Here’s the thing. There’s so much music floating around my head I need to offload
it somewhere. Roll on Tuesday night. Another Country has a new night and once more we get some well worn jeans and a plaid shirt round the Radio Scotland studios.

My producer, Richard Murdoch, and myself have been sending excited e mails to each other and doing some solid preparation for an extended eight week run of programmes. Thanks to a number of great artists coming into Glasgow over the last few weeks we have a great list of guests but hey, you can read all that on the main page. What have you been up to Ricky my old friend I hear you ask?

In October I was actually on my way to Nashville but the day until I suffered my first ‘rock n roll bizarre gardening accident’ involving a falling vase, a large head (mine) and a misplaced hand. The net result was a stookie and 5 weeks of enforced down-time. As soon as I got the plaster off I was eased into a tour bus with the other Blue Deacons and headed out across the UK as guest of Simple Minds. This was great fun. I have also spent some time in Sweden song-writing with the great Tobias Froberg.

However I’d like to thank Dawn Munro and Victoria McArthur from BBC Scotland for their radio-therapy. Just when I thought I was no use to man nor beast and was finding it difficult to complete the simplest of tasks, they caught me up in a documentary about the late Joan Eardley. It was a real joy to listen to stories of people who knew Joan and spend a lot of time just looking at paintings.

Just to get things started for the dialogue we will no doubt have during the shows, here’s a list of recent albums and artist I’ve been enjoying: If you don’t know them I’m sure you’ll become familiar with some of them over the next few weeks. Feel free to weigh in with some of your own recent faves.

J Tillman – Vacilando Territory Blues, Bon Iver – Blood Bank, The Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion, Wood Pigeon – Songbook,

I watched Once and have to say the songs on the soundtrack by Glem Hansard and Marketa Irglova are beautiful. The Devon Sproule and Iron and Wine recent albums still give me plenty of joy. There’s lots of good music from this side of the water too but that’s another show!

oh…. and George Jones. He just gets better with every listen.

More soon

We opened the show last night with the song that’s been chosen to lead off Liverpool 8 – Liverpool as European City of Culture 2008. On paper the song doesn’t look promising. The artist is the one and only Ringo Starr and despite past achievements he’s hardly been someone synonymous with creativity over the last few weeks. However it is a wholly appropriate choice given the great honesty and heart warming nostalgia within the song. The song is a brief synopsis of Ringo’s travels and ends with the axiomatic chorus, “Liverpool I love you..” I think Liverpool still loves Ringo.

There is something about the Beatles which gets into the soul of any sixties child. Most of the time we have a detached over view of modern music. Apart from the early days of rock n roll we have watched every new phase come and go. In my case this has generally brought immense pleasure. Joy to see new things coming and relief to see something else coming in from the left to sweep it away. Now there’s a contented happiness that the best of all new things are remembered and every night this week we celebrate all of that. However this distanced overview is put aside when the subject of The Beatles comes along. Suddenly the world-weary cynic becomes a bright-eyed cub scout willing to follow any daft old trail through the forest. I’m like that. Ringo only needs to sing the lines “John, Paul, Me and my friend John” and I’m back in the attic staring at my big sister’s posters from the Jackie. They didn’t have surnames then and they don’t need them now. I always like to think the Beatles were a cut above every other band but I can’t honestly tell you if it’s true or not because I’m far too biased to ever make a reasonable assessment. They, in their turn, have been too big a presence in my life to ever fade into some kind of perspective.

After we played the Ringo song last night I found myself announcing Ringo’s gig in Liverpool on January 12th and saying I’d like to be there…….me, the man who wouldn’t cross the park to see David Bowie if Hell’s Kitchen was on the telly……go to Liverpool to see a gig…by a drummer? You see it’s that old perspective thing. It’s the Beatles and I have none.

I’m back in the BBC tonight to sit in for Iain Anderson for a week. I’m very much looking forward to it though I’m always aware that sitting in for someone means the audience at home will be impatient to hear the main man as soon as possible. I should think so too. Iain is a great communicator and the success of his show is down to his ability to make you feel as if he’s only talking to you. Looking forward too to spending sometime on board the Hesperus (is that how they spell it?) with Much Ado and The Professor.

I’m just back from the Deacon Blue tour which wound up on Sunday at Hammersmith Apollo in London. It was, as always, an exhausting but increasingly exhilarating few weeks. Thank you for coming if you came. If you didn’t – fear not there’s going to be a film of the show, and if you can’t wait for that you can find out via our website how to buy official bootlegs of four of the gigs.

Interesting too to read people’s comments. Often the atmosphere is much debated. I find this interesting as we often don’t pick up the nuances of particular venues or groups of people. What I would say is this: I love shows where people are wanting to be part of the show, but I love it as much when audiences listen to what you have to play. There’s no sight worse for me than looking out into a theatre to see people’s tails as they head for the bar knowing you’re about to do a song they don’t know. Personally, I love going to shows where I hear things I don’t know or know less well – it makes me go home and love them again or discover them for myself. So to play in Manchester – in a great rock n roll venue – but also to people who love to listen is a joy. Having a ‘mad’ audience in front of you can be a mixed blessing, and exciting though it is, it isn’t always what I’d prefer.

Whichever audience you were please believe me when I tell you you were always great. Whatever night you came I honestly know we gave you the best we had to give on the night. Each show was very special and I can’t really pick out one
more than any other – though we all felt Dublin was a real high as it reminded us of the old days at The Barrowlands. It’s a long time since we’ve played properly there – last year was a botched job as the venue had moved – so to go and give it our best shot was a real pleasure.

So tonight I’ll be back to playing songs and talking with songwriters about songwriting. What could be better than that? If you’re in your car or near a computer or a radio between 10.30 and 12.30 tonight (St Andrews Day/30th November) join me. I’d love to hear from you if you want to mail, text or blog!

This is my last week on the Late Lounge. Have I enjoyed it? Yes, hugely.

Here’s the funny thing: The thing I’ve enjoyed most is the feeling that gathered round the glowing valves of any given evening is a community of people listening into the Late Lounge. Hearing your stories and some of you brilliant jokes (albeit sometimes unbroadcastable!) has made it very worthwhile. Knowing that people like hearing things they haven’t heard in a while or are enjoying new things is always very satisfying.

So thank you to you folk for making the show an interactive delight…for me if not for the listeners! There have been some great people who helped me through. Honourable mentions to Shona, Muslim, Anne, Mark and Richard. Big thanks to Tony Currie for his late night bonhomie and a huge thank you to Barbara Wallace and Sushil Dade for all their producing skills. I do want to give a particular mention to the woman who really created the Live Lounge. Roslyn McCuish I salute you, my dear. Go off and have yourself a lovely holiday.

After I return from my holiday I am going to enjoy getting my late evenings back. The one great thing you can say about the Scottish summer is that it may not be the warmest but the evenings do go on a little longer. When/if the weather does turn a little warmer we will celebrate it by hanging around in our garden or someone else’s until nearly midnight when the sky will sometimes still look like it has some light left in it. Wonderful. On these nights I’ll set off round the park and give my dog the late night walk she has been denied for these six weeks. I’ll do some reading which has also disappeared from my day and I’ll switch on the digital radio I got for my Christmas and listen to some great singer songwriters on Iain Anderson. You never know, I met get to hear some of my favourite records and some that I’ve long forgotten.

I know one or two of you have asked if I’d carry on blogging when the Late Lounge ends. I’m afraid I won’t. I’m off on holiday for one thing and for another I have completely run out of things to blog about! However I’ll do a deal: if I ever lounge around at BBC Scotland again I’ll open up the blog and we can all do it again. I have so many things to complete before I get away on my holidays that this is my last entry. I hope you have a great summer. I’ll be doing a weekly show called Ricky’s American Tunes in the early autumn and be back on the road in November. I hope I can meet some of you then. Thanks for taking part. All the very best

Ricky x

T, a note that follows soh…

Apart from all the festival ephemera there was some fine music in the park. The best moments for me were in the Pet Sounds arena. It’s actually a big tent which means the sound is very good and there is considerably less mud underfoot.

I saw Albert Hammond Jr. This was a real joy. Using exactly the same line up as his other band but moving to centre stage he played a fabulous hour on Saturday afternoon. It was one of the best noises I have heard for ages. Three great guitarists all making electric guitars sound like they should sound; very loud and very exciting. I didn’t know Albert’s solo album but that mattered little. I enjoyed his set immensely and now will go off and buy the record.

We needed a wee seat after that but we got ourselves in front of the stage for The Arcade Fire. I love this group. I loved the first album and bought the new one as soon as it came out and have been playing it all year. Boy, was I disappointed in their show. Firstly it sounded like listening to an Arcade Fire album being played in the next room while you stick your head under the surface of your bath water. I suppose if it had sounded ok I could ignore the “look at me now” antics and the endless swapping of instruments. But it didn’t; and I couldn’t.

We headed back to the big tent to see Rufus Wainwright who was singing beautifully. We didn’t get to see all of his show but what we saw sounded very good. Then came Brian.

To see Brian Wilson and his band play at T in the park is a real joy. It was quite moving to hear how much these kids in their teens and twenties loved a guy who is a hero of their parents. They all knew the songs and they loved them all. In all honesty it didn’t sound as good as it might have, but that was only because the crowd sang along to everything – bless them. Just as you thought he’s sung everything there was to sing he would go into another one…oh I forgot about Help Me Rhonda, how could I have not remembered Do It Again. In fact, Brian, do it again.

This is an old joke on people from Edinburgh. The idea being that Scotland is a largely welcoming place but in the snootier parts of the capital they will welcome you on the doorstep with the above greeting. Of course we should never let the truth get in the way of a good gag and Edinburgh is a actually nothing like that. Sometimes Glaswegians get mildly offended if I suggest some of the best audiences we’ve had have been in Auld Reekie – but it’s true.

There are audiences and then there are Liverpool Audiences…then I realised too at the weekend there’s another level again. The T in the Park audience…but more on them later.

Firstly Liverpool. Deacon Blue sneaked me out of the Lounge to do a show at the Liverpool Pops. Wow. It was really a great night and the warmth of the Mersey welcome was wonderful. One thing I love (amongst so many) about being in that city is the way they know they are the best. I was exhausted at the end of the night when I was asked to do an interview with a local film crew about their year of culture. “Ricky…tell us what you love about Liverpool? Tell us three words which some up how brilliant it is here. Can you tell us your favourite Liverpool album…apart from the Beatles?”

I wanted to tell them I can hardly stand up, but they smiled so engagingly I didn’t dare refuse. The answer should have been Stephen Fretwell’s – Magpie, but I forgot in the heat of the camera’s gaze. Anyway to those of you gave us such a welcome, thank you so much.

From Liverpool to T in the Park. I promised my daughter I’d deliver her. So my brother-in-law and I took our respective daughters up for the day. As I’ve made perfectly clear in this blog, this Rock fest type even is really not my bag. I was dreading it and making quite reasonable excuses on Saturday morning. Nothing could get me out of it. Here’s a thing: I had a great time. Loved it.

I’ll tell you more about who I saw tomorrow but let me say this for now. It’s a really great event. There are thousands of very young people, lots of them have clearly enjoyed a wee drink but there is a great spirit there. People go out of their way to have a good time and really enjoy themselves. They were so friendly to John and me. (we looked like a couple of dodgy blokes trying to hang with the kids so all credit to the liberal polis for not arresting us). One or two indie kids even asked to have their photie taken with me. Don’t ask me why. We really had a great time so thank you folks. You tolerated two old geezers with style and grace. I hope you have another fab day today and come back home safely.

Someone I knew once remarked that they couldn’t go to the US on holiday. ‘Why?’ we asked.
They then went to cast the US as people as all to some variations of Ronald Reagan. Surely, we countered, they could imagine us all extensions of the personality of Mrs Thatcher? I think the point was made.

Let’s get this very clear. I love the USA. I love the landscape, I love the music and I love people. I don’t begin to like the policies of their government – but then I rarely agree with my own…that’s usually the way things are!

There are many reasons why I like the America but the main gist of it is this. I grew up enthralled by music. I loved the names. Raleigh, Memphis, Birmingham, Houston…..all the way to the promised land. I learned the geography from Chuck Berry. More than that I didn’t know. One day in 1975 or 76 an important political awakening happened to me. I had a geography teacher who had grown up in Poland. A very bright man he clearly knew a thing or two about life under Soviet rule and contrasted that with his experience of Scotland. At the time the US political system was hanging its head in shame. Ford was the president who had been sworn in to help the country recover from the shame of Nixon and Watergate. The geography man loved it all. What did he like most? He loved the fact that we all knew, that there was endless debate in public and that ultimately there was system (a constitutional system at that) of sorting it out. I often tell this story to people who tell me this country doesn’t need a written constitution – it’s good to know people like Gordon Brown are finally listening! He also knew what many of the left in this country liked to pretend they didn’t: that similar corruption could never have been exposed in the East.

The second thing that happened to me was going to America. I had to wait until I was thirty – but boy did I appreciate it more. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Chicago, Washington were the only places I really got to know at all but they have all been amazing places to visit. The biggest impression that has been made upon me however has been the people I’ve met on these journeys. They have always been so generous, kind and welcoming and, call me very old fashioned here but it’s true, always so polite.

I say all this because I’m looking forward to seeing some of my oldest friends there in a couple of weeks time when we go on holiday. People we first met on a beach in Santa Cruz will all gather for a wee soiree with our old best pals and we’ll enjoy catching up over a glass or two of California wine. Roll on the holidays. In the meantime, to all of you stateside having a holiday, Happy 4th of July.

It’s school holidays here. You could probably guess that if you didn’t already know. Yesterday enough rain fell in Glasgow to test the faith of Noah. This morning I was suggesting to my little boy that it might be a good idea to go over to the tennis club and hit a ball or two when I looked out the window. I couldn’t get a really good view of the window because the gutter above our kitchen was overflowing and a torrent the size of Victoria Falls was cascading down the building.

It was probably always thus. Every year we get a couple of lovely summer days and ask ourselves why we go abroad It’s so beautiful here, we say, best country in the world. Then it rains for a week. I’m not very good with wet weather activities and the net result is you end up with too many people in one house.

I have one wet weatherish activity which I suggested to my little boy. A few months ago we succumbed to pressure and bought him a games thingy. I say this because I’m still not sure what you call these things. His is a Nintendo (I think.) He’s been in here 5 times to get the Cars game going. He seems to be deluded enough to imagine I might know how that kind of thing works. Listen pal your dad may be a good for nothing rock dude but he drew the limits at playing computer games. If I got bored on the bus I gambled or slept.

The reason he got the thingy was simple. We were all round at pals one night and he was intent on playing their boys’ games. We were acting responsibly. Eating, drinking and ignoring all our offspring big time. It was only when he came through to ask us how he could beat up a cop or shoot some hooker that we figured we needed to divert him on to other games. He was only 5. I think it was AA Milne who said the cop killing starts at 6.

I went to a games shop to buy the thingy. The bloke behind me looked at me like the cool dudes used to look at Bruces records in Dundee. With disdain. I came clean. It was actually quite refreshing to admit I knew nothing about their infernal thingys and the thingys that went inside them. I could tell the cool guy saw me as an interesting social experiment, a species, the likes of which, had not crossed his threshold in many a long year. He took me through it, showed me how to put a small thingy in a big thingy and outlined how to avoid the more violent/adult/pure-mad-mental games. This wasn’t hard to do. It seems to mean ignoring 95% of his stock and concentrating on games where you remember it was first a U film. The thing is, now that it’s raining and the young chap’s got nothing to do he seems to expect me to remember what the bloke in the shop taught me and he must surely know by now the rule of all dads: they know nothing.

You don’t need me to tell you what kind of weekend it’s been in Glasgow. For the reasons we most dreaded we’ve become the centre of attention from around the world. In all the important questions asked there has been the glaring absence of two key questions: 1. Where were the highly trained bobbies that usually scare you to hell with their sub machine guns? 2. How come a couple of loonies in a jeep can roll up to the front door when the rest of us aren’t even allowed on the road that leads to the entrance?

I guess the reason no one fancies the questions is because the answer is simple. The rapid response polis weren’t there and anyone can drive up to the front door as longs as they drive unsafely and it looks like their vehicle will combust; told ladies in Morris travellers should be kept at a safe distance.

Sorry to sound cynical but for those of us who have the misfortune to use British airports with regularity it’s hard not to be. My firm belief is the public are far too long suffering in this country. There is nothing worse that queuing for hours only to discover a wide variation in the rules when you go through security. We were going through Glasgow recently when one of my esteemed musical colleagues asked politely, ‘Do we take our shoes off?’ As we watched the masses all go ahead of us without taking theirs off the security guy shook himself awake and quickly said, ‘Yes, shoes off.’ You can only imagine the look I gave to Jim.

The thrust of all this is pretty simple. It’s a real pain in the arse doing security checks. But no one minds because they feel, ultimately, they are helping keep everyone alive. What’s harder to stomach is meaningless drivel that’s put there to look efficient when everyone knows it’s a complete waste of time. Then to crown it all it ends up with passengers at the airport trying to land knock out punches on terrorists.

This is not saying the policemen at the airport were hopeless. They were quite the opposite – incredibly heroic. One of the most shocking photographs is of an off duty policeman hosing down a terrorist while clearly he must have been aware his only life was in real danger. God bless you sir.

However the reality which those in authority never give us the credit for realising is the glaring reality that if someone wants to blow something up there’s not too much any of can do. On Saturday the only bit of good news was the the terorists plan was only marginally more useless than BAA’s security strategy. Cold comfort.

I was having a chat with someone last night. He then began to wax lyrical about an album by a band that I’d never heard of whose music heralded the era of The Band. He loved it so much he said it had never been off the turntable. We shared a moment. I know how that feels. Then as I went off he said, “The old ones are always the best.”

I was annoyed at myself. I should have said, No. But instead I quietly nodded and smiled. It’s not true. It’s never been less true. On the way up the stair I thought about this and considered ten things I might have said. The French have a name for this feeling – L’Esprit d’Escalier. The quick one liner you wished you’d said to some smart Alec who has just given you a cheap put down. The smart quip you never thought of as you squirmed awkwardly at some second rate joke by someone you don’t even respect. Literally, the wit of the staircase. Aah regret.

But the old ones are not the best. I could easily play lots of new music and only new music. There are great new things being constantly created all the time and many of them quickly become modern classics – that’s the magic of pop music. Last night on the way home from the show I played Ray LaMontagne’s new album for the first time. It’s stunning. I’m bringing it in next week and you’ll get a chance to hear it. Believe me – the new ones are every bit as good as the best.