It doesn’t really matter if you’re meeting the Pope or the Dalai Lama or the bloke three doors down,” says Ross. “What the reader really wants to know about is you and your emotions.” If we’ve learned anything about the life-cycle of pop groups, though, it’s that the years of boom and bust can often give way to a critical and commercial rehabilitation. In his memoir, Ross revisits his formative years growing up in Dundee, his early forays into music and the beginning, extraordinary success, fall-out, and re-emergence of Deacon Blue. Ross writes movingly and with great wit about the people and places that have meant the most to him, as well as his relationship with faith, politics, and the ever-changing challenges of being a musician. Yet anyone looking for the kiss-and-tell candour once pursued by the Press after the singer married his Deacon Blue bandmate Lorraine McIntosh, following the end of his first marriage, won’t find tittle-tattle here.

It’ll be a bit experimental, and I’ll have to judge it as I go along,” he says. “But that’s my intention. I didn’t intend to write a memoir. I wrote a song called On Love for our City of Love album, which vaguely mentioned my grandparents. It was a trigger for me. I wanted to write more about them, and then I started to think about other people I wanted to write about. So I did.” Unauthorised copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting prohibited. Edel Germany GmbH, Neumühlen 17, 22763 Hamburg. It’s just my perennial thing: it doesn’t matter what phase of life you’re at, you’re travelling through it. You’re trying to get somewhere, and possibly you’ll never arrive.” Physically, emotionally and spiritually, you’re moving. There’s a little place on Mull where I used to take kids when I was a youth worker, and we used to do a wee sing-song.They go there because it’s a gathering place, and Glasgow is very similar. Bands think, ‘it happened here for them, it could happen for us’. So it’s kind of self-generating in some ways.”

There are sepia-toned recollections of the roles his grandparents played in his young life, and insights into the stifling nature of an upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren. Passages about the dawning realisation of his father’s mental health struggles and, much later, well-intentioned events going wrong in the days preceding his mother’s death in 2020, are especially moving. His recollections of his days as a youth worker in Dundee, and as a young teacher in Glasgow, suggest that had the nascent songwriting flame not taken hold, working with young people would have delivered their own, harder-won, joys. An anecdote about how Ross bought his kids a pony after a co-writing credit on James Blunt’s song High from his mega-selling debut album is among the few divulgences of showbiz excess, a tale told more fondly than the one about the New York record execs and the offers of cocaine and prostitutes. Lorraine was upstairs, self-isolating with Covid – I’d recently got over my bout – and it just started to take shape in this little studio here. It wasn’t really intentional, I just got this creative spur, and ended up writing and recording it at the same time, which is quite unusual for me.”

For Sale on Discogs

Recently, the Daily Record reported on a poll of the all-time top 100 Scottish music artists, in which Deacon Blue finished a highly respectable fourth position (behind Primal Scream, Simple Minds and Travis). That’s not too shabby, is it? “It depends who they asked, I suppose,” demurs Ross. “On another day, we’d be 94th.”