How to have a Wet Wet Wet day by the seaside in Scarborough on Saturday...and not at the new Alpamare water park

"It does sound an exciting place to play," says the Glasgow band's long-serving bass player Graeme Clark. "I knew it had been doing these outdoor shows in the past, like the Kelvin Grove Bandstand in Glasgow, an old Victorian/Edwardian bandstand that holds 6,500 people.

"I've never been to Scarborough, though my mother and father honeymooned there in the 1950s when it was the height of fashion, coming from Scotland, to go there. The height of sophistication!"

Wet Wet Wet are no strangers to playing in the North Yorkshire open air after their Music Showcase Weekend concert at York Racecourse in July 2014. "We agreed to do a couple of racecourses a couple of summers back, and it's not like a tour, as each gig is a one-off situation, so you're kind of walking into the unknown and nobody tells you how many people will be there.

"It was a race day so I think we played to more than 30,000 people on the Saturday afternoon, which was amazing. I don't partake in alcohol any more, but let me tell you there were a few messy situations that day!"

Outdoor shows differ from tours, where the set lists tend to promote the latest album as well as the familiar favourites. "As the open-air shows are one-offs, you just build them around the hits and if it's a sunny day, on top of that, it makes a real difference," says Graeme. "It lifts spirits when the weather's OK and you play your hits for an hour at the racecourse shows.

"We play music, we entertain and if you buy a ticket, you know what you're going to get. If there are certain songs we don't play on Saturday, we know we're not going to get out of Scarborough alive!

Wet Wet Wet: "We always had a pretty decent work ethic," says Graeme Clark

"No-one is more surprised than me that people are still wanting to hear those songs, some that we wrote 30 years, but they have stood the test of time." Songs such as Wishing I Was Lucky, Angel Eyes and Sweet Surrender, not to mention their cover of The Troggs' Love Is All Around.

Looking back, Graeme says: "We always had a pretty decent work ethic, being working-class lads, coming from where we did. We put the work in; we worked on our craft, making well-structured, well put-together songs, after we grew up in a great time for songwriting, like hearing Burt Bacharach's songs that my parents played.

"If a child can sing a song, you think it must be really simple but to make a song seem simple is a deceptively simple thing to do when you're trying to create something that sounds effortless. That's the trick you have to pull off; it has to sound like that but it doesn't get easier to write good songs."

Different factors come into play. "The life experiences you go through, you're observing things differently to how you viewed things at 21," says Graeme, now 51. "For me, everything has to come from the melody; you can write a bad lyric, but if the melody isn't there, you can't make a song work. The best songs are driven by the melody and then you think about what the singer is singing about in a song.

"As you grow older you become more articulate as a musician but there's also a risk you become self-indulgent, because there's an exploratory process that musicians go through, and eventually you hit a wall, a glass ceiling, but you break through it."

Wet Wet Wet play Scarborough Open Air Theatre, Burniston Road, Scarborough, on Saturday; gates open at 6pm. Box office: scarboroughopenairtheatre.com or ticketmaster.co.uk