WHEN Deacon Blue started seriously denting the charts in the late eighties with hits like Dignity, I don’t know why, but I was doing something else (probably burning my Marillion LPs).

It wasn’t until many years later when my then fiancée started playing their greatest hits collection, Our Town, that I realised that the mix of streetwise Scottish lyricism, sound politics and seductively slick production was alarmingly appealing. I told no-one, not even my therapist. By then it was virtually the millennium, for heaven’s sake, and such desires were probably punishable by some kind of amputation.

So rolling up at the New Theatre on October 17, for the latest stop on their 25th anniversary tour was like attending a reunion with friends I’d never met. I may have had my wife as fan collateral, but I was a gate-crasher. What’s more, I sensed the hoards of fellow 40-plussers in their turned-up black Levi’s and rollnecks knew it and smelled my fear.

And, dear reader, when I saw a whole page of the high gloss, oversize programme had been dedicated to advertising lead singer Ricky Ross’s Invitational Golf Day and Dinner (£600 per team of four, since you’re asking), I was primed to take the revenge of the outsider. ‘From bittersweet balladeers to bourgeois behemoths,’ my internal reviewer began to jeer, while silently vowing to take my clubs to the tip in the morning.

But then Ricky sidled on, resplendent in black Levi’s, and applied that extraordinary crystal-gruff voice to the opening bars of a lovely song I’d never even heard (Here I am in London Town) and I thought I’d better give them a second chance. By the time Lorraine McIntosh bounced on to the stage (from whatever cryogenic chamber had been preserving her pixie energy these two score years) and unleashed those angelic, folky tones - I had given in. Three minutes of noble resistance.

I’m sorry, young people, but it’s just a delicious musical recipe to we eighties teens: earthy, intelligent lyrics; intriguing keyboard riffs; and those goddamn G-spot harmonies from McIntosh, apparently channelling Patsy Cline. The result is something very soulful, and pleasingly substantial in these Cowell-ravaged times. And even the new stuff works.

The fans around seemed stunned at first, until Ricky muttered some well-judged nonsense about ‘waiting 25 years for this’ and the emotion was released. Suddenly all the golfers, middle managers and knackered parents were back in their student halls, woo-a-wooing to Real Gone Kid, bopping to Fergus Swings the Blues or clapping to the (still) very moving Dignity.

There are other well-judged delights too – a string of lovely things from new album Hipsters and a beautiful rendition of Woody Guthrie’s I Ain’t Got No Home.

And to round it off? An audience singing along to Dylan’s Forever Young, its bittersweet promise acquiring new force in the mouths of Ross and little Mac. Perhaps not a promise of eternal life, but an offer, at least, to grow old, like Ricky, Loz and co, with a little dignity.