Big Country Untamed
Stuart Adamson remembers the night well. It was about two years ago, shortly after he had parted ways with a band called the Skids. He was lying in bed, thinking, the way he did every night before he drifted off to sleep, when it suddenly came to him: Big Country. Perfect! It was exactly what he’d been looking for, the ideal moniker for his new group.
The name worked on two levels. It conveyed the sort of rural aspect of the band’s Scottish roots, which are so important to Stuart. This was not, after all, a group manufactured in the corporate bowels of the London music industry, nor was it one born in the industrial gloom of places like Manchester and Liverpool. No, this was a band that had little to do with current fashions or trends or politics. And its music — the stirring, Celtic-flavored anthems and Stuart’s own unconventional guitar playing, which at times recalls such traditional instruments as bagpipes or fiddles — was as folkish as it was modern.
But most important, Stuart thought, as he lay in bed on that quiet, peaceful night in his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland, the name Big Country suggested the breadth of the band’s ambitions. It was symbolic of the large territory he had staked out for the group — territory he and his fellow musicians would explore and develop in the years to come.
Like so many other British kids, Stuart had been inspired by what he viewed as the positive elements of the punk movement. Those early years of punk, 1976 and 1977, were his favorites because for him they marked the first time that young people had a chance to get up and express themselves onstage in the manner in which they saw fit. To Stuart, punk wasn’t about a certain style of music or dress. It was about being able to write songs that honestly express your emotions, your feelings, your observations, and then sharing those songs with an audience that was your equal, not one that worshiped you as a kind of demigod, the way the Rolling Stones and the Who had come to be worshiped.
When the Skids started out in Dunfermline in 1977, the four original band members shared Stuart’s attitudes about music. But by the time of their third album, The Absolute Game, in 1980, things had soured. Lead singer Richard Jobson had become something of a preening, posing dilettante, dabbling in poetry and theater. And the audience no longer seemed to matter so much. So Stuart left the band and returned to his hometown, where he set out to form a new group, one that would not stray from that idealistic path. And lying in bed on that night in 1981, Stuart made up his mind: The band would be called Big Country.
Mark Brzezicki perks up. A waiter at New York’s Peking Duck House has just passed the table, his arms loaded down with platters of the house specialty, giving Big Country’s tall, stocky, 26-year-old drummer cause to break the momentary silence. “This,” says Brzezicki, pointing to the trayful of crispy ducks, “is the kind of place where they say, ‘I’ll bring you the bill later.'”
The other members of Big Country — Adamson, guitarist Bruce Watson and bassist Tony Butler — groan loudly. But the bad jokes don’t stop. Adamson picks up his glass of Tsingtao beer and offers a toast to New York: “I’m so happy to be here,” says the 25-year-old guitarist, “in the city where so many other musicians have died before me.”
When the four members of Big Country are together, that kind of playful camaraderie always emerges. “Even if we didn’t play any instruments, I think it would have been a great loss to all of us if we hadn’t met one another,” Brzezicki says of their friendship.
But team spirit aside, there are plenty of other reasons to be cheerful on this night. Big Country’s debut album, The Crossing, has made it all the way to Number Two on the British charts, while in America, the notoriously conservative radio programmers jumped on the record and made it one of the 10 most-played LPs almost as soon as it was released. Based on initial sales figures in the U.S., word was that The Crossing was almost certain to sell at least a half million copies.
But Big Country’s is no overnight-success story, not by a long shot. Chris Briggs, the A&R man who signed the band to Britain’s Phonogram Records and its American sister company, PolyGram, can attest to that. “The first nine months were harrowing,” says Briggs, who also works with ABC. Def Leppard and Dire Straits, among others. “I definitely had some sleepless nights. There were moments of brooding into my beer, thinking, ‘Maybe I’m just crazy.'”
Briggs had been an admirer of Adamson’s ever since hearing his soaring guitar on the Skids’ punkish “Into the Valley,” a British hit in 1979. So when Stuart struck out on his own, the London-based A&R man hightailed it up to Scotland to see what he was up to. It was not an overly impressive sight, as Briggs recalls. “Big Country at that time was Stuart and four local guys. Stuart was like the master, and they were his pupils.”
It wasn’t, Briggs remembers thinking, a lineup destined for greatness. “Stuart was already too advanced to wait for young players to pick up sufficient skill. It would have taken too long, and Stuart would have lost momentum. He needed people who could do it right there on the spot, musicians who would chase him.”
Despite Briggs’ advice, the guitarist took that nascent version of Big Country on the road as an opening act for, of all people, Alice Cooper. It was a tour he’d just as soon forget. “We were treated very badly,” he says. “We got our gear onstage as the people were coming in through the doors. And Alice Cooper, well, I couldn’t believe it when I saw him. It was just completely over-the-top heavy metal.”
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