Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue Has Always Written Songs About People. but He Has Never Written

BIOGRAPHY: 2013

RICKY ROSS

Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue has always written songs about people. But he has never written songs like those on Trouble Came Looking, his sixth solo album. It’s his starkest and most urgent work to date.

Set against the backdrop of global economic recession, Trouble Came Looking is an unadorned, acoustic anthology of unheard voices and untold stories. But its tales of poverty, displacement and desperation are imbued with the warmth and resilience of human nature. Like folk songs, they recount tales without resolving them, yet they’re never bleak, and they’re rarely downbeat. (They can’t afford to be). Ross alludes to the psalms, to a “cry in the dark”, and shows that sometimes we don’t so much need an answer as a voice.

“You have to have about 10 reasons to make a record these days,” says the Dundee-born, Glasgow-based singer-songwriter. “You have to feel like it really needs to be made, and that’s how I felt about these songs. I was so enthused that I started recording when I’d only written about half of the album, so a lot of the versions on Trouble Came Looking are the first time I’ve properly played them through. They’re rough round the edges. They’re barely written – they’re there and no more. I’ve never done that before.”

Trouble Came Looking’s lyrics and music reinforce this atmosphere of scarcity, necessity and lack of choice – from its first-person narratives to the stirring, pared-back arrangements, as cannily augmented by Deacon Blue’s Gregor Philp (guitar, banjo, mandolin) and Lewis Gordon (double bass). “There’s no backing vocals, no extra instrumentation. I wrote most of the songs on guitar – on the only two chords I know,” laughs Ross. “I wanted to tell the stories, to lay them down, without anything getting in the way.”

The album, he says, almost wrote itself. “When I started it, I realised that it’s not possible to tell this story in one song – you have to tell the different sides of it. So the first few tracks became stories of people having trouble upon trouble visited upon them,” he says of ‘Trouble Came Looking For Me’, ‘Now I Smoke, Like I Used To Pray’ and ‘Any Drug Will Do’. “Then came ‘The Fear’ and ‘Good Man’, where I wanted something that jars a bit, that’s a bit more violent-sounding: that you can’t just let wash over you.”

There are also undulating hymns about dislocation (‘How Will the Heart Survive’) and the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers (‘A Strange and Foreign Land’, which rebounds in the bruised Americana of ‘Nothing More Than Travelling Now’). At the heart of the album is ‘Sang O’ The Saracen Maid’, a poem by Craig Smillie, based on a centuries-old parable, which Ross revisits as a glorious folk ballad. “It’s a beautifully written story of cruelty which casts a long shadow over the characters on this record,” he reflects.

Ross, who formed Deacon Blue in 1985, has long explored social issues in his work. He did so for On the Line (1996), a play about Dundee’s Timex Factory industrial dispute, and he drew inspiration from Tony Benn (‘Peace and Jobs and Freedom’, 1993), dedicated songs to unemployed miners (‘Orphans’, 1989), and chronicled 1988’s Glasgow Govan by-election (‘Don’t Let the Teardrops Start’). But, he admits, it’s taken him until now to be comfortable writing about social justice in explicit terms.

“Sometimes when you’re in a band and you’re aware of your audience, you almost write with a little distance,” he offers. “You try to disguise and encode things, and I’ve done that before – whereas with Trouble Came Looking, there was no need. Also, in the past, with Deacon Blue, I’d become involved in the mechanics of politics and protest, and I think when you get sucked into that, you get diverted a little bit from your creativity. It takes you a while to get your bearings back.”

Ross has rediscovered his sense of direction, but his songs remain close to his heart – from a chorale inspired by his daughter’s resolve to beat human trafficking (‘We Shall Overcome The Whole Wide World’) to familial swansong, ‘Holy Night’. “I was listening to Billy Bragg the other day, and he was saying that for all that people associate him with social struggles, the biggest struggles in his life are domestic. I think that’s true for everyone,” Ross suggests. “It’s hard, but if you can keep everyone happy, keep your family together, you’re doing well.” And so it is that Trouble Came Looking concludes with ancestral petition ‘Holy Night’. It’s a heartfelt reminder that all we can really do is keep going; that all we have is each other; that while Ross has repossessed his social bearings, his true north still points to home.

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