Big Country - Folk-rock epic from Scotland

Dunfermline is a pleasant little town in Fife, perched on a hill just over half an hour north of Edinburgh. During the 11th century, under the reign of Malcolm III, it enjoyed a certain flourishing as the country's capital and seat of ecclesiastical power, until 1437, when, following the brutal murder of James I, the royal family chose to move to Edinburgh Castle, where it felt safer and more protected. In the 17th century a rapid geo-political decline began with the transfer of the Scottish courts to London, made worse still by a disastrous fire that in 1624 destroyed much of the town centre, so much so that the novelist Daniel Defoe named Dunfermline as the very emblem of "perfection of decay". Yet between the 18th and 19th centuries the town found the strength to pick itself back up thanks to linen damask weaving (in which it excelled worldwide for design and finish) and other thriving trades, such as dyeing, soap-making, rope manufacturing and, inevitably, beer and whisky distilleries. In Gaelic, Dùn Phàrlain roughly means "fort on the river bend", referring to the small Tower Burn that flows just steps from the Cathedral. Today, if you happen to pass through, you can enjoy enchanting scenery and long walks among the free-roaming squirrels of Pittencrieff Park and the remains of the Benedictine Abbey, where numerous monarchs rest in peace, including Queen Margaret and Robert the Bruce.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull was born here, and, coming to music, Scotland as a whole has always been an unrivalled breeding ground for talent — just think of the Postcard bands (Joseph K, Aztec Camera or the Orange Juice of Edwyn Collins), but also Blue Nile, Deacon Blue, Lowlife, Associates, Waterboys, Cocteau Twins, Simple Minds and so many more, in roughly ascending order of popularity. Not just post-punk, new wave or dream-pop: in the early Eighties a fervent so-called "combat rock" wave also surged, shaking up much of the north of Britain with offshoots in Wales (Alarm) and Ireland (U2 and Aslan). What these bands had in common was a deep-rooted nationalistic sense, taking shape through proud, defiant rhymes and aggressively-pitched songs that translated the folklore of their respective homelands into music.

As for the Scottish strand of this wave, the most genuine exponents are undoubtedly Big Country, even though, on closer inspection, none of the four members actually hailed from the area: guitarist/frontman Stuart Adamson came from Manchester, drummer Mark Brzezicki from Slough in Buckinghamshire, south-east England, bassist Tony Butler from London, and the other guitarist, Bruce Watson, from as far afield as Timmins, Ontario, Canada. In any case, in 1981 the four of them found themselves together in Dunfermline, through a mix of life choices and pure happenstance.

Late Seventies, the Skids: a portrait of Stuart Adamson

A charismatic leader full of promise, William Stuart Adamson was one of the most gifted musicians of his generation, and for a long time he lived up to that promise. But the popularity he achieved with Skids and Big Country was counterbalanced by a fragile, tormented personality, which, combined with troubles in his personal life, would eventually sink into anger at the outside world and a reckless, self-destructive creed. "I totally hated the record industry and its bosses, I couldn't see it as a workable system, so after the first album I recorded I was ready to pack it all in," he would later reveal in an interview, "but I didn't realise that the person I got on with least was myself." Had it not been for music he would probably still be sweating out his days on a building site, or cursing that "steel town" that would eventually make him immortal. Instead, roaring years of triumph and satisfaction awaited him, with shows alongside the Jam and the Rolling Stones, and praise from The Edge. Then something went wrong, and the gates opened onto an alcoholic imprisonment he would never manage to escape again, from a cherished dream of an ordinary life all the way down to chains of grim servitude. And yet it had all begun on an upward curve, with a blazing apprenticeship that, by the time he was barely nineteen, had already won him an enviable audience.

Stuart was born on 11 April 1958 in Manchester to two Scottish parents, Ann Muir and William Adamson. When he was four, the family decided to move back home to Crossgates, in Fife, just a mile east of Dunfermline. His father, a travelling agent for the fishing industry, saw an intellectual future for his son, so he tried to steer him towards literature and enrolled him at Beath High School in Cowdenbeath, a well-regarded springboard for anyone who might eventually want to go on to a degree. But Stuart evidently had other ideas, and as early as 1975, together with his schoolmate William "Bill" Simpson, he started a first rudimentary band, Tattoo, after enthusiastically attending a Damned gig. The four-piece played covers of Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Status Quo, but the experience was worth barely thirty pounds a night, after which Adamson fell for the glam of Roxy Music and Mott The Hoople, and the others decided to leave, unhappy with the new direction. Stuart and Bill, however, stayed on good terms and, tired of the narrow confines of small-town life, set off in search of fortune in Amsterdam, where Simpson's girlfriend was working and could help them settle in.

But things didn't go as planned: Stuart squandered most of his savings in the ship's casino during the crossing from Hull alone, and once he arrived in IJmuiden he found nothing better to do than fritter away his remaining loose change in the red-light district. At that point he realised things couldn't carry on like this and went back to Dunfermline, where, smitten with the Ramones and Sex Pistols, he decided to try again with punk and guitar. He rolled up his sleeves and founded Skids: not a passing whim, but a life cycle well worth dwelling on, given that it would go on to produce at least a couple of evergreens. Adamson brought along his long-time friend Simpson on bass and a new drummer, Tom Kellichan, and together they got to work around the Dunfermline-Edinburgh area. The trio was soon joined by a sixteen-year-old from Kirkcaldy, the son of miners, one Richard Jobson, who had an excellent flair for singing: this motley line-up made its debut on 19 August 1977 at the Belleville Hotel on Pilmuir Street, and within six months had released, on the independent label No Bad, the EPs "Wide Open" and "Charles", which caught the attention of John Peel. The tracks "Charles", "Reasons" and "TV Stars" were played on constant rotation on BBC Radio 1: this was irreverent art-punk, with lyrics and music written by Adamson; Simpson's muscular basslines, meanwhile, caught the ear of Peter Hook and The Edge, who would later cite them as a genuine source of inspiration. In short, the quality was there, and word of mouth first earned them a slot opening for the Clash, then a deal with Virgin, sealed in September '78 by what can be considered their first true single, "Sweet Suburbia", premiered at the open-air festival in Battersea Park in an afternoon set alongside the Stranglers. Cornwell and co. were out touring "Black And White" and staging "Nice N' Sleazy" with alluring strippers on stage, while Skids were eyed with suspicion and snubbed by the crowd.

Just a few weeks later, the band had a chance to win over the sceptics with Scared To Dance (February 1979), a powerful debut LP recorded at AIR Studios in London and driven up the charts by "Into The Valley", probably their best-known song, which sold 250,000 copies and reached number ten in Britain (to this day it's still sung on the terraces by Dunfermline Athletic supporters to spur on their heroes, and fans of Charlton and Bradford in the English Premier League borrow it too, given that their respective grounds are called The Valley and Valley Parade). Which valley is actually being referred to remains a mystery, though, given Richard Jobson's proverbially garbled pronunciation, which renders most of the lyrics - dedicated to a friend killed during national service - practically incomprehensible: legend has it that it's High Valleyfield nearby, known for clashes between its residents and those of the neighbouring villages of Torryburn, Rosyth, Oakley and Inverkeithing; others suggest it might refer to the 1971 film "The Last Valley" starring Michael Caine.
Either way, success now smiled on them thanks also to other gems scattered across a tracklist with a fiercely eclectic spread of influences, such as the ramshackle waltz "Dossier Of Fallibility", "Scale" and the title track "Scared To Dance", with its Ultravox-like flavour (recalling "Slow Motion" from "Systems Of Romance"); also notable are "Of One Skin" and "Six Times", which hint at a certain adolescent U2 (the resemblance of the riffs to those of "Electric Co." and "Out Of Control" is striking, with "Boy" coming out just a year later).
Lastly, there's a string of anti-militarist invectives worth noting, such as the marching "Hope And Glory", "Melancholy Soldiers" and above all the anthem "The Saints Are Coming", which earned them a spot on Top Of The Pops, accelerating their climb to fame (in 2006, U2 themselves, together with Green Day, would cover it for charity, with proceeds going to the victims of Hurricane Katrina).
At this stage Jobson was the leading man, but Adamson was already unsheathing those slashing guitar strokes that would find full expressive freedom in the Big Country saga.

War, death, anarchy and rebellion also chase each other across Days In Europe from October 1979, the second studio album, which confirmed Skids' growing appeal: it was produced by the brilliant Bill Nelson (of Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise, to name just a couple of his projects), a virtuoso guitarist obsessed with science fiction who also played keyboards and made a decisive contribution to modernising the sound. Shortly before the recording sessions, moreover, drummer Tom Kellachan left the group and was replaced by Blitz club DJ Rusty Egan, formerly of Rich Kids and future Visage member: what caused a stir wasn't so much the new electronic guise that coloured "Animation", "Pros And Cons" and "Peaceful Sounds" with bright tones foreshadowing new romantic aesthetics, as the questionable cover art depicting an Olympic athlete being crowned by an Aryan woman, presumably set at Berlin '36, complete with a gothic-lettered title: John Peel read it as fascist regime propaganda, and given that the third track is called "Dulce Et Decorum Est (Pro Patria Mori)", the neo-Nazi band label was quick to stick, even though it was never actually clarified whether the musicians simply meant to shake consciences on the subject or to take some kind of stance.
In any case, to defuse the controversy, the band promptly put out a re-release with retouched artwork, without however completely eliminating the original image (shrunk down to a poster on a bedroom wall and partly covered by a woman's head). On top of that, "Pros And Cons" was dropped from the tracklist in favour of "Masquerade", a thrilling non-album single that, even a few months before the record's release, had already broken into the Top 20 with space-age synths and a killer chorus that courted comparisons with contemporaries A Flock Of Seagulls and "Telecommunication".
The flirtation with technology produced other notable episodes in "Charade", "The Olympian" and "Workin' For The Yankee Dollar", where icy OMD"-style beats were warmed up by vibrant guitar riffs and energetic choral performances, averting the kind of robotic posturing that would never become their stylistic signature. "Thanatos" (Greek for death) and "Home Of The Saved" close out an album that received mixed opinions, evenly split between hardliners of Scared To Dance's raw sound and enthusiasts of the futuristic, hyper-effected new trappings.

The third album, Absolute Game (1980), poured fuel on the fire of ideological controversy with a bonus disc of outtakes bearing the ambiguous title "Strength Through Joy", which some traced back to the slogan "Kraft Durch Freude" used by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, though vocalist Richard Jobson preferred to joke about it, claiming instead that he'd borrowed it from Dirk Bogarde's autobiography. "My surname is Jobson, son of labour, so how could I be a Nazi?" The gleaming production was handled by Mick Glossop, while Rusty Egan, his stint over, was replaced on drums by Mike Baillie, and founding bassist William Simpson passed the baton to Russell Webb, who had cut his teeth in Slik and in Midge Ure's PVC2. The cast was rounded out by fourteen backing vocalists, both adults and children, featured on almost every song, plus Derek Wadsworth on didgeridoo on the artificial rondo "Hurry On Boys", which chews over keyboard-driven paranoia reminiscent of Simple Minds's "Empires And Dance" (bringing to mind the insidious intro of "This Fear Of Gods"). Melodically, this is their most impactful album, boasting hits like "Circus Game", "One Decree" and "Goodbye Civilian", still carved out of obsessive choruses built on sequencer phrases in the manner of Magazine or Japan, with tones further softened towards pop and lyrics less abrasive but still faithful to a poetic, literary undercurrent.
"The Children Saw The Shame" grafts an Orientalist xylophone in the style of "Hong Kong Garden" onto extended guitar riffs reminiscent of the Cure's "Push"; also worth hearing is the lavish ballad "A Woman In Winter", with intriguing vocal combinations and a theme worthy of a Rossellini film, as well as "Out Of Town" and "Happy To Be With You", which skilfully blend rock energy with a catchy streak. But the electro-wave direction never fully convinced Adamson, and his partnership with Jobson derailed into rivalry.

Music is that thing where working people get together on a Saturday night to sing songs, someone plays the fiddle, someone the guitar, someone the accordion, but no bastard plays the synthesizer, and that's how it should be
(Stuart Adamson)

"Late-Seventies punk was an attitude towards music whereby you could sing and play however you wanted, and that's exactly what I did on the first three Skids albums," Adamson added. But now he wanted to leave his mark and was thinking of something more traditional and less fashion-driven than synths, so frictions began to surface within the band, along with some trouble with the bottle: around this time he suffered his first nervous breakdown, and on top of everything the rockstar life weighed heavily when, at just twenty-two, he already had a child and a marriage to answer for. At the end of the Absolute Game tour, Mike Baillie left and went back to fishing on the East Coast; Jobson and Russell Webb then split control of operations between them and brought in seventeen session musicians, with whose help they produced, in 1981, the failed pop-pastoral of Joy, on which Stuart, pushed to the margins and stripped of any decision-making power, appears only on guitar on the track "Iona". Then, in 1982, came the compilation Fanfare, which wrote the final word on the story of Skids.

Before bowing out of the scene, the Jobson-Webb duo, together with John Doyle and John McGeoch of Magazine, allowed themselves one last generous flourish under the alias The Armoury Show, which in 1985 produced the excellent Waiting For The Floods, a pompous rock-wave record streaked with dark undertones, somewhere between Love And Rockets and Echo And The Bunnymen ("Kyrie", "Castles In Spain" and "We Can Be Brave Again" are the highlights worth remembering). After that, following a brief spell with Public Image Ltd., Webb reinvented himself as a video game designer, while Jobson today is an established director and TV presenter.

Big Country, The Crossing, and the Eighties

The story of Big Country begins in April 1981. Three weeks after signing in Inverness on that “Iona” we mentioned earlier, Stuart Adamson comes into contact with Canadian guitarist Bruce Watson, who has lived in Dunfermline for years and scrapes by as a ship cleaner. Watson has built up a certain reputation on the local circuit with various small bands, including Eurosect and Delinquents, in which a brother-in-law of Adamson's also plays, along with one of the old Skids drummers with whom he shared a rehearsal room for a while. This is how Stuart and Bruce meet, and the two instantly strike up a strong chemistry, so they start sketching out demos at the Townhill Community Centre together with brothers Alan and Pete Wishart (bass and keyboards) and Spizzenergi drummer Clive Parker. But this first incarnation of the band lasts only as long as two disastrous gigs at the Brighton Conference Centre and the Birmingham Odeon, opening for Alice Cooper's Special Forces Tour.
At this point Adamson and Watson audition bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Brzezicki for the single “Harvest Home” - two London session players active under the name 'Rhythm For Hire' with top-tier credentials - and, impressed by their skill, redraw the definitive four-piece line-up, which settles on the name Big Country after rejecting the less captivating candidates Little Giants and Angle Park. Big Country, instead, packs the essence of their artistic manifesto into just two words: “Big” alluding to that explosive, full-bodied sound of big music that would later make the fortune of the Waterboys' “This Is The Sea”, and “Country” as the unbreakable bond with the folk roots of their homeland.

On these premises, the debut The Crossing (August 1983) is one for the frame: helmed by the skilled production of Steve Lillywhite, who at that very time was forging the sound of early U2 (“Boy” and “October”) as well as Peter Gabriel (“III”), Toyah and Simple Minds, the album makes heavy use of heavily engineered guitars that strongly evoke bagpipes, thanks to the MXR Pitch Transposer 129 distortion unit, while e-bow devices let the six strings mimic strings and synthesizers. The rest is supplied by youthful impulsiveness and flair, in a perfect mix of awareness and spontaneity that shares a 360-degree vision of music, loosely labelled by some as epic, celtic, or even more specifically, bagpipe rock.
However you want to frame it, what emerges is the idea of a fusion between rock and folklore, though unlike other bands that bring back traditional instruments (Pogues, Clannad or Waterboys), these guys exploit electric guitars to reproduce the sound of fiddles and bagpipes, with results full of pathos, responsiveness, mastery and Highland culture - the offspring of a romantic, direct modus operandi that needs no outside interference and has very few rivals in its field, perhaps U2's “War”, the Alarm's “Declaration”, Simple Minds' “New Gold Dream” and, at least in part, the more mature Virgin Prunes' “The Moon Looked Down And Laughed”.
The icebreaking single “Harvest Home” misses its target in February (only number 91), while the second single “Fields Of Fire” (subtitled “400 Miles”) does better, reaching the Top Ten in March.

The spark catches in spring, when Big Country play in support of U2 on several dates of the “War” tour, then in May “In A Big Country” (number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100) lands in the US - a self-referential third single that broadens their visibility on a global scale: it's the substantial preview of an exportable Scotland that isn't postcard rhetoric made of bagpipes and tartan kilts, but a great country made of valleys, traditions and glimpses of nobility, mythical figures and anti-British identity pride, passion and self-respect in the age of MTV.

In a big country dreams stay with you
like a lover’s voice across the mountainside…

The video for “In A Big Country” shows the four musicians involved in a treasure hunt on three wheels and jet skis, constantly chased and beaten to the punch by a girl: the scenes are shot between the abandoned Corfe Castle railway station and the beaches of Swanage Bay, and the gang finds a black box decorated with the band's logo and a map showing the route to follow. As for the logo, it was designed by graphic artist Julian Balme, who since the late Seventies has designed more than a thousand covers for Clash, Iggy Pop, Tears For Fears, Inxs, Pete Townshend, Psychedelic Furs and other sacred monsters. Here there's a compass motif on the upper part and a triangular floral illustration below depicting the thistle, Scotland's national flower. At the centre is the wording Big Country, “as Adamson wanted it, with Big stretched out in width and Country in height. I'd spoken to him and I think I met his requests - the symbolism fully reflects the band's values: exploration, the quest, the journey and attachment to one's homeland.”
Going back to the album, Bruce Watson plays the crucial role of supporting guitarist, in contrast to Stuart Adamson's more substantial, direct work: there are no solos, but true guitar duels evoking open spaces, highlands, clouds and cliffs, soldiers at the front and battles that perhaps never even existed - but why put limits on imagination? In an era when Peter Gabriel and David Byrne were opening up world-music perspectives through exotic contaminations, the Scots' assault on the world was, if anything, even bolder precisely because it was attempted with the ancestral music of their own land.
The truth is that some people were starting to get tired of the chart monopoly held by the synth-pop of Eurythmics and Human League, and The Crossing acts, in this sense, as a fresh and engaging antidote. An individual analysis of the ten songs on the tracklist is almost superfluous, united as they are by nearly identical basic dynamics, without too many variations on the formula, but a few distinctions are necessary: the jovial “In A Big Country” carries a message of hope, positive and optimistic, while behind the ritual sonic charges on the surface, many of the other tracks don't skimp on darker, melancholic shades. “Inwards”, for instance, was written in memory of Stuart's recently deceased mother, so that its swaggering gait only partly masks depressed lyrics (“the light in the window has burned its fuse”), while the tender ballad “Chance” - one of the most requested live - delves into the complications of an unplanned pregnancy with a resigned gait similar to fellow countrymen Lowlife or the Chameleons; Adamson, after all, was born in Manchester, and certain darkwave chromosomes run in his DNA.
“Lost Patrol” denounces, with martial emphasis, the horrors of war and the gradual process of dehumanization (“there is no beauty here, friends, just death and dark decay/ we save no soul, we break no promises”), while the electric folk-country of “The Storm” (distinctly Gaelic, about the Jacobite risings) earns, according to some, comparisons to Van Morrison, Runrig and Thin Lizzy - a bit misleading, actually, given that the band's acoustic forays are generally sparing and fleeting; what comes through instead is an impetuous punk drive, a legacy of their Seventies background, softened by soul sensibilities à la Dexys Midnight Runners.
Not everyone loves the stamp Lillywhite imposes on “his” records, but in this case the good producer deserves credit for sensing how alternative rock could benefit from mainstream melodies: “Close Action” and the bucolic “Harvest Home”, with its age-old folk wisdom (“just as you saw, you shall reap”), ring out like a call to arms and an appeal for change for a working class facing an uncertain future, both professional and otherwise. Finally, let's enjoy the jig-like “Fields Of Fire” and “1000 Stars”, proud and lofty with dancefloor potential, and the thrilling little closing gem “Porroh-Man”, perhaps the most visionary song of the bunch, with an instrumental intro in delay and an almost eight-minute prog-pop crescendo (inspired by a story by H.G. Wells; “porroh” is a tribal system of religions and taboos from Sierra Leone).

In the same year that saw the release of R.E.M.'s “Murmur”, the Church's “Seance”, the Police's “Synchronicity” and Talking Heads' “Speaking In Tongues”, The Crossing stands as the uncompromising ardour of youth and the voice of a revolution just begun. It won't last long: within barely five years, in fact, the picturesque twin-guitar gimmick, however disarming and brilliant, stops making an impact, getting stuck in a stale, repetitive formula. Before that, though, there's still room for a few more moments of glory: Brzezicki is a stratospheric drummer, citing as his influences Keith Moon, John Bonham and the unorthodox Phil Collins of Brand X. By this point in his career he'd already played with the best (Midge Ure, Roger Daltrey and Fish of Marillion), but tired of session-fee gigs, he chose Big Country to find a permanent home. His is not mere accompaniment but constructive drumming, free to flesh out the score, which pairs beautifully with Tony Butler's nimble fingers, themselves busy with an ingenious, full-throttle bass. Butler too boasts a respectable résumé: in 1980, for instance, he played alongside Pete Townshend on the album “Empty Glass”, while in 1982 he had recorded the celebrated “Back On The Chain Gang” with the Pretenders, with whom he'd also found a certain rapport, to the point of briefly entertaining the idea of staying on with Chrissie Hynde and co., before eventually giving in to Adamson's persuasion.

From wonderland to the city of steel

Having a sense of self and dignity in times of trouble: that’s a recurring theme in my work and something that’s a very identifiable part of the culture and environment that I came out of
(Stuart Adamson)

The Crossing sells a million copies in England and earns platinum status, putting Big Country forward as a superpower of an English rock scene that had seemed to be falling apart. January immediately brings an echo with the EP Wonderland, which captures the band in a state of grace and wins unanimous praise: the majestic title track “Wonderland” can be considered the perfect model of their archetypal song, both in subject matter and stylistic choices. It's a portrait of honest workers hoping for a bright future for themselves and their homeland, built on a particularly detailed riff (from which the more mischievous critics claim Inxs lifted the one for “New Sensation”). The flip side of the coin is the B-side “All Fall Together”, which by contrast mourns shattered dreams through recurring tempo changes propped up by Mark Brzezicki's closed-roll drumming.
The mini-album also includes two leftovers from The Crossing: the very long “The Crossing” itself, split between a sung first half and a pompous instrumental second half, and the excellent “Angle Park”, which echoes a few notes of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and the cadences of “Digital”, again by Joy Division.

It's an inevitable bridge to Steeltown, which on 19 October 1984 bursts straight in at number 1 on the English charts, marking their biggest commercial success. The record is recorded at Stockholm's Polar Studios, owned by former ABBA members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. The epic, electric framework doesn't stray far from its predecessor, relaunching its tried-and-tested guidelines: more lashings of guitar, e-bow and mandolins, except this time Lillywhite softens the Scottish touch, shifting the focus towards decidedly more aggressive tones, so the vocals seem to struggle to emerge from the magma.
“It's a dense, muddy album,” the producer admits in response to some critics who lament a general decline in the melodies, “maybe we overfilled it trying to mask something. Stuart's songwriting had become politicized, closer to Bob Dylan or the working-class Springsteen: people living in a Steeltown, even if they're out of work and so on, don't want to be told their life is rubbish - if anything, they have even bigger dreams...” So, no longer the wonderland or the great country to be celebrated, but post-industrial tales from the city of steel, with lyrics about unemployment and the exploitation of the working class, English dominance and Thatcherite government.

I looked to the West for freedom and I saw slavery
I looked to the East for answers and I saw misery
(“East Of Eden”)

The first furious single “East Of Eden” (taking its cue from John Steinbeck's novel of the same name) sides with the labourers crushed by those stylized gears depicted in Soviet-style artwork on the cover. The despondent title track “Steeltown” piles it on, dwelling in journalistic black and white on the 1935 diaspora, when at the height of the Great Depression Scots sought work in the newly opened factories of Corby, in Northamptonshire (“We built all this with our hands/ but we built it on sand”). Musically it's an evolutionary step, with harmonies sustained endlessly by frantic guitars and nervy bass, while Adamson adds an emphatic vocal delivery that spits out every inner demon: it's impossible not to be swept up by the sweet “Girl With The Grey Eyes” (dedicated to an unidentified Josephine), “Just A Shadow”, with its building final coda, and above all “Come Back To Me”, a pleading pre-grunge ballad about the despair of a young mother whose husband has just been killed in war.
The bloody “Where The Rose Is Sown” also indignantly laments the pain of loss, this time against the backdrop of the absurd Falklands conflict (“If I die in a combat zone/ box me up and ship me home/ If I die and still come home/ lay me down where the rose is sown”), while the almost-metal opening track “Flame Of The West” fights against Reaganite windmills (“One man with a ruling dream/ and everybody falls for him”). Finally, there's the pagan dance of “Rain Dance”, returning to Celtic territory, the galloping “Tall Ships Go” and “The Great Divide”, about the delicate balance between unions and management (it echoes the experience of a shipyard colleague of Bruce Watson's, when around two thousand people went on strike against management-driven privatization that would have led to layoffs).
“People expected a sequel to The Crossing,” Adamson admits, “but while that was a contagious, anthemic album, Steeltown is about facing reality and making people think.” Perhaps that's why it goes almost unnoticed (only number seventy) in the US, where the misfortunes of British society arouse relatively little interest.

Either way, at the end of the year the band takes part in the non-profit charity single against famine in Ethiopia, “Do They Know It's Christmas?” (contributing a spoken message on the B-side “Feed The World”), while the following July '85 their planned appearance at Live Aid is cancelled at the last minute for scheduling reasons (the group is busy during those same months on a major tour supporting Queen).

The second half of the Eighties: The Seer and Peace In Our Time

Also in 1985 the whole band contributes to the excellent soundtrack for the independent film “Restless Natives” (we'll return to this later, since it was reissued in 1998 under the name Restless Natives & Rarities), and that same year they provide the arrangements for Roger Daltrey's album “Under The Raging Moon”. Shortly after, Butler and Brzezicki enrich the rhythm section of “White City: A Novel”, the solo album by the other pillar of the Who, Pete Townshend, after which the Anglo-Polish drummer joins the Cult's line-up, with whom he helps deliver the epoch-making “Love”. Meanwhile Steve Lillywhite is replaced in the producer's chair by Robin Millar, who during those same years is making the fortune of, among others, Sade (his touch is evident on the refined “Promise” and “Diamond Life” by the Anglo-Nigerian artist): Big Country's raw sound would emerge from this gleaming and polished, so that the third studio album The Seer veers towards a catchy pop-rock with folk veins that are less uncompromising but still clearly recognizable.

The first single “Look Away”, perhaps the band's most lively and radio-friendly song of all (it tells of an outlaw on the run grappling with unrequited love), serves as an appetizer for a series of more traditional tracks still influenced by authentically Scottish or Celtic sounds, confirmed on “The Seer” and “Eiledon” by Kate Bush's magical contribution, while the rest of The Seer's (1986) tracklist flows evenly between exuberant rhythms and historically/literarily rooted lyrics. The fierce, youthful anthem “The Red Fox”, for example, refers to a murder on 14 May 1752 known as the Appin Murder, when the “Red Fox” Colin Roy Campbell was killed by a gunshot fired in the Lettermore woods following the unrest that broke out amid the Jacobite uprising. “Remembrance Day”, meanwhile, tells of the forced exodus of the Highland Clearances (between 1750 and 1860 thousands of Highlanders were brutally deported to various British colonies, mainly Canada and New Zealand, in order to clear agricultural land owned by the Lords), while the title track resurrects, right from its name, the 17th-century Gaelic mysticism of the seer Kenneth McKenzie, known at home as the Brahan Seer.
Overall, it's not Big Country's best work, but it's certainly very inspired, so much so that even a prayer of hope for world peace (“One Great Thing”), placed in Stuart Adamson's hands, transcends all banality in the name of a frank, sincere message. “Sailor” is the search for safe harbour for troubled souls, while the slow ballad “Hold The Heart” is somewhat mushier. Rounding things off are the powerful “I Walk The Hill” and “Teacher”, which flirts with the psychedelic-metal sounds dear to the Mission's contemporaneous “Wasteland”.

Boosted by the band's heavy presence at festivals (Montreux in Switzerland, Roskilde in Denmark and Seinejoke in Finland) and on some of the coolest TV shows of the moment (like Germany's “Rock Palast”), The Seer climbs to number two on the British charts, kept off the top spot only by Madonna's “True Blue” (Madonna). On the Billboard Hot 100, however, it only reaches 59th place, so in an attempt to revive the band's fortunes on the American market as well, the four decide to put the follow-up, Peace In Our Time, in the hands of seasoned producer Peter Wolf, who had worked on records by Grace Slick, Commodores, Frank Zappa and Patti Labelle, but also Starsailor and Wang Chung. The real problem, though, is precisely that Big Country are neither Starsailor nor Wang Chung, so the album, which sees the light of day in 1988 in Los Angeles, closes out — without much excitement and with a bit too much glitz — the first phase of the career of a band that, however electrifying, would never again manage to recapture its former spark. The lead single “King Of Emotion”, which Adamson said was inspired by the groove of the Jagger-esque “Honky Tonk Woman”, ends up instead as lightweight, disengaged soft-pop closer to the sugariest side of Spandau Ballet's “Round & Round”, with the same choral cheerleader-style approach echoed in turn by “Thousand Yard Stare” and “Broken Heart (Thirteen Valleys)”, both pleasant enough (the latter is, in the frontman's own opinion, the single best song he's ever written).
The near-acoustic ballads “Everything I Need” and “In This Place” fare even better, while “From Her To Eternity” finally brings back some of that bagpipe sound that seemed to have been shelved, and which resurfaces forcefully on the title track “Peace In Our Time” too (the third single released, with a catchy 60s-style protest-song chorus). But overall the emphasis on synthesizers dulls the charge of the e-bow, and the songs progressively lose their evocative pull, also because Stuart seems to have far less to say than he did on The Crossing or Steeltown, preferring instead to sketch sometimes painful vignettes in a more colloquial, less poetic language than in the past (the funky, free-fallin' “Time For Leaving” and the unremarkable “River Of Hope” pay the price). The album closes in fine style with the gently rhythmic “I Could Be Happy Here”, which leaves more than a little regret for what this LP could have been, had the band only managed to strike the right balance between its Scottish roots and its Yankee ambitions.

The Nineties: No Place Like Home and Buffalo Skinners

Peace In Our Time fails to climb higher than 160th place on the US charts, and is instead, oddly enough, exported to the Soviet Union for a long tour backed by Cry Before Dawn and Diesel Park West. They are the first European band to play in the USSR, but the Cold War atmosphere ends up weighing on the band's mood too, triggering a rift within the group that, while not irreparable, proves decisive for the rest of their journey. Adamson's problems with alcohol take hold precisely during this period, and drummer Brzezicki leaves to go and play with Sting on "Soul Cages". He does return immediately afterwards, though, as a session player on the fifth album, No Place Like Home, released in September 1991, which features the valuable backing-vocal contribution of Carol Kenyon, a British vocalist much admired in pop-wave circles (hers is the voice, just to give an idea, on Heaven 17's “Temptation” (Heaven 17), as well as on Ultravox's “Same Old Story” (Ultravox), Malcolm McLaren's “Madame Butterfly”, Simple Minds' “Real Life” (Simple Minds) and Duran Duran's “Liberty” (Duran Duran), to name just a few).
This new, more radio-friendly inflection inevitably shapes the whole tracklist of Peace In Our Time, an album ambitious in intent that never quite takes off on the charts: it isn't even released in the United States, while in England it settles for a modest number 28. The title openly references Frank L. Baum's novel “The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz”, which is what the twang of the opening track “We're Not In Kansas” alludes to (Kansas being the state where young heroine Dorothy Gale's farm was located): unfortunately, there's precious little that's wonderful about the album itself, save for the guitar-driven ballads “The Hostage Speaks” and “Dynamite Lady” and the lovely piano-and-voice gem “Ships”, among the best-realized tracks here.
Produced by Pat Moran, the record definitively sheds the band's traditional Scottish garb in favour of a bland, flat, Americanized sonic outfit. Many of the tracks (the acid-rock “You Me And The Truth”, “Comes The Time” and “Leap Of Faith”) are pleasant enough but too similar to one another, to the disappointment of the sizeable fanbase (commercially it's still a decent success) who from now on have to say goodbye to the band's rousing e-bow sorties. On the plus side, there's Stuart's committed songwriting, which at least seems to give the record some meaning: “Republican Party Reptile” tackles the theme of political corruption, while the aforementioned “We're Not In Kansas” and “The Hostage Speaks” lament, respectively, a general decline in ethical values and the scourge of Western hostages taken in Lebanon.
In short, the sacred creative fire still burns in the lyrics, but Moran's production (previously put to use by numerous hard-rock and prog-metal artists such as Rush, Robert Plant, Lou Gramm and Hawkwind) proves heavy-handed and ill-suited to the context, nor are things helped by a few clever touches like the use of the wah pedal or banjo on the failed single “Beautiful People” (number 72 on the UK charts). The introspective “Into The Fire” and the more exuberant “Keep On Dreaming” close out, without too many highs or lows, an LP that marks a point of no return in the band's history. Big Country now find themselves, paradoxically, trapped in the very same cliché that had until then been their true strength, suddenly turned repetitive and out of fashion.

“We're Not In Kansas” and “Ships” are dusted off, with mixed fortunes, on the follow-up Buffalo Skinners, the sixth studio album which in 1993 tries to turn the band's fortunes around, aided by a new contract offered by Chrysalis (given the way the wind was blowing, previous label Mercury now decides to cut all ties). On drums is the seasoned Simon Phillips (Nik Kershaw, Judas Priest and Toto among the highlights of his rich CV); despite a positive critical reception, though, inspiration flags once again this time around. The sound swings decisively towards hard rock: there's no trace of the trademark Celtic bagpipes beyond a few faint echoes on “Seven Waves”, “Pink Marshmallow Moon” and the outrageous “Selling The America”. The tracklist is dominated by an explosion of aggressive guitars à la "Sonic Temple" (by fellow travelers The Cult) oozing the band's visceral love for the working class and a latent sense of political and social outrage (the feisty “What Are you Working For?”, “because you played chance with a lifetime's romance/ and the price was far too long”).
Also worth noting is the excellent “Long Way Home” (“half a million sons of Nixon, some with toys and some with anger/ hunted by the men in black”) and the post-punk-tinged opener “Alone” (“I have been a sailor/ lost and lonely on your sea”); the real problem, though, is the simultaneous rise of the grunge phenomenon, which overshadows any ambition toward a different compositional register.
Adamson's still-intact lyrical sharpness lends the romantic anthem “The One I Love” a certain epic mysticism veiled in melancholy: it's no coincidence, since Buffalo Skinners was written during the very days the frontman was divorcing his first wife Sandra, worn down by his abuses, so the lyrics reflect the pain of loss and are tightly bound to the extremely difficult period the singer was going through. The new version of “Ships”, for instance, is a fragile yet furious plea (“where were you when I needed you?”), bolstered here by sharp, rugged Thin Lizzy-style country riffs, and all in all it's preferable to the piano-only original.
But generally speaking, pretty much all the songs sadly address the loneliness of a relationship on its last legs. The only variations on the theme are a couple of environmentalist numbers (“Winding Wind” and “All Go Together”) and the dark, pounding closing track “Chester's Farm”.

Certainly not their most representative album, then, but anyone with a taste for hard rock will still find plenty to sink their teeth into. There is, however, a flip side to the coin: ten years on from The Crossing, Buffalo Skinners in a sense writes the final word on Big Country's story — or at least on that Scottish touch that had defined their golden era.

1995-2000: why the long faces?

1995 brings confirmation of the decline with Why The Long Face, a pop-rock hybrid that moves definitively away from the band's roots to attempt an awkward foray into Brit territory. The result is genuinely modest: don't get us wrong, there's no shortage of energetic riffs and interesting hooks (lead single “I'm Not Ashamed”, the Rush-like “Send You”, “God's Great Mistake” and “Thunder And Lighting” chief among them), but the 14 tracks that make up the record are, on the whole, too many, and they lack the fresh, spirited approach of Suede and Manic Street Preachers, who at that very moment were on their way up with the epoch-defining “Dog Man Star” and “The Holy Bible”. “Take You To The Moon” pushes forward with a country-western mood, while the Dylan-esque skiffle of “Post-Nuclear Talking Blues” mixes folk and blues to unremarkable effect. The disillusioned opener “You Dreamer” questions, with a hint of regret, (“is this the best world you were making your plans for?”), while “Charlotte” is the pulp story of a housewife in trouble.
Speaking of this album, guitarist Bruce Watson would later say: “It was our happiest time, it was just the four of us in jeans and t-shirts making a lot of good music.” During this period Adamson tries to shake off, even before the bottle, a life that isn't going the way he wants, and so he moves to Nashville, where he remarries, to hairdresser Melanie Shelley, and meets songwriter Marcus Hummon (the two would later release an album together under the moniker The Raphaels). But the resulting Brit-country drift doesn't amount to much, and the ballads “Wild In My Heart”, “Message Of Love” and “One In A Million” close out, without much excitement, an LP best forgotten.
Better, then, is the bonus disc attached to the CD reissue, which features some intriguing covers of Joni Mitchell (“Big Yellow Taxi”), Canned Heat (“On The Road”), Bruce Springsteen (“I'm On Fire”) and Lou Reed's “Vicious” (Lou Reed), capturing the band grappling with some of their genuine sources of inspiration.

In 1998 the Scottish band take advantage of a brief break to release a complete remastering of Restless Natives & Rarities: as mentioned earlier, this is the soundtrack to a 1985 adventure comedy directed by American filmmaker Michael Hoffman. It tells the story of two young men who grew up in Edinburgh's Western Hailes neighbourhood and who, to rebel against the brutal dullness of their lives, decide to turn to crime: they operate undisturbed among the crowds disguised as a clown and a wolf-man respectively; Big Country supply the music in the form of a single 35-minute track that merges the various pièces featured on the original release.

By now, though, no one seems willing to believe in them any longer: a year goes by, and the eighth album, Driving To Damascus (1999), is released on the London indie label Track Records; in the United States it comes out under the alternative title “John Wayne's Dream” with completely different artwork.

I was driving to Damascus when a sandstorm rose
The road disappeared and the axle froze
(“Driving To Damascus”)

Once again there's no trace of old-school bagpipes, but anyone with a taste for heavier sounds will find a few ideas to their liking here, direct and immediate ones. Chief among them are the frenzied bursts of the T-Rex-like title track “Driving To Damascus” and the Texarkana-flavoured “The President Slipped And Fell”, counterbalanced by the loping acoustic numbers “Trouble The Waters” (about racial issues), “Fragile Thing” (featuring Eddi Reader) and the folk tune “Your Spirit To Me”, among the most convincing of the bunch. “Dive Into Me” offers a catchy refrain and little else, the same strength underpinning the driving “Bella” (whose “Bella don't cry” refrain bears an uncanny resemblance to Inxs's “Baby Don't Cry” (Inxs), echoing much of its melody while never quite committing to it). The romantic ballad “See You” then softens the mood, before it returns forceful and angry on “Perfect World” (with a psycho-sixties flavour) and “Somebody Else”. Finally, there's “Devil In The Eye” and the sinister closing track “Grace”, built on a menacing drum intro and a martial, instrumental crescendo.
Not exactly enlightened "on the road to Damascus", but not something to dismiss out of hand either, this remains the last LP with Adamson at the helm and bassist Tony Butler (who would leave the band for good in 2012). A small hidden gem is “Loserville”, included as a bonus track only on the version released for the US market.

Yet another box-office flop, however, plunges Stuart back into the depths of a depression from which, this time, he will never recover. Madchester, Britpop, grunge, rave, hip-hop: there no longer seems to be any room for the Big Country Sound, and the band's commercial appeal seems to have finally run dry.

2001-2013: Big Country's last journey

Now sunk into an irreversible personal crisis, Adamson needs to unplug and mysteriously disappears for a while, only to resurface for the farewell tour "Final Fling", which culminates in a triumphant homecoming show in his native Scotland. The concert at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom on 31 May 2000 sells out, and in October of that same year Big Country play in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a show that will be remembered as their very last live performance. Stuart, in fact, disappears once again, this time for good: searches prove fruitless, as do appeals posted on the band's official website. On 16 December 2001, his body is found lifeless in a hotel room at the Best Western Plaza in Honolulu, Hawaii. After a period of sobriety, he had gone back to drinking heavily, right up to the tragic end. He hanged himself with an electrical cord in the room's wardrobe: it's his manager, Ian Grant, who breaks the sad news to the world, while police continue to investigate at the request of his wife, Melanie. A month later, in Dunfermline, a memorial evening is held in his honour, attended by numerous internationally renowned artists including Simon Townshend, Runrig, Bill Nelson and Midge Ure. Joining them on stage are his two children, Callum and Kirsten, who have since grown into promising musicians in their own right.

With Stuart Adamson's passing, an unquestionable and prolific talent is lost: just six months before his death, Track Records had released Supernatural, the only LP born in Nashville together with his friend Marcus Hummon. This is the side project mentioned earlier, rechristened The Raphaels, a pleasant alternative-country collection with no great highs or lows, of which the title track “Supernatural”, the autobiographical “Simple Man” and the flute-driven “Old Country, Country” stand out as the three highlights.
The rest of the tracklist finds a warm, well-blended mix of hypnotic whistling, fiddles and Braveheart-like atmospheres (“Private Battlefield” and “My Blue Rose”). “Learning To Raw” offers a tender look back at lost innocence and the mistakes of youth, while the more eccentric “Mexican Trout” and “Toujours Aimez” tell, instead, the strange tale of an encounter with a French model. The only off note is Adamson's deliberately thick American accent, a touch too forced and never quite at ease in such an unfamiliar guise.

The surviving members of Big Country would reunite in 2007 for a tour celebrating their 25th anniversary, scrupulously documented on the live collection Twenty Five Live. Afterwards, Alarm's Mike Peters (Alarm) is brought in on vocals, and with him, between 2010 and 2011, the band play another round of shows and, with the help of trusted producer Steve Lillywhite, release the brand-new single “Another Country”. Butler is replaced by Simple Minds bassist Derek Forbes: on 8 April 2013, this renewed line-up brings into the world, at the Welsh studios in Wrexham, a new album tellingly titled The Journey — a genuinely lovely record, as it happens, produced by independent label Cherry Records.

The past is a foreign land, two sides tore apart
(“In A Broken Promised Land”)

Before his death, Adamson had actually pointed to Peters as the ideal candidate to replace him, since the combat style of his Alarm bandmates was really very close to that of his own Big Country. On mandolin and violin there's curiously Jamie Watson, son of original guitarist Bruce: "After The Flood", "Last Ship Sails" and "Home Of The Brave" pick up the barricade rock of early U2 and The Clash, elevated to a true generational anthem on "Hail And Farewell", while the stirring, near-eponymous "Another Country" partly revives the band's original bagpipe sound.
Powerful guitars ("Strong All Through This Land"), introspective lyrics ("Angels And Promises") and anthemic choruses ("Winter Fire"): The Journey (2013) is anything but a fleeting nostalgia exercise — it's a solid album that, despite going almost unnoticed on the charts, won the band new legions of aficionados, who in any case have always kept flocking to their live shows. "Return" spits out New Order-style effected riffs, while the slower, more measured "Hurt" and the energetic "In A Broken Promised Land" put the seal on the story of Big Country, who by this point had truly reached their final flutter of wings.
Indeed, after a further tour of North America, Mike Peters and Derek Forbes also left the group: English rocker Simon Hough was tried out on vocals for a while, while Scott Whitley was brought in on bass to work on possible new material that, to this day, has still never seen the light of day.

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