It’s early 1988, and I’m looking at spending some WH Smith vouchers I’d got at Christmas, probably given by a well-meaning relative to buy a book or something but that wasn’t on my agenda as I, as I still am, was all about the music not print.
I can remember picking up this cassette with a dreary Septura-like image of an industrial town with the words Raintown emblazoned in a turquoise colour across the top. I didn’t even see the words Deacon Blue above that I just saw the image and word and thought that’ll do and purchased it. As soon as I stepped out of the store, I ripped the cellophane off the cassette box (always a satisfying moment), slapped the tape in my Walkman, and hit play.
The memory of stepping out of Bradford’s Arndale Centre into the wet miserable Darley Street whilst hearing a haunting voice sing “That hurricane day, will soon pass away, and someone will sweep all the jetsam back into the bay” has stuck with me for nearly 40 years, and Raintown, the album after all those years gone is still one of my favorite albums that I never tire of so it’s incredible to think that in all that same time that has past since hearing Deacon Blue for the first time, I have never seen them live as a band, until tonight!
Fate didn’t make it easy for me either; for some reason, the request to review the band I put in wasn’t submitted, and it was only a chance conversation that I had that led to a last-minute approval. It did’t stop there, typically, the day job tried fucking with me, sending me over to Harrogate and Knaresborough for the afternoon, so I was already on a stretch to get back.
Two of the road works I knew of which were going to be a problem weren’t too bad but it was the one I didn’t know about, the one on Skipton Bypass which was down to a single lane in each direction was the first spanner in the works to get to the gig.
So it was a dash in the house, stick every thing needed for the evening onto a charger just to make sure everything had some if not a full charge, Being pushed for time meant no time for a proper shower, it was a council one (half a can of deodorant for those who don’t know), grab the shorts and a tee, slap some trainers on, grab all my gear, jump in the car and shoot off to the train station as driving over during rush hour would take too long because of yet more road works I was aware of in and around Halifax.
I had twelve minutes to get to the station, which is a little over a couple of miles away, so simple, right? Yeah… I live in a lovely, idyllic village, with its own cricket ground, country pub, village hall etc., that happens to sit beside the Leeds Liverpool canal. It sounds like the perfect place, doesn’t it? Well, not when you’re in a hurry! I get down to the canal, and the bridge is up, great!
The barge owner then decides that, as another boat is heading towards the bridge, he’ll keep the bridge open for them to chug through at a slower than walking pace- screw all the cars he’s holding up during rush hour eh?
Great, I’m now down to 4 mins to the station, still doable, right up to the point some wonderful drivers stopped to let a tractor, complete with its fully laden trailer out of a field to amble down the busy main road so that was the easy train buggered as it set off just as I crossed the road to walk the final 20 yards to the station platform, just awesome….
Now this meant I was dealing with 2 changes, one very tight connection and obviously the train I was waiting for was late, meaning by the time I got over the bridge and across the car park at the next change, the next connection was already pulling away from the platform…
Thankfully, the final train that made it doable to be in before the support was only 15 mins after the missed train would pull in. The only catch – it wasn’t at the station the next train I was catching would be pulling into but on the other side of Bradford. So, it’s muggy as hell, and I’ve got a very brisk 10-minute walk to make it there on time, which I do, only for the train I rushed for to be delayed 5 mins, so no rush was needed – FML!
Still, nothing else could go wrong now, this evening, eh? Well, I got to the booking office only to find they had no record of my allocated tickets – at this point it felt like the universe was making it as difficult as possible; me and Deacon Blue live wasn’t meant to be…
Thankfully, after several walkie-talkie chats, furious tapping away on group messaging by the booking office girl going on, and an unexpected meet with Andy Whyment (Kirk from Corrie), the tickets were handed over, so we entered literally just as The Lightning Seeds walked on stage.
I swear I have never needed a beer so much in my entire life!
One thing has been consistent over the years with The Lightning Seeds: their performance. Unfortunately, this is both a good thing and a bad. The good thing is that the band that has changed line-ups over the years is still great, the songs are still brilliant, many of the tunes have very clearly stood the test of time but the biggest kicker has always been with the main man and continues to be so. For as long as I can remember, Ian Broudie’s voice has never stood up live.
Sometimes it has been absolutely terrible, sometimes not great, and tonight we got not great, so in terms of Broudieness, it was “Lucky You” for me. A great singalong set to some classic 90’s songs, including the likes of Change, Pure, Perfect, the aforementioned Lucky You, and the inevitable Three Lions that both enjoyed and disappointed at the same time, but it was to be expected and ended up better than I originally feared it could be.
Nervously, it was time for the band I’d loved for many decades to enter the stage; had I left it too late to see them? Thankfully, after the opening 3 songs, 1 from their latest album (Late’88) and 2 from their 2nd (Queen Of The New Year and Wages Day), it was clear I had nothing to worry about, especially as Chocolate Girl followed them, a change from the previous night’s performance, as the entire mid set was changed or switched around from the previous night, fantastic for the fans that booked both nights.
I was now in my element and was taken right back to 1988. The nostalgia continued during the set with the likes of Loaded, Your Town, Love and Regret, Real Gone Kid were mixed in with newer and not so newer tracks from their near 40-year career (albeit with a few reasonably large breaks around the nineties and naughties) it was a good mix for the die hard fans and the curious alike, enough to keep the curious onboard with songs they knew and enough of the newer stuff to satisfy the rest – something like the band James attest to, refusing to be seen as a nostalgia band and preferring to perform as a legacy one.
Of course, the big one had to be there, like the aforementioned James’ Sit Down, the opening bars of Dignity land which led to the crowd singing the 1st verse alone before Ricky joined in with them, singing along with everyone – its amazing when you get to my age, you can’t remember what you did the day before without a long hard think but lyrics from the best part of 4 decades ago are still as clear as day in your head! Fergus Sings’s The Blues continued the singalong before That’s What We Can Do, and their cover of Burt Bacharach’s I’ll Never Fall In Love wrapped up the night.
So was another night smashed at the wonderful Piece Hall? You betcha! Even though officially the second Deacon Blue night wasn’t actually a sell-out, the sheer numbers there meant we must have been talking a few hundred remaining at most; it looked as busy as the sold-out nights I’ve attended this year and the crowd loved it.
Me? I spent the journey home kicking myself I’d left it this long to see them, another band ticked off the gig bucket list with the biggest of ticks you could give it. If you were on the fence and didn’t go then you should be kicking yourself too. A performance like that on a warm, barmy night is what gig life is all about!
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