Deacon Blue To Celebrate 40 Years On Tour In Australia…

Scottish pop-rock icons DEACON BLUE are returning to Australia in January and February 2026, marking their first shows down under since 2023. The tour will celebrate the band’s fortieth anniversary and the release of their latest studio album, The Great Western Road.

Known for their emotionally charged performances and enduring hits like Dignity, Real Gone Kid, I’ll Never Fall In Love Again and Fergus Sings the Blues, Deacon Blue will deliver a dynamic live experience that spans their full career, from the soulful grit of their acclaimed ground breaking debut album Raintown to the energy of The Great Western Road. Their new album reflects the band’s journey with honesty, warmth, and a renewed sense of adventure.

Australian fans can expect a specially curated setlist, including all the hits you know and love, blending arena-sized classic anthems, tracks off their latest album, mixed with intimate surprises. With a reputation for crafting unforgettable live moments, Deacon Blue’s 2026 tour promises to be a celebration of fan connection, nostalgia, and musical brilliance. Lorraine McIntosh (backing and lead vocals, percussion) talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Another Australian tour, you’ve got to be excited about coming back for your second visit within two years?
It’ll be just a couple of months over two years, and it’ll be our third visit in five years. After a thirty‑year drought, we’re definitely making up for lost time, and we can’t wait. It’s a fantastic country, and it feels exciting to come back and, in a way, reclaim something. We first came in 1989 and then never made it back for decades, so it’s great to return feeling like we have something to prove, playing bigger venues and bringing more people along. We’re really excited.

Are there a lot of highlights and memories from the last tour?
Every tour has great memories, but it’s always especially exciting for us to land on the other side of the world and leave winter behind. You walk off the plane into a completely different world. In Perth, we even get three days at the beach to recover before the gig, so we’re definitely looking forward to it.

Forty years for Deacon Blue is an incredible milestone, how do you wrap your head around that milestone?
For me, it’s probably about thirty eight years, not that it makes it feel much shorter. Time just creeps up on you, and before you know it, you’ve been going a decade. The band were together for eight years, then took a break we thought was forever, which ended up lasting five years. At the time, those eight years felt like a full career, a whole lifetime in a band. Now, looking back, it seems like nothing at all. So to still be here, still making music, really does feel like a privilege.

Are you enjoying it more now than you ever have before?
I think when you’re young, you’re a bit arrogant and you start to take things for granted. You don’t really believe things end, or that nothing lasts forever. You feel like it’s up to you when it ends, but in many ways, it isn’t. Now, when we go out, there aren’t many people our age having the kind of fun and experiences we’re having, especially with such a great group of people who feel like family. We really couldn’t ask for more.

When people start focusing on a milestone and things like that, do you start getting nostalgic?
We don’t really get swept up in nostalgia. We appreciate it and respect it, but we’re always looking ahead. Even the last album, The Great Western Road, was about being this age and not knowing what’s ahead for any of us. It was tragic that one of our band members (James Prime), who had worked with us for forty years and made the album with us last year, had no idea it would be his last piece of work. So yes, we’re nostalgic, but even that album, despite looking back, was very much about looking forward. Nobody wants to become a tribute act to themselves. You have to keep being creative, and that was something Ricky was very clear about when we came back and made The Hipsters ten or twelve years ago. If we were going to do this, we were going to make new music, we weren’t going to be a tribute act.

Did the ideas for The Great Western Road come easily?
Ricky writes constantly, from one album to the next, always creating without really knowing where the songs will end up or what they’ll be for. But I think, in the back of his mind, he’s always wondering whether it could become another album. He and Gregor, our guitarist, worked closely together, and the songs started to take shape until it became clear that, yes, this was going to be the next record. We went down to Rockfield, the famous residential studio in Wales where everyone seems to have recorded, and worked with an engineer we hadn’t seen since Raintown. The last time I saw him, I was twenty three or twenty four and he was twenty five, this time he was sixty five and I was sixty one. You can’t help but think, how did that happen? But the whole experience was magical. It really was special.

Was it a fairly easy process, or did it really challenge the band?
Ricky had all the songs written and demoed before we went in, and Gregor as well, I should say. Once we were in the studio, things naturally changed as everyone added their own touches, but it was a really enjoyable process. The only challenging song was Late 88, which became a bit of a radio hit and the first single. I never liked the original chorus, and Ricky kept saying, “No, no, it’ll be great when we do this or that,” and we kept piling more and more onto it. With two days left in the studio, we listened back to the whole album on the Thursday night, we were leaving Saturday morning, and Ricky finally said, “No, that chorus isn’t right. I’m going tonight to write a new one. Tomorrow at 8:30am we’re recording it again.” So everyone went away that night thinking they had ideas for the chorus, but Ricky was determined, and he wrote a brilliant new one that completely changed the song. And Jim, our keyboard player, who we sadly lost in June, said, “Right, now that you’ve got this chorus, I’m going to work on the string part.” He went away and composed the beautiful string section that leads into the song.

How exciting was it seeing it all come together like that?
The thing is, we finished the album on that Friday, and Radio 2 had already heard the demos and were keen to hear the new single. They listened to it, and two weeks later it was mixed and played on Zoe Ball’s morning show. It all happened really quickly, which was exciting, you don’t want things hanging around for months. It was just a great feeling.

How did you feel listening to the final version start to finish for the first time?
We didn’t use headphones, we just sat in the control room and played it through the big studio speakers, the ones the engineer avoids because he’s worried they’ll damage his hearing. We don’t mind, because ours is probably already damaged. So we put it on the big speakers, listened from start to finish, and we were very, very proud of it.

How do you fit all these songs in the set list now?
Ricky has a real gift for working new songs into a set, even though most people think they don’t want to hear them, I mean, I’m the same. When I see my favourite artists, I want the songs I grew up with, the ones I went to the pub with or fell in love to. But if new songs are done the right way, they fit. On the last tour, which was probably one of the best we’ve ever done, we played ten new songs. We won’t do that in Australia, though, because people there haven’t had us coming through every couple of years for the last thirty years. We feel a duty to cover the whole catalogue, so there’ll be plenty of older songs, but some new ones as well.

There’s plenty of love for Deacon Blue in Australia, it must be exciting stepping up the size of venues this time?
It’s just mind-blowing, really, when you go to a foreign country, and people are so excited that you’re coming, and they were fantastic audiences the last time. It just makes it so special, and I mean. We’re just, honestly, we’re so vibed up about coming, and going to New Zealand, which we love as well, so we, just, you know, kind of get to get through Christmas and New Year, but we’ll be there soon.

Seeing that generational shift as well in the fan base must be humbling as well?
I think if you hang around long enough, your fans’ kids grow up, and they’ve been indoctrinated into your music, so they start coming too. It’s always interesting when we travel, Italy, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, we’ve noticed that the audience our age is still there, but there’s also a new generation coming through, and sometimes even another generation after that. If you stick around long enough, you’re bound to bring some young people into it and they like to think they’ve discovered it themselves. Sometimes it’s not through their parents at all, they’ve just stumbled across something on YouTube or Spotify and that’s a really rewarding experience.

The legacy that Real Gone Kid’s built itself, does that continually blow you away?
It’s such a gift to be able to start Real Gone Kid, it’s always fantastic, even on the last tour. Dignity has its own huge place everywhere we play, but in terms of sheer joy and energy, Real Gone Kid is a special song, especially for people who are really into the band.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Deacon Blue on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…