Deacon Blue. The Great Western Road.
Ricky Ross wrote some of the greatest 80s indie-pop songs, not least the life-affirming Dignity about a council worker dreaming of escaping his day-job by saving up to buy a dinghy and sailing away. Decades on, the exhilarating Late ’88 captures the carefree excitement of the Scottish band’s heyday. It’s a vibrant slice of soulful, string-embellished nostalgia celebrating a time when they ‘were running, never stopping’, releasing platinum albums and writing hit after hit – like Real Gone Kid, with its unforgettable “whoo-whoo” chorus. ‘We seemed to do it all – and it all seemed so easy,’ Ross sings. But if songwriting is harder for him now, at 67, you wouldn’t know it.
Deacon Blue’s 11th studio album is awash with strong tracks, not least Ashore, about someone struggling to find their place in the world. This huge, lush melancholic ballad could have been penned for a West End musical, with its uplifting chorus promising: ‘I will not hurt you/Nor desert you/I will not let you go’.
Other gems include the upbeat People Come First and the warm embrace of How We Remember It as they say goodbye to the metaphorical circus leaving town. The 12 tracks range from melodic ballads to the pop funk of Turn Up Your Radio! via Americana – a fine country riff opens the pensive ballad Underneath The Stars – but they all share an emotional intelligence and charismatic Lorraine McIntosh’s bittersweet harmonies impress throughout. The album opens with the plaintive title track, simple piano flows into a relaxed tribute to Glasgow’s West End, a place, he sings, of ‘lost days and wasted journeys, undiscovered twists and turnings’. Typically self-deprecating Ross describes the trendy area as “the place we wanted to be and we seemed part of it for about two months in 1987.”
Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes. Live At The Greek
Re-issued with 16 new tracks, this combustive 1999 collaboration at LA’s Greek Theatre finds Led Zeppelin guitarist Page on top form with the US blues-rockers as they roar through Zep classics and swaggering Crowes gems like Hard To Handle. We get everything from Heartbreaker to Misty Mountain Hop plus BB King, Elmore James & Fleetwood Mac covers.
Courting. Lust For Life.
Don’t let the album’s classical violin intro fool you, the Liverpool quartet are still forging a playful path between indie rock and electronica. The opener builds into a gallop before they jog on to funky floor-filler Pause At You. They’re at their strongest on full-on rockers Namcy [CORR] and After You. The title track, Lust For Life starts listlessly before surging into a banger.
Various Artists. Krautrock Eruption.
Opening with Conrad Schnitzler’s simple and hypnotically insistent Ballet Statique, this is more a 12-track introduction to German synth-pop than a definitive compilation. It packs in Harald Grosskopf’s simple, repetitively relaxing Emphasis, enlivened by soaring electric guitar, along with Roedelius’s Glaubersalz with its off-kilter feel and chilling synths. No Can though.