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

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