Raintown by Deacon Blue

Raintown, the 1987 debut from Glasgow's Deacon Blue, came out on Columbia with Jon Kelly producing, and it's a record soaked right through with its home city. Ricky Ross wrote most of it and sings it with a preacher's ache, while James Prime's piano and keyboards lend the songs a polished, soulful sheen. It plays almost like a concept album about scraping by in the inner city, and the city is plainly Glasgow: Oscar Marzaroli's cover photo shows a wet day over the West End with the Finnieston Crane looming, and the back cover catches the M8 slicing through the centre in a long exposure.

It was a slow-burning success, peaking at No. 14 in the UK but hanging around the chart for a year and a half and selling around a million copies. Plenty of people still rate it the band's finest work.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.