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

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.