Jim Prime, widely admired keyboard lynchpin of Deacon Blue

The Herald Scotland

19-06-2025

Died: June 19, 2025.
WHEN Ricky Ross was putting his band Deacon Blue together in 1986, he heard of a talented keyboard player named Jim Prime. He rang Prime's number but a woman who answered told him that he had picked a bad time.
At length, a breathless Prime picked up the receiver and told Ross that he had gone into the street to 'stop a guy beating up his wife' in a domestic argument.
As Ross wrote in 2022, 'the strangeness of the conversation set the scene for the next thirty-five years'.
When Prime attended a rehearsal and heard a new song, Raintown, wrote Ross, 'something began to happen to make it sound like a band who had a direction. A lot of that 'something' was about what Jim brought to the arrangement'.
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Prime, who has died, aged 64, of cancer, 21 years to the month since the passing of the band's guitarist, Graeme Kelling, also from cancer, was an integral part of Deacon Blue's sound.
The band's debut album, Raintown, featured Prime and Kelling alongside Ross, Ewen Vernal on bass, Dougie Vipond on drums and Lorraine McIntosh on vocals. Released in May 1987, it went into the British Top 20 and yielded such classic Deacon Blue songs as Dignity, Born in a Storm, Raintown and When Will You (Make My Phone Ring).
Two years later the band released a follow-up album, When the World Knows Your Name, which went to number one and opened doors for them in America. All told, the band enjoyed 12 UK Top 40 singles and two chart-topping albums, and became one of Scotland's most successful musical exports.
James Miller Prime was born in Kilmarnock on November 3, 1960. Asked last year on the Australian interview series, The Keyboard Chronicles, when he realised he had a passion for music, he said he had been brought up classically trained and that he came from a 'long line of piano players in my house'.
His three sisters played the flute, piano and guitar, but he had 'something else that was going on'; he started playing piano at the tender age of four. 'My mum said, 'I was in the kitchen and you heard Loch Lomond on the radio and you ran through to the piano and you just played the melody - you couldn't even play the piano'. I couldn't even reach it.
'I guess that's something I know inside myself, that I'm kind of joined to this thing', he added, indicating his piano.
The bass guitarist Alan Thomson, who had played with John Martyn, was a neighbour, and he would regularly arrived at the Prime household at 8am, drag Prime out of his bed and force him to practice.
The US Southern rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, were the reason that he became a keyboards player; their keyboards player, Billy Powell, was 'outrageously good'.
Prime dropped out of college at the age of 20 to join the brilliant guitarist John Martyn's band but, as he told the Deacon Blue biographer, Paul English, he eventually left because he could not stand it.
'There was drink everywhere, paranoia and violence. I was too young to be with these really heavyweight musicians. I left under the guise of joining Altered Images, and eventually ended up on tour with them in America when I was 22. We toured right across America, it was absolutely stunning. People like Blondie and Nile Rodgers came backstage and I ended up with a load of tips on how to be a pop musician'.
Returning to Glasgow after the break-up of Altered Images, he got a job in a Southside pub, The Granary. An encounter with the owner of the nearby Park Lane Studios led to a recommendation to contact a Ricky Ross.
'When we met, I immediately thought there was something about this guy', he told English. 'Not only was he writing songs on the piano, but he had gear, and he was dead set. And I fell in love with the idea that he wanted to put keyboards at the centre of his songs'.
Prime's career with Deacon Blue spanned world tours, bestselling records and many memorable moments. One early such highlight came at Sir George Martin's AIR Studios in London, during the making of the debut album: the piano he was sitting at turned out to be the same one used by Stevie Wonder to compose his hit song, Superstition. In 1990, at a John Lennon tribute concert in Liverpool, Prime met Yoko Ono, Lennon's son Julian, and the Superman actor, Christopher Reeve. That same year, Deacon Blue headlined the massive Big Day event on Glasgow Green, part of Glasgow's European City of Culture celebrations.
Deacon Blue broke up in 1994 and the band went their separate ways before reconvening in 1999. Prime toured with the colourful French singer, Johnny Hallyday, and played in the band that accompanied Bill Bryden's 1994 epic promenade production of a Govan regiment in the Great War. He was also involved in the establishment of a School of Music and Recording Technology in South Ayrshire.
Away from Deacon Blue, Jim Prime was also a popular lecturer in music at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS).
He spoke about his time teaching there, sayinG: 'You can imagine a class with me doesn't come from any book. I try as much as I can now to tell people about the power that their music has for other people, not just writing songs in bedrooms and being on the stage. I do a lot of work with Alzheimer's Scotland, and I've done stuff with special needs and I try to encourage kids to get out there and talk to all people and help them with their memory'.