We understand how much people were looking forward to this weekend and we really were too but with historic levels of Covid infections circulating in the community we feel it would be irresponsible to go ahead with our two concerts in Aberdeen on 18th December and Glasgow on 19th December. Therefore, we have taken the difficult decision to postpone these shows and the rescheduled dates are:

6th May 2022 – Aberdeen P&J Arena
7th May 2022 – Glasgow OVO Hydro

Your original tickets remain valid and information on the rescheduled shows in Ireland and Northern Ireland will be shared with you as soon as possible.

We were so excited about finishing our Cities of Love tour on a high this year and we know it will be disappointing to many of you that we have been forced to make this decision. However, it is obvious to us that gathering in large numbers would be a huge risk for our fans and our crew and with the authorities only offering broad advice we decided that it would be best for everyone if we postponed the shows until the spring.

Have a safe and Happy Christmas.

Deacon Blue

Last remaining tickets available here.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Deacon Blue’s third studio album, Fellow Hoodlums is to be released as a special edition yellow vinyl including the seven inch, 12-page lyric booklet from the original release package plus digital download code.

Released on 18 June, and available to pre-order now from https://Deacon.lnk.to/FellowHoodlums, the album originally reached number two in the UK charts on 15 June 1991, and continued the huge critical acclaim and chart success the band had had since the release of their 1989, top 15 debut Raintown which was followed by their 1989 number one album When The World Knows Your Name.

Fellow Hoodlums includes the top 10 hit Twist And Shout alongside other singles Your Swaying Arms, Closing Time and Cover From The Sky; it was an album that brought the band back to their Glasgow roots and allowed them to remember and rediscover their love and joy of songwriting, influenced by their combined musicianship, the album is uniquely and unmistakably Deacon Blue, as Ricky Ross explains…

“Fellow Hoodlums is the album Deacon Blue made when we really knew who we were. In retrospect, and try as we might, it was really an album quite removed from the sound of most records of that time and for that, thirty years on, we are grateful.

“It’s the sound of six people making music together, finding their way round songs and interpreting them through playing and trying not to second guess each other or the audience. All the joy we found in making ‘Raintown’ was revisited on this record and we knew that making records should be as much about joy as any other attribute.

“Glasgow is the grid on to which the stories were set. The stories are about loss, reconciliation, devotion, restlessness, longing and, of course, love. There was a deep well of sadness at the start of the writing, the opening song is a valediction for a soldier’s life, but increasingly the ‘audacity of hope’ (to borrow a famous phrase) triumphs. Isn’t that so often the way?

“I loved Fellow Hoodlums and I have loved re-listening to the newly mastered version. On it I hear my musical brothers and sister at their individual and collective best. We were close then and close some thirty years on. We hope this new vinyl cut brings you as much joy as we had making the album.”

‘To Be Here Someday’ is Deacon Blue’s first official book and will feature extensive interviews with Deacon Blue as well as key members of their crew over the past 35 years along with fans’ memories of gigs, singles and albums.

The highly-collectable limited edition comes with a specially-curated hoard of previously-unreleased vinyl, with artwork, posters, replica tickets, a signed set list and a VIP laminate all selected by the band. It includes a new vinyl 7″ single, featuring never before released, demo recording of ‘Dignity’ that got the band signed, backed with one of the best live versions of ‘Dignity’, recorded in 2006 at the Hammersmith Apollo, released on vinyl for the first time.

Deacon Blue want fans to tell them your story of your connection to the band. We want this definitive book in the band’s history to include your recollection about what the band have meant to you. Tell us your memories of first gigs, singles and albums, the memorable moments and people tethered to songs, about the place the band have in your life, and the reason why.

Email your story to deaconbluebook@gmail.com

Authored and edited by journalist Paul English, ‘To Be Here Someday’ will be published in two editions: a standard hardback version, priced at £39.99; and a special edition box – limited to just 1,000 copies, each featuring an individually hand-numbered certificate – priced at £75.00.

The boxed set will also feature a poignant signed setlist from the band’s emotional swansong on 20 May 1994, with each member of the original lineup, including the late Graeme Kelling, dedicating a message to Ricky after what everyone thought would be the last-ever show.

It’ll also feature a special A3 poster, presented to the band on selling out their ‘To Be Here Someday’ 2018 UK tour, plus another from their ‘Extended Play’ tour of Spain in 1990.

To order your copy now, click here.

It is with a heavy heart that we write to you again about rescheduling. Our Royal Albert Hall show will now take place on 2nd December and the show in Manchester on that date moves to 5th December.

Unfortunately, due to the various complications that rescheduling brings we have to cancel our show in Brighton and those tickets will be refunded. We are truly sorry not to be able to perform for you there. Tickets are still available at the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo and Portsmouth Guildhall the tour and we hope you can get to one of those shows instead.

Get vaccinated when you can. With love DB x

Hi folks, it is with regret that we have to announce our shows in June have to be rescheduled. We have a new date for Blenheim Palace and we are working on new dates for The Brighton Centre and The Royal Albert Hall.

6th June, 2021 – The Brighton Centre – Rescheduled Date TBC

7th June, 2021 – Royal Albert Hall, London – Rescheduled Date TBC

18th June, 2021 – Live at Blenheim Palace – NEW DATE 18 June, 2022 – Tickets

All tickets remain valid and we will announce new dates for London and Brighton as soon as we possibly can. Thanks for your understanding, stay safe and get the vaccine when you can.
DBx

Photo: Barrowlands 2016, Simon Murphy.

Deacon Blue are proud to announce the band’s first official book, To Be Here Someday, in conjunction with This Day In Music Books.

The special project will feature exclusive interviews with the band, looking back on their 35-year history as one of the UK’s most popular live acts, as well as unseen photography, collectables and ephemera from the band’s own personal archives.

And, as with every great Deacon Blue gig, the band want their beloved fans to be right at the heart of their journey back through the years.

Deacon Blue would like you to contribute to their first official book, sharing your own personal recollections of how you fell for the band.

It could be a memory of watching them live over the years, chronicling the experience of the thrill of seeing one of the best acts in the business.

Or it could be about the songs that are forever tethered to a time and place in your life, the track you fell in love to, the album that soundtracked a period of your life, the songs from a band which have a special place in your life, whatever the reason.

Photo: Barrowlands 1994, Alan Wylie.

Were you there in the beginning? Or did you fall for the songs and the unique live experience sometime on their remarkable journey over the land and the city in the years since? Deacon Blue would love for you to contribute your own personal memories.

Authored and edited by journalist Paul English, To Be Here Someday will chronicle the exceptional reciprocal relationship between one of the country’s best-loved bands, and their fans.

If you would like to be part of Deacon Blue: To Be Here Someday, please send your story, to deaconbluebook@gmail.com no later than 1st June 2021. Feel free to include any photographs of you with the band, or images of ticket stubs, merchandise, etc., with your submission, to help us illustrate the book.

A couple of years ago I remembered a story I’d heard about the Gorbals in Glasgow. In the church of Blessed St John Duns Scotus there is said to be some of the remains of St Valentine. As the Gorbals was always a slightly mythical place for me I became fascinated with the idea that in the heart of Glasgow such a strong symbol of love endured.

The Gorbals had only been a place I’d read about until I moved west from Dundee. Even when I lived here first, the old tenements of that part of town had been pulled down and sixties high-rise flats had replaced them. No one seemed to love the flats and everyone I spoke to agreed that the demolition of the old area had been unnecessary as the housing stock could have been refurbished and the community kept in place. Instead people were scattered across Glasgow and beyond and one of the strongest, tight-knit neighbourhoods of the city was destroyed. In case it sounds like I’m romanticising poverty, I witnessed all of this at first hand when my wife’s aunts returned from Ireland and America and always headed back to the old community they’d first joined in Scotland. They talked about Crown Street and Cumberland Street as the centre of their world in the early sixties. A place of refuge, family and welcome to which they always returned on any visit.

As the idea nagged away at me I wanted to bring these two threads together. I wanted to celebrate the symbolic heart of a city which has been my true home for thirty-five plus years with the hope of those overheard childhood hymns. I wanted to celebrate the possibility of mercy, love and kindness being not just dreams of paradise, but ideals we need to believe in if we want our world to be a better place for everyone. In short, we imagine the future to be the best of what our imaginations can contain. In turn our hope is not in the consolation of life after death but in the true expectation of life before it.

So, the City of Love became an idea about finding a place of hope; a city we somehow knew but which hadn’t yet been realised; a dream which had been cruelly disturbed and one which we couldn’t quite remember but still remained in our heart as a place of true happiness. The City of Love was on that far shore. Rooted in this dark, soot-drenched jumble of houses where light had to fight to break-in to the back courts was a heart of love which, despite all the efforts to diminish or remove it, continued to beat.

For this reason and also because we loved the studio there, we wanted to make our record in The Gorbals, in the heart of the City of Love. We wanted to make a record which was honest, raw and sounded like the band we have become. I felt we’d come to a point where we needed to make the record that was in our hearts, not one which carried any hope of being in the charts.

With Deacon Blue I think we all take every event: record, tour, TV, radio show or film as an unexpected bonus to the life we once lived. Simply put: everyone in the band is delighted to be making a record which, in the course of recording we always tell ourselves might be the last album we’ll ever produce. Happily, we now know that is not true.

‘City of Love’ came out in a year no one will ever forget. That it came out, we are grateful and very thankful to all of you who confounded our expectations and gave us our best chart position in twenty-six years. We are finally beginning to believe everyone is going to get to hear these songs later this year. On behalf of us all, thank you.