Deacon Blue, the Glasgow band behind “Dignity” and “Real Gone Kid”, play their 1987 debut Raintown in full at the Eventim Apollo for its fortieth anniversary.
Deacon Blue, the Glasgow band behind “Dignity” and “Real Gone Kid”, play their 1987 debut album Raintown in full. The dates are at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith on Sunday 24 and Monday 25 October 2027.
The band formed in 1985, after Ricky Ross, a schoolteacher from Dundee, moved to the city. They took their name from the Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues”. Ross wrote most of the songs and sang them with Lorraine McIntosh, whom he married in 1990.
Raintown set out their literate, soul-inflected pop in songs such as “Chocolate Girl” and “Loaded”. When the World Knows Your Name topped the UK albums chart in 1989 and gave them their first top ten single.
A break from 1994 ended with a reunion in 1999. Their most recent album, The Great Western Road, reached number three in 2025. In 2014 they sang at the closing ceremony of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
They have sold more than seven million records. Raintown is now a platinum record, as are the two albums that followed it. At the Apollo the album comes first, then songs from the four decades since.