Big Country - s/d, c or d?

(and yeah, they weren't just one-hit wonders in the U.K., lots of hits)

I discovered Big Country through one of the non-MTV video shows, most likely Friday Night Videos, which used to air on NBC in the early ’80s. The “In a Big Country” clip featured the band (presumably--they were wearing helmets) riding around Scotland on ATVs, chasing some willful young lass. But I bought The Crossing, Big Country’s 1983 debut album, as many did, not only because the sound was so distinctive--the guitars as bagpipes--but because when they sang about the largeness of the land and how it might inspire someone needing uplift, they seemed completely serious.

Stuart Adamson, the band’s singer and songwriter, wrote about Scotland--not the new, semi-Americanized Scotland growing in the cities of Glasgow or Edinburgh, but the old Highlands Scotland of glacial creation and gray skies and evil English lords and William Wallace. There were songs on The Crossing about famine (“Harvest Home”), missionaries making their way home in the dark (“Lost Patrol”), and great bloody battles (“Fields of Fire”). All were grand, all were panoramic. Even the occasional love song (“1000 Stars”) sounded as if a man and a woman were breaking up on the edge of a rocky, windswept cliff.

The album’s inner sleeve was illustrated with black-and-white renderings of lighthouses, oceans, men dodging falling rocks. The band’s logo included a compass. A compass! Who else, except perhaps John Denver, about whom no more shall be said, has dared to write songs about the land, about mountains and storms? With Mark Brzezicki’s martial drumming and Adamson’s booming voice, the album was intimate yet vast, gritty yet atmospheric, universal yet fervently nationalistic. Listening to it, you really felt--prepare for a word this magazine will regret publishing--transported. Even the band’s videos sought to immerse you in a frigidly exotic place and time. While U2 rode horses in the snow in “New Year’s Day,” Big Country dressed as World War I soldiers and ran through minefields in “Fields of Fire.” It was so corny it ached, but its unfettered earnestness was welcome, given the vapidity of the era.

Big Country were born in 1981, when the United Kingdom was producing some of the most ludicrous music ever devised. Synthesizers had sent thousands of actual-instrument-playing musicians onto the dole, and most successful bands traveled with a hair architect, a jeans ripper, and someone to tie scarves around the members’ necks and ankles. Still, there was some good music to be found, smart, tight pop that took punk’s energy and polished it, exploding the fatuousness of Boston-Journey-ELO spaceship rock, stripping things down, bringing it back to Earth. Squeeze made it, as did XTC, Elvis Costello, and the Go-Go’s. We listen to their tight, well-crafted songs and we think, “Of course! This is the way songs are supposed to be--they should be neat and polished and no more than three minutes long.” There are no loose ends, no mistakes, and this gives us a sense, dare we say, of the order we can make of the world.
They were Big Country, and they are wrongly forgotten

But then we hear something different. We hear something huge and loose and flawed, and when that somehow works, we switch our allegiance and we say, “No, no--this is it, this is the way it should be.” Such music unravels everything we know but makes that unraveling, that fraying of all order, feel like the best idea anyone’s ever had. It hits higher highs and lower lows, and by the end, you wind up somewhere very different from where you began. This is the Epic Album, achieved by bands like U2, Radiohead, and, most recently, the Walkmen (holy lord, that record is great). The difference between the tidy song/Perfect Album and the crazy song/Epic Album is the difference between driving an efficient, shiny sports car that can accelerate quickly and turn on a dime and driving an 18-wheeler at 200 miles an hour and having it take off, become airborne, and just barely miss flying into a mountain. The Crossing was that kind of album.

So I started following pretty much everything Big Country did. I was too young (13) to go to a concert at a club--and I don’t even know if they made it to Chicago--but I caught them when they gave a short TV interview, which I taped on our new Montgomery Ward VCR. Stuart Adamson sat with bassist Tony Butler, at that point the only black man I’d ever heard speak with a Scottish accent. Adamson was pasty, his hair short but gelled in a bedhead style, his eyes small, close-set, and dark. He looked and sounded like a Boy Scout, talking very solemnly about how few bands were making real music, how slick and uninspired things had become.

He and Butler were wearing plaid shirts--one red, one blue. Big Country wore a lot of plaid. This was an era when bands, like the image-conscious gangs in The Warriors, wore matching outfits: The Jacksons had their space-admiral look, Dexy’s Midnight Runners had their waif-in-overalls motif, and Bananarama…also had a waif-in-overalls motif. And though such ensembles, even then, seemed tragic, Big Country’s somehow felt unplanned, as if the members all happened to show up, night after night, photo shoot after photo shoot, in plaid shirts, presumably selected from closets holding nothing else. These men were so unmistakably sincere that everything they did defied pity or suspicion.

I can’t say it was all Big Country’s doing, but I too started wearing a lot of flannel. That winter I walked through the snow for hours listening to The Crossing, jumping down ravines, looking for caves, walking on frozen lakes, letting in the cold. I would come home chilled to the bone, my feet itchy from the onset of frostbite, but I felt stoic, like I knew something about the fighting men of the harsh Scottish countryside. It was sad, yes, but this is the kind of experience-through-osmosis adolescents usually get by reading Wuthering Heights or Dune, not from listening to an album. How many bands could claim to have created, in ten songs, an entire troubled, inspired, rainy, sorrowful but persevering world?

Big Country became well known for their live shows, which were spirited, revival-like. During “Fields of Fire” they often did a sort of jig, kicking at the same time, left and right, a little bit Highlands, a little bit rock’n’roll. I eventually found a live import of a New Year’s Eve concert in Edinburgh. At the end of the show, while the drummer did a long snare buildup to “In a Big Country,” Adamson spoke to the audience, out of breath. “I just want to say...” he said, then he seemed to lose his train of thought. “I just want to say...” he repeated, and trailed off again. After a long pause, he finished: “I just want to say...stay alive.” He spoke the words very quickly, as if for whatever reason they were difficult to get out. At least that’s how I remember it. Then the band kicked in.

Big Country’s next two recordings, 1984’s Wonderland EP and Steeltown, were every bit as good as The Crossing, but the quartet never had another hit in the U.S. Eventually they seemed to capitulate to what they felt the American market wanted, creating a series of shatteringly mainstream singles, as if Adamson had been possessed by Kip Winger. Or Kip Winger’s less talented brother. Worse, the band traded in their denim and flannel for tapered linen pants and Miami Vice jackets. It was rough.

And now, while a series of ’80s bands have been eulogized or even resurrected, nobody talks much about Big Country. Maybe it’s because they defy classification. Those interested in the kitsch value of the era might recall Big Country for their plaid and for committing Rock Sin No. 41--having a song with their name in it--but any deeper look into their music separates them from the Kajagoogoos or Dramaramas. Big Country had an original take on the world and might have followed a path similar to U2’s--their sound was just as big, and Adamson’s worldview was just as idealistic. Yet before they had the chance to make the leap from curiosity to full respectability--a leap made by Beck, the Beastie Boys, and others who started their careers with a misunderstood crossover hit--they abandoned what made them distinctive. And many of their loyalists deserted them.

Stuart Adamson hanged himself in a hotel room in Hawaii in 2001, at the age of 43. He’d disappeared a few weeks earlier from his home in Tennessee, where he’d moved in 1997. He’d struggled with alcoholism for years, and an autopsy revealed that at the time of his death, he had a blood-alcohol level over 0.2. His passing made the wire services, but it wasn’t big news in America. It had been, after all, 18 years since “In a Big Country.” But for those who still cared--and there are dozens of websites that dissect every word he wrote and publicly spoke--Adamson’s death was as affecting as anyone’s, including Kurt Cobain’s.

For the previous six months, I’d been in touch with the band’s manager, Ian Grant, because I was planning to write something about Big Country--I didn’t know what, maybe a short biography, or a tribute; I wasn’t sure. Grant told me that Adamson was living in Nashville with his wife, who owned a beauty parlor, and that he was writing country music with a band called the Raphaels. At some point while we were trying to arrange a time for me to visit, news of Adamson’s disappearance arrived. The official Big Country website posted pleas to fans to report any sightings. It was devastating to watch it all unfold.

Kurt Cobain’s suicide wasn’t entirely surprising. His head was known to be a dark and tortured place, and there were countless clues that he might someday choose an early exit. But it’s harder to get your mind around things, isn’t it, when someone whose vision seemed so positive and outward-focusing decides to end his life. How can a man who finished his concerts with the words “stay alive,” the words spoken to throngs of young people as they looked up at him soaked in sweat and grinning, hang himself in a Hawaii hotel room?

There’s no moral here. There are lessons, maybe, but they cancel each other out. Lesson: Don’t forget who you are, and don’t pretend to be, say, Kip Winger or a country singer from Nashville. On the other hand: Was Adamson supposed to play Scot-rock in plaid flannel all his life? Lesson: More bands should write about the land, the sky, soldiers, storms, oceans; the world is vast and rock music is uniquely poised to reflect that. Counterpoint: One false move and you’ve got Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Lesson: Go buy The Crossing. Listen to the eight-minute “Porrohman” and tell me these guys didn’t know something about soul and suffering and uplift. Counterpoint: There is no counterpoint to that one. Final lesson: Support your local Epic Album makers. Let the Walkmen and Interpol and Grandaddy know they’re necessary to the mix, lest they take the easy way out.

Anyhow, things I still honestly like about them: the guitars when they're not being all wheezy and coming down with some strange Caledonian asthma, I think Bruce and Stuart really primed me for hearing Television later on; their way with a melancholy tune, even when they paired it with this totally unreasonable optimism, cos even then you knew that that the sadness would win out in the end; I like that whole epic sensibility and they could really conjure a mood when they wanted to; also their utterly unrockstar way of conducting themselves, exemplified in their ridiculous dress sense, and capped with the lovely old photo I've got of Stuart Adamson giving my wife a hug when she was a kid.

I saw them on their tour for the Buffalo Skinners and they were pretty great. Of course, "In a Big Country" is great, but seek ye also "Look Away", "Fields of Fire", "All Go Together" (Big Country go METAL...well, not really).

It's all about Stu's guitars, of course.

Don't forget THE SKIDS, though.

I like this thread ... Big Country were an adolescent obsession of mine for a couple of years, so I remember them with a mixture of fondness and slight embarrassment.

Nick: Funny I never thought of Television in conjunction with BC before, but they do share a certain guitar-centric musoness. And melancholy, yes.

Incidentally, has anyone else listened to 'Porrohman' lately and thought "Mogwai"? (er, just me then)

I saw BC's last ever gig in Ireland, in 2000. They played a very predictable set to a wildly enthusiastic blokey pisshead audience, who bellowed along to every song as though their lives depended on it. I didn't like the way both band and audience seemed to be just going through the motions (yes, an audience *can* be both wildly enthusiastic and going through the motions). It was all a bit depressing. Then again, they say you can't go back ...

Alex mentions the Skids - haven't listened to them in ages, but I imagine The Absolute Game, Days In Europa and Scared To Dance wouldn't sound out of place in the era of Franz Ferdinand et al.

Sounds like I had a similarly depressing experience to you when I went to see them one last time 'for old times sake'. Had never bought anything beyond The Seer and some of the then new material was just plain horrible. Must have been waaaay back though cos the Wonderstuff were supporting them and they'd only just put out 'Unbearable' for the first time. 1987?

Mark Brezyki (sp?) drummed for the Cult for all of about five minutes (though appears in the vid for "She Sells Sanctuary"). He filled in for Nigel Preston (who died, I believe?) and was quickly replaced by Les Warner (who also didn't stay too long).

You're right about Nige Preston, died in 1983 just after completing the second Theatre Of Hate album (which wasn't released until many years later) I believe.

I never liked Big Country as much as I did The Skids although in retrospect now I think maybe they've aged slightly better.

Mark Brzezicki was one of my drummer heroes in high school. Tony Butler was good too. The rhythm section didn't exactly swing, but it did really move.

Hey, I didn't say that he was with them for a long time. Few drummers have been.

In the future, everyone will drum for the Cult for about five minutes.

I bought the "Best Of" some weeks back, just for fun. I used to have Steeltown, I'd really like to hear that whole thing again. I used to think "Just A Shadow" was their best song, now I'm convinced it's "Where The Rose Is Sown".

I also have fond memories of the Wonderland song and I remember buying that EP when it came out.

My best friend at the time was into the Crossing album but I never really took to that one as a whole album. I preferred Steeltown.

wonderland (i think the video for "new years day" made snowy landscapes sort of de rigueur for earnest guitar bands)

wonderful!!! I heard U2's "Two Hearts Beat As One" on the radio this morning as I woke up and that was really weird. I haven't seen the video for that in a billion years either. Thanks!

Wonderland video wonderful thanks

Man they really jumped the fucking shark with that song "King of Emotion" huh? What the fuck were they doing with a heavy metal riff? ugh it could be fucking Def Leppard.

that song is godawful (and it could not be def leppard, even def leppard's bad songs are better than that).

However, Bryant Reeves was pretty good basketball player in his, albeit short, time.

Okay WOWWWW these Steeltown extra tracks BLEW MY MIND. I mean as if listening to the entirety of the original Steeltown album today at work in my headphones wasn't enough of a delightful experience - haven't heard it in many, many years and I was amazed to learn it was a Lillywhite production, I never knew or remembered that he had produced them. Listen to the drums the way they crack as if each is a rimshot all its own. Listen to the primitive rumble of the bass. Holy hell, and as if they didn't PLAY well as musicians I mean oh my god. They fucking shred.

So then these extra tracks come along and I'm like holy hell what is this? I've never heard this before. I'm talking about "Bass Dance", "Belief In The Small Man" (my favourite - what a tune!) and "Prairie Rose". Also I DIDN'T FUCKING REALIZE I WAS MISSING OUT ON A 12" VERSION OF WONDERLAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOW!!!!!!!!!!!

The guitar on Winter Sky!!!

i used to own the 12" of wonderland, but i didn't know there was a steeltown with extra tracks. i guess i should find it.

now i really want to hear "tall ships go"

YES! THAT ONE IS ESPECIALLY GOOD@!

Imagine if they'd got together with Eno...

This band are my salvation. I can't even speak.

Top Of The Pops, 1983

I feel the winter too...

Just A Shadow

Whoops

Here we go: Just A Shadow

In a Big Country
Dreams stay with you
Like a lover's voice
far as the mountainside

McSweeney's in valorizing Big Country for prefiguring The Decemberists shocker.

But egads The Crossing is grebt. It's a pop churrigueresque, urgent, generous, overloaded, with what feels like an EP's worth of hooks crammed into each song. Even when the Sir Walter Scott conceit starts to groan under its own weight (e.g."The Lost Patrol") there's new a vocal or guitar line or change coming with every new bar.

Goddammit this band, they could outdo Simple Minds for just awhile but don't tell anyone. They'll whisper it in my ear. You think I'm joking...

This band

"I am honest man
I am a working man
I feel the winter too"

You think I'm finished? I haven't posted the video yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZgioX6s1UI

It says "embedding disabled by request" just double click it, thanks

spooky glockenspiels a pretty ripe band name, i reckon.

I imagine that ambient album as described would be pretty awesome. It might also sound a bit like Frippertronics.

Speaking of ambience, the opening minute-plus of "Porrohman" could be sampled to endless purposes. This live clip may be one of the videos I posted above in this thread that have since disappeared. It's great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQRxbjyQceo

I've posted him before because he's awesome but:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBpXK5LMzXA

talking of ambient, it was fun to revisit some skids' deep cuts knowing what i know now about eno and fripp and cluster et al

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dAJxkfcehQ
Skids - Snakes & Ladders (Peel Session, 1980) - sounds like some sort of ambient guitar pedal demo from 2017 tbh, knobs eat yr heart out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_sY9ljUFac
Skids - A Man For All Seasons (The Absolute Game bonus disk, 1980) - lots of pitch-shifted guitar over some roedelius-esque bloopiness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mznYLqLicxE
Skids - Peaceful Times (Days In Europa, 1979) - big dose of bill nelson backwards magic on this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avbvgbGBnCY
Skids - Surgical Triumph (The Absolute Game bonus disk, 1980) - another another green world

I haven't heard a Big Country album yet, but I listened to Days in Europa last year. Can't say that I loved the songs, but it sounded to me like the unexpected bridge between Devo and U2 that I'd never imagined existed.

i like that characterisation of them! they were actually an influence on u2 - i think that when staurt adamson died, the edge said something like stuart was the guitarist that the edge always wanted to be. also there was that horrendous u2/green day cover of 'the saints are coming'

the devo-ish nerd punk thing did carry over to some of the early big country songs. this one definitely springs to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8G-VQom2kM

(there is an early demo version of that somewhere with synths instead of guitars)

Good long feature: https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-life-and-hard-times-of-big-country-and-stuart-adamson

thanks alfred, enoyed reading that

Really interesting to read that the bagpipe guitars were in some ways a happy accident by way of avoiding playing anything bluesy. Lots of melodic scales, harmonies, drones, etc.,

Yeah, that was a good read. Also confirms the huge role Lillywhite played in creating their sound.

Great set here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UlnVnQ06ZM

tough read tbh but a good one.

re the whole guitars/bagpipes thing, the comparison’s always struck me as a disservice. it was never a gimmick, and to the extent that any particular riff “sounds like bagpipes” what we’re hearing is less an effect than a melodic/harmonic sensibility.

show me a rock guitar genius suckled on highland folk music and I’ll show you a guitar that sounds like a bagpipe.

hot take: nothing in big country's music sounds like bagpipes.

sidebar: this revive has me jamming the skids for the first time in my life and i'd just like to say to the collective here that you guys are fucking awesome. thank you so much for letting me eavesdrop on your conversations and take notes.

Just watched the drummer video above, it's good. I liked in the article how Brzezicki talked about taking marching band inspiration from Steve Gadd, I wouldn't have made that connection but it makes sense.

hot take: nothing in big country's music sounds like bagpipes.

exactly. but something in big country's music made some people think of bagpipes. given the former, I'm curious about the latter.

"fields of fire"...what a banger

One of my favorite things in the whole world is sending people familiar with just the big(ger) hit to the album and getting their appropriately awestruck reaction. As in, "where has this been my whole life, I only knew the hit!"

I suppose the only other single to achieve comparable U.S. video and airplay was "Look Away" in summer '86, no?

Did "Fields of Fire" not chart at all in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Country_discography#Singles

I remember hearing it briefly around that time, and I did see the SNL performance. That plus The Big One were essentially my only encounters with their work.

How could you not be roused?

https://vimeo.com/801825759

"Fields of Fire" fares even better in this context.

Looking at that discography I'm surprised "Look Away" did that well on the US rock chart. I remember the video getting a little MTV play but I don't recall hearing it on the radio. Good song tho!

I have a friend who only knows or cares about "In a Big Country" and thinks it's hilarious that I can rank and discuss the relative merits of three different Big Country albums. I think for most Americans they're like Men Without Hats or something.

Just did a little research: "Look Away" was in heavy MTV rotation for several weeks in July-August 1986.

loved the Fields of Fire video as a kid!

My heart is rewarmed a little bit every time this thread reappears on my New Answers list.

Thought ‘Fields of Fire, huh?’ Then cued it up and BLAM! Straight back to 12 year old me rocking out in my bedroom. What a trip down memory lane. It’s getting rarer to encounter a song I’ve not heard since I was a child and getting that Proustian Rush

This guy's trademark snark doesn't work that well with a band steeped in snark-repellent, but I still learned a little:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaO5QOvVr1E

Anyway, words to live by: “So take that look out of here, it doesn't fit you. Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded. Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming. Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted!”

TBF, Todd (who I know very casually) is fully upfront about two things: both that depending on where you were the idea of them being a one-hit wonder is ridiculous and that there is absolutely no happy ending to the story. He also noted that this was a request from a fundraiser to help his dog through a medical emergency, so he might not have gone for this in the first place without that. But yeah, it was an engaging reminder of that lyric for sure.

I typically like his takes, and he more less comes to the right conclusion: the hit(so) rule(s), the first three albums are worth a listen (even if I don't think the second one sounds as bad as he claims), the band should have been a contender. It's just the literal tone is off, probably because a) he actually likes the band and b) yeah, he was sort of doing it under duress.

his vids are generally pretty good and open-minded, i think some people are just born with snark-tone?

And there's plenty he loves and talks about! His year end videos on his favorites of the year are as good as his hate lists.

I've watched the SNL video a couple times. Boy, it wallops.

Very much remember that performance at the time.

Tony Butler's the silent star.

Not silent! He's a good enough singer that iirc he's lead a few of the post Adamson lineups. Regardless, great to see a band move around on stage so much, even if they look a little like someone told them to move around on stage a lot.

There was this awesome dork on youtube who used to post drum covers of Big Country, he ruled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kREc3HZWm_M

Weird Tony Butler trivia is that his bassline on "My City Was Gone" ended up as the de facto theme song for Rush Limbaugh's show for a decade. That riff was supposedly something he was just playing in the studio to warm up, and Chrissie Hynde liked it.

Haven't watched the whole thing yet but he is so damn right that Wonderland is their best song. Probably.

Our Marcello wrote well about Steeltown: https://nobilliards.blogspot.com/2014/05/big-country-steeltown.html

Steeltown is fantastic if you can deal with the production, Steve Lillywhite did much the same thing that he did to Simple Minds on Sparkle In The Rain that same year, everything is such a racket, but it works a little better on the latter as Simple Minds had a more spacious sound to start with. Charlie Burchill takes up way less space in the mix than Stuart and Bruce do with their guitars. I suppose the main themes on Steeltown are things like industry and warfare so maybe the clanging and the clattering work from that POV.

Had forgotten how unappetising Big Country became after The Seer. Didn't hear any of the albums that followed, but the singles were dire.

Do people know this one? it's from Frida from Abba's second solo album. Again it's a Lillywhite production, song is written by Stuart and he's very obviously on guitar too. Mark Brzezicki plays drums, it sounds very Big Country indeed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVJjxkY7-0Q
Frida - Heart Of The Country (1984)

Wow, I've never heard that, cool!

My favorite Brzezicki is on the Cult's "Love" album, especially the title track. So many cool changes, and one of my favorite drum fills of all time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcv-Ah2q3ag

drafted in at short notice after the cult's original drummer got busted for armed robbery iirc

Anyone remember Slade's hamfisted attempt to ape the Big Country sound?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMxcGaAwy-Q

lol, I know that song well (for some reason), but I never made the connection!

I love "Run Runaway," it wasn't just Big Country there was also "Come On Eileen" around then, it was a mini-Celtic MTV thing.

The Celt-Big Music Connection

For sure.