Some of my Big Country stuff on display...
Posted on 12/18/2001 6:58:46 PM PST by Pokey78
In 1982 Stuart Adamson asked Allan Glen 's schoolfriend and bandmate Bruce Watson to join him in a new group called Big Country. Adamson and Watson went on to pop stardom. Glen became a coal miner. Here he describes his friend's journey from Dunfermline to Top of the Pops - and suicide in a Hawaii hotel room
In the 80s, Stuart Adamson was an idol to millions - and I was one of them. Here's a memory. It's 11pm in Edinburgh, September 1984, and the backstage clientele of the Playhouse are in party mode. Cue backslapping, the popping of Moet Chandon corks and the sound of success reverberating around the room. In one corner, U2's the Edge is locked in discussion with the singer and guitarist of arguably the most famous band in the world at that time about the superiority of the wah-wah pedal over the fuzzbox. In another corner, a coal miner on strike who faces the depressing reality that in an hour he will be heading back to Dunfermline over the red steel of the Forth Road Bridge to the harsh realities of Thatcher's determination to crush the NUM.
The party in Edinburgh was celebrating the end of Big Country's UK tour. As a friend of Stuart and Bruce Watson since Big Country formed, I had been invited to all the Scottish dates as a guest. It was an intoxicating experience for a 20-year-old miner in more ways than one. The band were always in high spirits - usually whisky. Alcohol fuelled that tour, morning, noon and night, a pattern that would be repeated for another 10 years and which would cause Adamson serious problems in later life.
On stage, of course, he was the epitome of professionalism. Adamson was always the volatile vortex of the group, often standing stage centre in a white vest and rolled-up jeans, a Fender slanted obliquely across his torso. To me, growing up in Dunfermline, he was an inspiration. Here was a 24-year-old musician from the same small mining town who had already appeared on Top of the Pops more than a dozen times with his previous band the Skids, and who, at 19, had John Peel telling millions of Radio1 listeners that he had discovered "the new Hendrix".
Born in Manchester, Adamson was raised in the small village of Crossgates in Fife. As a teenager, inspired by glam rock, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Bill Nelson, and finally by punk, he taught himself to play electric guitar. The impact of punk in 1977 persuaded the trainee environmental health inspector to put together a band of his own in Dunfermline. After recruiting bassist Tom Kellichan, drummer Willie Simpson and young vocalist Richard Jobson, he launched the Skids in 1977.
It was during the disintegration of the Skids four years later that I was first introduced to Adamson. Together with schoolfriends Bruce Watson and Derek Coll, I decided to start a band called Eurosect. Adamson had watched us play in the many venues of Dunfermline and, with the Skids on a temporary hiatus, would often come down to the rehearsal rooms of Sound Control, offering encouragement and support.
Unbeknown to us at the time, Adamson was secretly looking to start a new band, having decided to split the Skids. He could see that my fingers weren't exactly flying up and down the fretboard the way they should and it was our guitarist, Watson, whom he chose to join Big Country. It was Watson that broke the news to me. "You're not in Stuart's new band, Allan, but if we make it, your name will be on the guest-list for ever!" Like, cheers, lads. Ahead of me lay 11 years of dirt, grime and strikes as a miner in Fife while my friends travelled the world, sent gold albums to their mums and regaled me with tales of the rock-star life.
Although success in rock music can turn the most decent of people into disgusting creatures, Adamson really was a resolutely down-to-earth type who refused to leave Dunfermline, either in body or spirit. (His fondness for the town was evident even back in 1982. The Skids' record company, Virgin, asked the band what they would like to call their forthcoming greatest hits album. He told them: "There's no argument over what it's called. It'll be called Dunfermline - or it won't be released.") In later years, when the money started pouring in, both of them bought several houses in the town, despite repeated requests from their record company to relocate to London at the height of Big Countrymania.
During the 80s, Big Country were never a fashionable band, but ask any decent music critic about the contribution they made to pop and a misty look often comes over their eyes. Would we have had Oasis' anthems without Big Country? I don't think so. There was a lot more to Big Country than just the sound of blazing bagpipe-styled guitars and checked shirts. Drawing both on the healthier aspects of British rock history, from the Jam to Joy Division, and on his own Scottish highland heritage, Adamson forged a highly original music framework on which to hang his songs of justice, freedom and pain.
Signed to Mercury Records in 1983, the band's first Top 10 hit, Fields of Fire, was an instant classic and their debut album The Crossing (1983) reached No3 in the charts. They remained a chart presence throughout the 80s, and in 1985 the band was invited to appear at Live Aid, probably the pinnacle of their career.
The week after Live Aid, they returned to Dunfermline and threw a party in the St Margaret's hotel for their friends in the town. The talk was of Bob Geldof's valiant attempts to end famine in Africa mixed with the latest goings on at Solsgirth Colliery. Strange days. The party lasted three days and the band was on top of the world, but heading for a fall. They decided to launch their 1988 album, Peace in our Time, in Russia, and finance the deal themselves. It cost an estimated £3m and precipitated their slide into the lower ends of the charts and near bankruptcy.
Although they continued to have a committed live following through the early 90s, Big Country were effectively over when I last met Adamson in 1995 at the Cathouse in Glasgow. At that time I was working there as Scotland correspondent for the NME and, noticing an advert for the band in the local press, decided to go along to see them. It was basically a greatest hits set, the old songs far outsmarting the new stuff. Backstage after the gig, we sat around and talked of our two passions: music and Dunfermline. At one point, they asked if I could get a review of the band into NME. My heart sank. Here was a band who had achieved so much, but couldn't quite understand that this time it really was over. I mumbled something about the band being way beyond all that stuff and quickly changed the conversation. To watch a fall from grace is difficult - to have it happen to your friends and idols in front of your eyes is heartbreaking.
That evening, Adamson told me it was his ambition to put as much of the money he had left into businesses in Dunfermline; to give the town something back for all it had given him. (As main songwriter, he took the majority of the royalties, which led to fierce fighting with the other members.) He still owned a pub in Dunfermline, Tappie Toories, and, before moving to Nashville in the late 90s, could be seen serving behind the bar or playing an acoustic set before joining the punters for a beer until well after closing time. I remember one of his proudest days was when he was handed the keys to his home in the lush surroundings of Dunfermline's park, the Glen, opposite the house of Andrew Carnegie, that other, slightly more famous, local philanthropist. But with an increasing drink problem to cope with, Adamson decided to relocate to Nashville, where he teamed up with Marcus Hummon. It was here he met his wife Melanie. Their band, the Raphaels, received airplay on Radio 2 but never matched Stuart's finest moments with the Skids and Big Country.
The first I knew of Stuart hanging himself was when I read the Guardian's news report this morning. Initial reaction? Shock? Definitely. Sadness? Deeply. Surprise? Not entirely. During a recent visit to Dunfermline I got in touch with friends close to the band. The talk turned to, as always, Stuart. How was he doing, I asked. The reply was eerily prescient.
"Not good. He's back drinking again, this time worse than ever. There's nothing he won't touch. Methylated spirits, the lot. Things aren't going great for him in America."
So what caused him to tie a rope round his neck in a Hawaii hotel? The pain of separation from his two children? A once-brilliant career that was crumbling? The return of the alcoholism and depression that had haunted him for the past 10 years? So many questions, each answer adding to the pain of the tragic end of a man whose songs celebrated strength in adversity.
That I am writing my own life story of the past 25 years as a response to an idol's death is something that will stay with me for a long time. For my part, I'll always remember Stuart, aged 17, walking along the dirt track that ran parallel with my mum and dad's home in McClelland Crescent, Dunfermline, guitar in hand and on his way to see Sandra, his girlfriend at the time, and later his wife. As a 13-year-old fan of the Skids, I would spot him and run out of the house to ask him about a new song he had played at some venue or other in Dunfermline the previous weekend, begging him for the chord sequence so I could practise it on a battered old acoustic guitar. As always, he was polite, enthusiastic and not bothered that a snotty-nosed kid was pestering him. His eyes were invariably on fire when he spoke of his songs. That was when music suddenly made sense to me. Although I spoke to many musicians during my time with NME and Melody Maker, it was always that fire in Stuart's eyes that I used to measure their passion and enthusiasm for their own music.
Adamson brought hope to a town when it desperately needed it; he went off to conquer the world and was destroyed by it in the process. He also made this former coal miner realise that anything really is possible. And added my name to the guest-list for ever.
Today, Bruce, myself and the entire population of Dunfermline are in mourning. "I still believe that music has a very important part to play in people's lives," Stuart once told me. "If I ever do anything that helps to give people an idea of self, then I'll have done something worth doing." You did, Stuart, you did.
· Allan Glen is a freelance journalist based in Brighton.
Some of my Big Country stuff on display...
this is complete shit, your a prick glen
ok...
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