DEACON Blue have the taste for it again. “This time around we haven’t played for 18 months, but we’re doing a lot of shows this summer – and we’ve been working on a new album that hopefully will come out next year,” says Ricky Ross, leader of the Glaswegian band, whose latest renaissance brings them to the Grand Opera House tonight for their first show in York since playing the Barbican Centre in 1999.

News of a return to the studio will be music to the ears of Deacon Blue’s fans, who last heard new material from Ross and co when they recorded three new tracks for their compilation, Singles – although Ricky and co-vocalist Lorraine McIntosh did release The Great Lakes album in 2009 under the name McIntosh Ross.

The new album is progressing well. “We started writing it last summer,” says Ricky. “We’d done a lot of gigs around three years ago and did a bunch of shows with Simple Minds and we were just really enjoying it, thinking, ‘this is really good and it would be good to do something creative with it’. Then I met some creative people and started working with one of the guys on demos and felt there was an album there to be made.”

Deacon Blue originally formed in Glasgow in 1985, releasing their debut album, Raintown in May 1987, and since their initial split in 1994 they have re-formed sporadically, releasing the albums Walking Back Home in 1999 and Homesick in 2001.

Band member Graeme Kelling died from pancreatic cancer in 2004, but the other core members, Ross, McIntosh, keyboard player James Prime and bass player Dougie Vipond, continue to work together, with input from beyond the ranks in the form of guitarist Mick Slaven and bass player Lewis Gordon. “The core is the same, the four of us, but sometimes it takes someone to come in and prod you to do something new,” says Ricky, who also goes on writing trips to Nashville each year.

He has recorded his own albums in the wake of the original split, but how does Ricky distinguish between a Deacon Blue song and a Ricky Ross solo number? “Weirdly enough, I don’t really know the answer to that, though I think there’s a scale to it,” he says. “What makes it easier is that there are times when you want the bigger canvas – the Deacon Blue canvas – and you’re all thinking about the harmonies, the lovely rich piano and the energy, whereas the things that work for me on my albums I can do on my own.”

He points to another distinctive feature of Deacon Blue’s work. “Our songs are cinematic,” he says. “They’re hugely meaningful songs to me. They always had to be so vital to me, and I really wanted to say things in those songs that I couldn’t say elsewhere. It was important to say those things with Deacon Blue.”

And so such songs as Chocolate Girl, Dignity, Real Gone Kid, Wages Day, Fergus Sings The Blues and Your Town rose to the heights. That’s what marked things out from day one, that vitality, and when we lost that, that’s when we lost our direction,” says Ricky. “But sometimes, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s difficult to decide what makes it good.”

Re-uniting once more is “a lovely chance to be creative again”. “When we come together – York is the first gig – we do really enjoy it and it’s a big change from what we’re doing on our own,” says Ricky.

The new songs will reflect the “fascinating times” in which we live. “A lot of reflection I’ve done for this album was about us a group of people and looking at our life and where we are now…” says Ricky. “But I have to say – just to allay people’s fears! –there won’t be a lot of new material in the show, maybe two or three, but the focus will be on those four or five albums we made, and there’s so much material we want to play.”

• Deacon Blue play Grand Opera House, York, tonight at 8pm. Tickets update: still available at £27.50, but close to selling out. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or grandoperahouseyork.org.uk

Did you know?

Deacon Blue took their name from the title of a 1978 Steely Dan song, Deacon Blues.

Did you know too?

Ricky Ross has a regular country music and Americana show on BBC Radio Scotland.