THE REAL GONE KID... AT 52
She’s now a middle-aged mum of 3... but singer Lorraine McIntosh will always be ‘that lassie from Deacon Blue’
IN the late 1980s she was the unmistakable face and voice of Scottish pop music. Lorraine McIntosh shot to fame as the girl with the raven curls and piercing blue eyes who sang on Deacon Blue’s biggest hits. Now, almost three decades and six million albums later, the band’s only female member has opened up about the chance meeting that resulted in her big break – and revealed she was the original Real Gone Kid.
In an exclusive interview with the Scottish Mail on Sunday following the release of Deacon Blue’s eighth studio album, Believers, Miss McIntosh talks fondly of her time in the iconic Glasgow group, fronted by husband Ricky Ross.
She has dined with Bono, been invited to Bruce Springsteen’s home, posed for selfies with Biffy Clyro and played at the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in 2014.
However, the 52-year-old, who overcame a tragic, poverty-stricken childhood in Ayrshire, says she will never take her success for granted. She also gives a rare insight into her home life and says she and Ross remain ‘as in love and happy today as we were when we first met’, while she was busking in Glasgow city centre.
Deacon Blue topped the UK charts with the albums When The World Knows Your Name and Our Town and achieved 12 Top 40 singles such as I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, Twist And Shout, Dignity and, of course, Real Gone Kid.
Believers recently became their highest-charting album in 22 years, peaking at No 13 last week. And Miss McIntosh says the band have no intention of stopping. She said: ‘I’m 52 now and I remember thinking 13 years ago, “Is there some kind of rule that when you reach 40 you can’t be in a band any more?”
‘But you get over that hump in the road and if you’re still producing music people want to hear, why would you stop? This is what we do. I’ll always be the lassie from Deacon Blue.’
For 21 years, the Ross family – Ricky, Lorraine and their children Emer, Georgia and Seamus – have lived in the same five-bedroom Victorian villa on Glasgow’s South Side – another world economically from the council house in Cumnock, Ayrshire, where Miss McIntosh and her two brothers were raised by their father David and mother Sarah, both factory workers.
When she was only 11, Miss McIntosh’s already difficult living conditions were compounded when her mother died.
She said: ‘We were just a normal working-class family. One thing can send a family into a spiral of poverty and things going terribly wrong. That happened when I was 11 and my mum died of leukaemia.
‘We were left with a father who didn’t earn much money. He had to work shifts, then got made redundant. We were desperately poor, there were days of no electricity and very little food, no school uniform or school trips. My father didn’t cope – he drank too much. It was awful. But we came through it.
‘I look back and realise how fortunate I am. I’ve been happy and relatively wealthy longer than I was unhappy and poor, but it’s something that never leaves you.’
Sadly, Miss McIntosh lost her father shortly after Deacon Blue hit the big time. She said: ‘The last time I saw I’m glad my dad saw our success before he died – he was thrilled my dad was the first time we played Glasgow SECC, which was a big deal in 1989. He’d never experienced anything like it and was so thrilled with that and seeing us on TV. I’m so glad he got to see that before he died.’
However, she is unsure what would have become of her had Ricky Ross not walked down Glasgow’s Buchanan Street after rehearsing with an early incarnation of Deacon Blue to find her busking one of his songs – a coincidence that led to him asking her to join the band. She admitted: ‘I had begun a BEd in Teaching. But I was a pretty chaotic person and I don’t know if I’d have been focused enough to get through the degree.’
When she joined Deacon Blue, Ricky Ross was married with a daughter. However, by the chart-topping second album, the pair were an item. They wed on May 12, 1990 –
by which time the charismatic lead singer had become a heart-throb and Miss McIntosh had her admirers too. She laughed: ‘In the old days, we both found that quite entertaining. It was flattering and fun, except we had a woman who stalked us for over a year and that was scary.
‘We don’t get much fan-worship these days. Deacon Blue has always been about the music but if people lust after Ricky, well, good luck.’
While Ross may have a legion of female fans, it is his wife who is his greatest artistic inspiration.
‘He’s written lots of songs for me. Real Gone Kid was written with me in mind,’ Miss McIntosh said. The pair also co-write, but Miss McIntosh assumes the role of ‘editor’ to her husband.
She added: ‘It’s quite difficult because I’ll know he’s been working hard on a particular song and he’ll say “What do you think?” He knows it’s a hit with me if I have tears in my eyes. Sometimes I go, “Hmmm, it’s okay, I don’t love it”, and he’s always so disappointed if I say that. It’s hard but I have to be honest.’
Miss McIntosh has become a bona fide celebrity in her own right but most of her friends are outside the showbiz circle.
One famous face she enjoyed spending time with was U2 frontman Bono. She said: ‘We’ve met Bono a few times. He took us out for lunch. He’s a nice, sincere, very intense person. Not frivolous and into small talk. When he says something it’s imbued with all sorts of meaning. We meet The Proclaimers every so often and we’ve met Amy Macdonald. They’re great but we’ve always avoided hanging out with other famous people.
‘We met Bruce Springsteen at a party in The Hamptons, New York, in 1989, and had a lovely time with him.
‘We were invited to visit him at his house and we said no. I have just read his autobiography in which he says the same about people he held in high esteem – he didn’t want to break that wall between them, as it meant too much to him. That’s how we felt. We met him, we had a great time with him but we didn’t want to outstay our welcome.’
The current members of Deacon Blue all have secondary careers. Drummer Dougie Vipond hosts BBC Scotland’s Sportscene, keyboard player James Prime is a music lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland, Ricky Ross writes songs for other artists and is a radio presenter, and Miss McIntosh is an actress, whose credits include the Ken Loach film My Name Is Joe and TV’s Taggart and River City.
She also revealed: ‘I’ve watched Coronation Street since I was five on my mum’s knee. I’d love to be in it. I’d also love to do Strictly Come Dancing.
‘The likes of Big Brother appal me but Strictly is so entertaining and it would be great to learn to dance like that. My absolute dream would be to do a Shakespeare play.’
Above all, she enjoys being a wife to Ricky and mother to Emer, who’s 24 and enjoying a year in Australia, Georgia, who’s 21 and has just started a Master’s degree at Oxford, and Seamus who’s 15 and at school ‘and the one most likely to follow in our footsteps’.
She said: ‘I think Ricky and I are very lucky. We still love each other. I’ve seen people who have been together ages then fallen out of love and, fortunately, that hasn’t happened to us. We’re as happy today as we were when we first met.
‘Our children are the happiest and best thing we’ve ever done. They continue to bring us huge amounts of joy and they’re our best friends.’
So what does the future hold for Deacon Blue? Miss McIntosh said: ‘We don’t look far into the future. We just take it one year at a time. If touring ever stops being fun, or people stop coming to see us, we’ll know when it’s time to go.
‘I’d like Deacon Blue to be remembered the way they’re thought of now – as a band that brought joy to a lot of people.’