Big Country
Scottish
band Big Country - with their big guitars and heroic, anthemic
rock - were the polar opposite of the predominant synthesizer
groups of the 1980s.
Guitarist and Dunfermline lad Stuart Adamson - the unsung hero
and sound shaper of The Skids -survived
that band's miserable end to form a down-to-earth rock quartet
unhampered by grandiose artistic pretensions.
 Strengthened by guitarist - and former nuclear-submarine
cleaner - Bruce Watson, and the rhythm section of Tony Butler and
Mark Brzezicki, Big Country (named after a line in the Roxy
Music song Prairie Rose) quickly jumped into the
vanguard of resurgent guitar-hero bands.
The band released their debut album The Crossing in
August 1983 and it soared into the Top 5 as the band played the
Reading Festival.
Retaining some of The Skids' pseudo-bagpipe guitar effects, The
Crossing offered rousing anthems, such as In A Big
Country, Inwards and Fields of Fire
(with a riff cleverly lifted from The Guns of Navarone)
and moving romantic ballads (The Storm, Chance)
that neatly intertwined Celtic folk traditions with blazing guitar
riffs. The album subsequently went Top 20 in the States in
November.
Resplendent in their trademark checked shirts - and aware of
the fashion potency of the bandana long before gangsta rap - Big
Country trembled on the verge of greatness, despite dividing
opinion amongst pop's cognoscenti.
Some
saw them as genuine contenders for the crown captured by U2.
Others saw their honest, working man's ethic as, well, naff and
contrived.
 After carefully establishing their rockist guitar-army
aesthetic, Big Country took a surprising detour on the deliriously
overproduced Peace In Our Time, which submerged the
band's trademark sound in sanitised, synthesized musical settings
that gave scant evidence of what made their previous efforts so
appealing.
While a few decent songs shone through (Thousand Yard Stare,
From Here to Eternity and the title track), Peace In
Our Time's drastic recasting of the band felt like commercial
desperation rather than artistic restlessness. More to the point,
it just wasn't much fun.
Increasingly out of synch with the times, Big Country finally
called it a day in 2000.
Stuart Adamson hanged himself in a Hawaiian hotel room on 18
December 2001. He had been missing from his Nashville home for a
month. He was only 43.
|
