Last week, James Prime the keyboardist of Deacon Blue, died.

He was integral to the band’s sound, adding depth and colour with his playing and there is that wonderful piano instrumental break in the middle eight of the band’s anthem Dignity.

This is Raintown, the title track from the band’s first album.

Deacon Blue: Raintown

Jim was co-writer of this one, a song dear to my heart. (“This is my country. These are my reasons.”)

Deacon Blue: Fergus Sings the Blues

James (Jim) Jim PrimePrime: 3/11/1960 – 19/6/2025. So it goes.

I got home late last night just after hearing of the death of Burt Bacharach on the radio in the car.

Burt Bacharach’s roster of hit songs is just superb. Far too many to list here.

I noted his collaboration with lyricist Hal David in 2012.

It is fair to say that the 1960s would not have been the 1960s without their songs to help soundtrack the decade. Most of their songs have become standards.

In memoriam I present perhaps one of their lesser known compositions. Like many of theirs it was a hit in the US for Dionne Warwick (albeit with a slightly altered title) but in the UK it became Adam Faith’s last top twenty success.

Adam Faith: Message to Martha

Scottish band Deacon Blue covered it – along with three other Bacharach/David compositions – in 1990.

Deacon Blue: Message to Michael

Burt Freeman Bacharach: 12/5/1928 – 8/2/2023. So it goes.

In 1988, this became Deacon Blue’s first top ten hit, a status that what is probably the band’s best known song, Dignity, never achieved.

In the next few years Real Gone Kid was played so often on Radio Forth (which I used to listen to in the mornings to get traffic reports and such when I was working) that I joked with the good lady they must have shares in each other. “It’s share time,” I’d say whenever I heard its first bars.

And yes I know I should mislike it for the ungrammatical use of ‘took’ for ‘taken,’ and the similarly grating rhyming of ‘kid’ with ‘did.’ Writer and singer Ricky Ross was once a teacher so ought to have known better. Mind you he did, as at the coda fellow singer Lorraine McIntosh sings “do what I should have done.”

Deacon Blue: Real Gone Kid

A very unBritish sounding song this. It’s more like US soul music.

This seems to be a live TV performance with an extra section in the middle that wasn’t on the album version. (Pity about the USian spellings on the subscript lyrics.)

Deacon Blue: When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring)

This could be considered a 1980s answer in reverse to Carpet Man (see last week.)

I remember seeing the band perform this on the daily lunchtime BBC Scotland TV programme broadcast from the Glasgow Garden Festival.

Looking at this video messrs Ricky Ross and Dougie Vipond seem impossibly young. (I have taught Vipond’s eldest son.) And what was Lorraine McIntosh thinking about with that outfit?

Deacon Blue: Chocolate Girl

Dignity was in effect Deacon Blue’s manifesto.

One of the things I particularly liked about the song was its Scottishness, (“a Sunblest bag,” “on my holidays,” “I saved my money.”)

Deacon Blue: Dignity

This is a variorum edition where the video may just possibly be sending up Duran Duran.

There is a more restrained version accompanied only by piano here.