Deacon Blue review – evergreen hits with a grip on the present

Wandering from his mic stand as the music fades to a murmur, Ricky Ross marvels at Chocolate Girl’s 34-year history as a mixtape constant and soundtrack to marriages, births and divorces. It’s a neat bit of accounting, but its backward glance doesn’t take into account Deacon Blue’s intriguing place in the present.

It has been some time since the band sat this close to the indie zeitgeist, yet thanks to the rise of outfits such as the War on Drugs and Wild Pink, who prize the exact blend of pristine pop-rock and conversational songwriting that Deacon Blue excel at, their music is ripe for reappraisal.

If they intend to engage with that process, even hurry it along, they don’t show it. They are an immaculate live band, urged on by a watertight rhythm section, lived-in interplay between guitarist Gregor Philp and pianist James Prime, and the boundless charisma of Lorraine McIntosh, whose voice remains a wonder. But they are not a particularly daring one.

The people who walk the streets of Ross’s songs have dirt under their fingernails, so it’s a shame that an overreliance on cut-and-paste arena stagecraft – video packages that look like screensavers, momentum-sapping acoustic interludes – leaves certain cuts adrift in the gloss, and a charge through Twist and Shout does little with its jangle-pop quirks.

The other side of this coin is that the hits are dispensed with undiminished enthusiasm. Real Gone Kid is evergreen, a song so vibrant that no number of ad campaigns can kill it, while Fergus Sings the Blues and Dignity are greeted wildly by an amped-up crowd. There is a neat through line to newer tracks – the stately A Walk in the Woods and barrel-chested Hit Me Where it Hurts – that display the same melodic solidity and ringing harmonies.

Ross, his voice a perfect blend of Paul Westerberg rasp and bruised romance, lands a blow on Boris Johnson in the preamble to Loaded, a polemic about haves and have nots from Deacon Blue’s 1987 debut Raintown that is precision-tooled for the moment. Their music isn’t far behind in that regard.