to have the miraculous as the underpinning of it? What is the story of it? The essence, the truth of it? Where it leads. What it represents, all these are the things, and that's really what "Ash Wednesday" was about.