Dignity

Ross lived in a tenement flat in Pollokshields and watched the council cleansing workers sweep the road outside. The song began on a 1985 holiday in Crete, where a copy of Sounds with Morrissey on the cover set him thinking about Glasgow, and the bread and raki of that holiday found their way into the lyric. Its narrator has worked for the council for 20 years and dreams of sailing off in a boat called Dignity; Ross made it a dinghy because a cleaner could afford one. He insists it is about the dignity of work, not unemployment. An earthier line about the gutter became litter, he said, because radio would never play it otherwise.

The demo, made while Prime still worked in a bank, won the band their deal. Ross said Prime's cascading piano part brought the song to life, with a nod to Nick Lowe's I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, and the closing wall of guitars is a tribute to Lloyd Cole and the Commotions' Forest Fire. The first version, recorded live as a band at AIR with Jon Kelly, is the Raintown track and reached only 123 as a single in March 1987. Bob Clearmountain re-recorded it in November 1987, with new vocals cut in New York, and that version reached 31 in the UK and 22 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart in January 1988. Reissued with Our Town in 1994, it reached 20, and it has since gone gold in the UK.

Live and after

It is the band's most played song, logged 347 times on setlist.fm, and it usually closes their shows. McIntosh, who first heard it from the audience at Queen Margaret Union in 1986, said she could not relate to it at 21, but chose lines for crowds to sing; she later found she had been singing one word of the bridge wrong for 30 years. At a Hogmanay show in George Square, council workers clearing the frozen ground shouted for it and the band played it for them. At the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony at Hampden Park on 3 August 2014 they played it before 40,000 people, with a parade of more than 220 Glasgow workers.

It topped the public vote for 1980s songs in STV's Scotland's Greatest Album in 2011, became a Dundee United anthem, and is played at weddings and funerals. Karine Polwart wrote in 2019 that she had a huge soft spot for it, and recorded a stripped-back version for her Scottish Songbook. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official music video.