Watch: Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh on how a Glasgow street inspired the band's new album

2025 marks 40 years since Ricky Ross met Dougie Vipond and they started to form Deacon Blue. The songs on The Great Western Road reflect the journey the band has taken and draws on the age and experience they all share. Ricky Ross say: “It’s just the next part of the adventure and it’s as exciting now as it was back in 1988”.

The album was introduced by the single, Late ’88, that fondly remembers the care-free excitement of those early days in Glasgow. The Great Western Road, recorded at Rockfield Studios, sees Ricky Ross and Deacon Blue guitarist and long term collaborator Gregor Philp return to production duties, having last produced the band’s Top five charting last full length album, 2020’s City Of Love. The album was recorded by Matt Butler, who last worked with the band on their debut, Raintown.

The inspiration for the title came directly from Glasgow. “Probably 90% of the time I start with a title and then I work backwards from there and it just fills your imagination” Ricky explains in the video above. “and it came to me one day when I was driving and thinking about these brilliant avenues that lead out from Glasgow.

“When we started, Great Western Road was our hangout. We’d meet in Kelvinbridge and jump into a wee minibus and set out to do a gig. Also it was exciting as a place, the West End was where you wanted to hang out. And it’s a metaphor for a road that leads out of that place into an unknown, into the wilderness, and eventually up into the Highlands. It just goes away somewhere else. I think that became a metaphor for where we are now in this later phase of life. It’s an exciting phase and an exciting time, but it’s a completely different time.”

On the Deacon Blue sound, singer Lorraine McIntosh says: “I think everything about Deacon Blue comes back to having a great songwriter and great songs at its heart, and I think we have a great group of musicians who are very talented, who bring these songs to life. I think we’ve worked really hard at it, but really the start is the songs. You can’t go out and do a great gig if you’ve not got great songs.

“I think we always were a really good live band, but we’ve got better because we really pride ourselves on putting on a great show and giving people a great night, because you’re taking people’s money, you’re taking their time. They could go and see a million other shows but they come and see us so every time we go out there’s that feeling that we want to win this tonight.”

Ricky Ross says: “I think we do what we do. I think like lots of bands from our era we were influenced hugely by the music that came before us and that’s a really wide range but with songs at the heart of it, songs with lyrics that mean something. People often say about, for example Dignity, that it’s become a sort of folk song and I think it is, and I think that kind of folk tradition has influenced me hugely. They are songs that people can sing.

“It’s really important for me to say it only happens with these guys. I try to do things on my own sometimes for a change or something, but it’s just not got the same dynamic. There’s a magic there.”

Talking about tracks on the new album and what inspired them, Ricky says: “Late 88 was our reflection that when you’re younger, there’s a fearlessness, you could take things on. \And I wanted ‘big fat synths and something exciting and you always think it would be good to have something that goes on the radio, but there was also this Jackson Brown record Late for the Sky that influenced me.

“With How We Remember, I knew at the time that you don’t write that song every day. And The Great Western Road, if I was run over by a bus tomorrow, that’s the song I’m most pleased about - in this recent period.”

You can read the full interview, which took place at Cafe Gandolfi, at our sister title The Scotsman.

Deacon Blue perform on Friday 10 October and Saturday 11 October at the Hydro.