Stuart Adamson: In a Big Country

For Gill and Leon

A Note on the Author

Allan Glen has written for NME, Melody Maker and

The Guardian. He was born in Dunfermline and lives on

Teesside with his family.

STUART ADAMSON

IN A BIG COUNTRY

Allan Glen

Foreword by James Dean Bradfield

Introduction by Ian Rankin

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Polygon; this paperback edition published in 2011

by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Copyright © Allan Glen, 2011

Foreword © James Dean Bradfield, 2010

Introduction © Ian Rankin, 2010

The right of Allan Glen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 191 4

eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 026 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

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Contents

Foreword James Dean Bradfield

Introduction Ian Rankin

Prologue

Hope and Glory

I’m in the Mood for Fighting

Goodbye, Civilians

Country Alliance

Going for the Yankee Dollar

The Great Divide

Without a Live Aid Safety Net

Rock the Bloc

Kings of Emotion

Second Chance

Communication Breakdown

Restless Natives

Lost in a Big Country

Epilogue

Postscript

Selected Discography

Sources

Acknowledgements

Index

Foreword

James Dean Bradfield

I’ve always had a weird thing with Stuart Adamson. It wasn’t like hero worship – I’d never have copied any of his moves or, like, chanted ‘Shee-ah!’ before a chorus – but he was something you aspired to. He was a massive, massive influence on me. All of us [in the Manics] were big punk fans from when we were about fifteen years old, so we listened to the Sex Pistols and The Clash who were our standard-bearers and then we started wading around the nether regions of punk and we came across the Skids. The first album Nicky [Wire] and I bought was Scared to Dance; it was like the bridge between punk and new wave. There were a lot of albums I bought that I didn’t like, but when I bought Scared to Dance it just hit me like a sledgehammer. There was that punk ethic, but it was also articulate, it was aggressive, it was power, it was melodic and it was ambitious. I’d never heard anyone playing guitar like that before. Songs like ‘Of One Skin’, ‘Charles’; these were brilliant, angular, satirical songs. I thought Richard Jobson was absolutely brilliant. He was a nutter, but he was articulate. Ambition, articulacy and aggression; all the things you want in a band. It was like a real golden era for Scottish music.

Me and Nicky were into the Skids, then we got into Big Country because of Stuart Adamson and I remember hearing ‘Fields Of Fire’ on the radio and I just knew it was his guitar. Then I saw – which was a massive thing for me – a TV programme they were on. I was just sort of practising guitar when my mum and dad were going out on Friday nights and I’d stay in, and there was a TV show with Big Country playing live at Sefton Park in Liverpool. It was a brilliant gig. Absolute mega. And I just jumped up and down – that thing, with one knee up, one knee down – and I was just hooked straight away, I absolutely loved it. Then I was really jealous ’cause Nicky sent away to a competition for a Big Country Live at Barrowland video . . . and he won it! And I tried to get it off him to watch it at my house but he wouldn’t let me have the copy because he thought I’d break it. So just for a short period I bought a checked shirt from the market and I cut the sleeves off. That’s when Nick looked at me and said, ‘James, that’s going a bit far.’

One of the Big Country songs I play all the time is ‘Inwards’ which is my favourite by a mile. Between him and Slash I really did learn to play the guitar. There are a few Manics songs very influenced by Stuart. If you listen to ‘Motown Junk’ you’ll hear it quite clearly! There was a real technical prowess with Stuart. There was a big jump when he moved from the Skids to Big Country because it lost the artifice of what Jobson gave, very much talking about a European landscape, the destruction of Europe, the regeneration of Europe. In Big Country the work he was doing was more intricate, and it’s a great testament to what a great foil Bruce Watson was because everything they played was so interlinked with each other. And if they had fucked up it would have sounded like, bad, like really bad, like a hairdryer dying, but they never fucked up, it was always beautiful, so Bruce did take some pressure off Stuart. With Mark Brzezicki and Tony Butler there was this real rock-funk rhythm section which really twisted things in different places and on songs like ‘Wonderland’ you can really hear those influences. It’s a very funk-influenced song. Nobody seemed to point out what an original amalgamation it was when you put them all together, which is really what made Big Country as a band. Nick brought in The Crossing to our studio the other day – he had the red-sleeve version, I had the green one – and we were playing it, and it was gut-wrenching to hear it. We had to turn it off, thinking about everything that happened to Stuart.

With Steeltown you realise there were no second album problems for that group. ‘Just A Shadow’? What a song! ‘East Of Eden’? It was very Steinbeck. It was as if Stuart was trying to weave the tapestry of folklore and myth into some kind of modern-day reality. In America if you try to weave the old with the modern – like musicians such as Neil Young do – you’re feted, but in Britain there’s always this suspicion of it. It’s a hard thing to make work, and Big Country did make it work, but some of the press were suspicious of it. I remember reading NME and there was one interview which left me confused because I can remember thinking, This is the guitarist from the Skids and now they don’t like him? And I remember being really confused by the worldview of the NME at the time, while still believing everything I read in it. Yet when you look at the rock press today, Stuart would have been feted by titles such as Uncut and Classic Rock.

Are the Skids and Big Country relevant now? Songs like ‘Charles’ and ‘East Of Eden’ will always be timeless. I think in this age where people want to reconnect with the way they used to feel, then Big Country and the Skids would inevitably just be made for that. Songs like ‘Charles’, ‘Melancholy Soldiers’, ‘Fields Of Fire’, ‘Just A Shadow’ . . . absolute classic songs.

Everything he did was original. And he could sing as well. Not that many guitarists can pull that off. That’s not to take anything away from the other members of the Skids or Big Country – I love all of them too – but he was like a force of nature, the sound of thunder coming over the hills. Stuart could have worked in any generation – the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s. He didn’t have to come out of punk, he had all the gifts to do what he wanted to do – but it was punk that gave him the aggression. His playing makes me feel emotional. It is just absolute genius.

Introduction

Ian Rankin

Stuart was a couple of years above me at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath, which might explain why we never spoke. There was an almost impenetrable hierarchy, and while you might just about feel able to talk to fellow pupils one year above or below you, two years was too big a gap. Stuart and his pals ran the school, just as my pals and I would a few years later. There was an added problem in that Beath was a ‘feeder’ school. I lived in Cardenden; other kids called Ballingry, Lochgelly or Kelty home. We were bussed to Beath in the morning and bussed back again at 4 p.m. It was hard to mix outwith school hours. Fife was a bit rough back then, and decidedly territorial. If you found yourself in a town where you didn’t belong, a kicking might not be too far away. These were the years of skinheads and bovver boots, three-quarter-length Crombie coats and plenty of attitude. The coalfields had closed down and alienation was rife. When punk came along, it was a god-sent release for many of us. There’d always been something about those Genesis and Gentle Giant albums that we’d never related to, hard as we’d tried. Punk had a basic honesty to it. It was also the sound of the suburbs. Every city and town seemed to have its local band.

Which brings us to the Skids.

Stuart had left Beath by the time the band’s first single was released. There was still a record shop on the High Street though, and that’s where many of us trekked at lunchtime to buy ‘Charles’. A song about a guy working in a factory! It definitely resonated: our mums and dads worked in factories. The lyrics told a story, with a twist at the end. And then there was the guitar, pouring out energy and light. I can’t now recall which came first, the gigs or the record, but I started going to every Skids concert I could manage. There were memorable nights at the Pogo-A-Gogo club in Kirkcaldy’s Station Hotel. Just a dance-hall – no actual physical stage. Stuart and vocalist Richard Jobson would drop to the floor to twitch the ‘dead fly’ while still playing and singing. There’d be ‘Test Tube Babies’ and ‘TV Stars’ and ‘Into The Valley’ . . . and a few nights later it would happen all over again in Dunfermline or (eventually) Edinburgh.

We all loved The Skids. It seemed that they belonged to each and every one of us.

And then they were gone, sort of. Top of the Pops . . . hit singles and albums . . . proper touring. Other bands replaced them at the Pogo-A-Gogo, but that didn’t matter. I’d shifted from Beath to Edinburgh University and joined a group myself. We were called the Dancing Pigs and we practised at the YWCA in Cowdenbeath on grim midweek nights. We thought of ourselves as Fife’s second-best punk band, despite the fact that some local bikers were fans. We were going to contact Stuart and get him to produce our first single. That never quite happened, and the Dancing Pigs folded before The Skids did. Stuart was busy meantime though, preparing to blow everyone away with the unique sound of Big Country. The twelve-inch single of ‘Fields Of Fire’ was my introduction to the new project, and it was wondrous. Brilliantly local yet embracing the international; the guitar skirling in triumph. Big Country caught the mood of the time in Scotland. There had been a failed attempt at devolution at the end of the 1970s. At the start of the 1980s, people were questioning Scottish identity and Scottish values. Now they only had to visit their local record shop or turn on the radio to hear one man’s take on it all. The Crossing, Steeltown and The Seer would go on to be chart-topping albums, proving that those early singles were no fluke. Stuart’s hard work had paid off. He had become a consummate songwriter, technician and performer.

But all of this was what the public saw. While we fans pin our hopes and dreams on our musical heroes, we often fail to notice that they might be toiling under the combined weight of our expectation and the music industry’s relentless demands. They are often very private people who either start to implode when they believe all the hype surrounding them, or panic that they can never hope to live up to that same hype. The world’s relentless gaze is a burden, having said which Stuart seemed at his best on a big, public stage, watching the effect his music was having on the audience. Whenever I saw him, he always seemed to be grinning from ear to ear, having as much fun as was humanly possible, teasing another improbably catchy yet complex progression from his guitar.

Allan Glen’s hungrily awaited biography explores Stuart’s life, examining the pitfalls of fame, the strains and stresses that come with global success. If there is frustration for we fans at a life cut cruelly short and potential left untapped, then it should be tempered by the thought of Stuart’s legacy: all those exciting, clever, demanding records; the exuberance of his performances and the inspiration he provided for players who came after him. Few guitarists, no matter how accomplished, can claim to have invented a sound. Stuart Adamson started small, but ended up one of the biggest, brightest and best. His is a story you really need to know, ideally with his music playing while you savour the words.

Prologue

On 17 December 2001 Richard Jobson walked out of a Soho cinema following a film screening and turned on his mobile phone. There were 60 missed messages from friends and journalists. Reported missing since mid-November, Stuart Adamson, Jobson’s former bandmate in the Skids, had been found dead in a Hawaii hotel room at the age of 43. In the 1970s and early 1980s Jobson and Adamson had forged ambition, articulacy and adventure into a taut new sound that would see the Skids in the Top 40 with three back-to-back albums in less than two years, but in the spring of 1981, increasingly disillusioned with the music business, Adamson walked out of the band. By the end of the year the Skids were all but finished, with Jobson embarking on various projects before finding his calling in films and Adamson drawing on the healthier aspects of British rock history, from The Jam to Joy Division, and on his own cultural heritage, to create a highly original music framework on which to hang his songs of justice, freedom and pain. It was a transition that would lead to worldwide success for Big Country.

To those outside the band’s loyal fan base, the popular image of Big Country was that of a distinctive-sounding Scottish band with muscular, blazing-bagpipe guitars who wore tartan shirts and scored a few hits in the 1980s until capricious musical tastes and dwindling popularity led them to drop off the radar. Not that the Skids had fared much better: an image of cartoonish flamboyance was still likely to be the most popular – if rapidly fading – memory of the band. Even during their annus mirabilis of 1979 there had been little critical approbation for Adamson. To many learning about his death in 2001, he was the scissor-kicking guitarist in a band of adventurous hooligans who looked and sounded like battle-scarred warriors on speed, fronted by the loud-mouthed vocalist with the funny dance who sang dodgy lyrics about dodgy subjects like, y’know, war and stuff. To the rest of us, Adamson and Jobson were way ahead of the game, the Skids an explosive mixture of pop sounds and punk rock attitude. The best band in the world.

Towards the end of 1980 industry pressures came to a head and the distance between them – geographically, ideologically and emotionally – would eventually lead to a difficult split. Second time around Adamson was intent on proving that it was possible to strip out egos in a band and demystify the characters created by the media and still communicate on a mass level – all he needed were others whose talent and ambition were sympathetic to that vision. Within just a few weeks of settling on a permanent line-up, Big Country were signed to Phonogram. Within two years, they were on the verge of becoming one of the biggest acts in the world.

In an industry in which spin and mass media manipulation are essential tools of the trade it is perhaps inevitable that Stuart Adamson and Richard Jobson would cause divisions along the way. Although both grew up in working-class households in the industrial heartland of Fife – Adamson in Crossgates, Jobson in neighbouring Ballingry – in early press interviews they appeared worlds apart. In one corner was Jobson, the self-confessed ‘tough wee guy’, a modern-day mixture of Jean Genet and Alex DeLarge, armed with an ego as big as a mountain and equipped with a nice line in bons mots; in the other was Adamson, the sensitive John Lennon-type character, packing only a guitar and a head full of phenomenal tunes. For every good review of the Skids in the music press there would also be accusations of pretentiousness and sly asides at the taciturn Scotsmen with their indecipherable lyrics and gobstopper vocals. When the band began to implode at the end of 1980, the differing ideals of Adamson and Jobson would lead to two distinct career paths, yet in later years each could be relied on to slip in a memorable anecdote about their colourful past.

On one occasion, after arriving in the Soviet Union with Big Country in August 1988 following a three-hour ferry journey across the Baltic from Helsinki, Adamson reminisced about the Skids and the time he taught Jobson to play a couple of guitar chords before the band appeared at the Marquee in London:

It was packed, people hanging off the rafters, and Rick comes on for the encore, plugs in and says, ‘Anything Hendrix can do, I can do’, whips his false teeth out and starts playing the guitar with them. We couldn’t play. I was on the floor crying! Another time we were playing some college when Rick was dancing and his teeth came flying out and fell down a crack in the stage. Our roadie had to crawl underneath and retrieve them, and instead of handing them back to Rick, he waited for the right moment and sprinted on stage and popped them back in Rick’s mouth, just like he was plugging in some equipment.

If Jobson had appeared eager to distance himself from the legacy of the Skids in the immediate aftermath of the split, in later years there were signs of reconciliation with the band. In the summer of 1990, with Big Country on the road promoting the single ‘Heart Of The World’, he interviewed Adamson for a television show. During the interview the pair discussed early Skids tours and at one point Jobson asked his former bandmate if his approach to songwriting had changed over the years:

Richard Jobson: Do you still have that same enthusiasm about writing songs? Y’know, sitting down and writing a song? . . . Obviously [tongue lodged firmly in cheek] you don’t have the inspiration I used to give you any more . . . but [both double up with laughter] . . . what do you write about now?

Stuart Adamson: I write about people and situations . . . I think when you first start writing lyrics [metaphors] are attractive because you can hide any meanings you want to behind those big metaphors, and I think as your confidence grows and you become more sure of yourself you start to get a bit more introverted about it.

If there was an innocence and wide-eyed optimism to the Skids that caused critics to view them with suspicion, it was magnified tenfold with Big Country. Like all bands that appeal to large crowds of people there was a mixed reaction to them from the press and public alike; some saw them as visionaries, some saw them as reactionary. At the height of their success in the mid-1980s there were few bands that polarised critical and public opinion so much. The Skids caused arguments. Big Country incited them.

*

Flanked by towering hills, surrounded on three sides by water, and sliced from the capital by the Firth of Forth, Fife is a region that encompasses markedly distinct areas – the semi-industrial south and the rural north. As you cross the red steel Forth Rail Bridge that runs alongside the grey Road Bridge the view towards Fife gives way to vertiginous, dusty sandstone cliffs that rise from the ground like the shoulders of giants, watching over the thousands of passengers – and the few hardy walkers – who pass below them every day.

On entering Fife, the skyline to the west is dominated by Rosyth Naval Dockyard. Several miles along the M90 is Dunfermline, the capital of Scotland until the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Clinging to the hillsides on the horizon are the pebble-dashed houses of the villages of Crossgates and Ballingry, built for the baby-boomer generation in the late 1950s and 1960s.

It is undoubtedly a curious place, Dunfermline: one where an eleventh-century Benedictine Abbey sits only a few paces away from a nineteenth-century Gothic City Chambers; a city where verdant parks and impressive architecture sit alongside some pretty grim unemployment statistics (one contributor to the local paper described Saturday nights in the town as ‘like Baghdad without the bombs’). With so much emphasis on traditional industry – in the 1970s employment prospects for those living on its council estates were pretty much limited to the docks, the mines and the Army – it is not surprising that the Conservative government’s economic policies of deindustrialisation in the early 1980s caused so many problems in the region, the aftershock of which still reverberates today.

Even as the band’s success took him far from Fife, in a sense Adamson never really left Dunfermline. For many years he chose to live close by: firstly in a small, one-bedroom flat above a chip shop at 95F Main Street, Townhill, a small village at the northern end of Dunfermline; then at the Old Kirk House on the edge of Pittencrieff Park in the city; and several years later in Balmule House at Bowershall, north of Townhill. If not geographically distant from his early residence, in terms of stature Balmule House is perhaps as far removed from a flat above a chip shop as it is possible to be: built in the seventeenth century, the ten-bedroom house boasted twenty acres of grounds and sat at the centre of the Wardlaw family estates. It even has royal connections through Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie, who was chamberlain to Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI. Living here with his wife Sandra (née Davidson) and two children, Callum (born 10 February 1982) and Kirsten (born 11 June 1985), Adamson often spoke in interviews of this side of his life with an affection not evident in your average 1980s pop star.

The influence of Stuart Adamson on modern music can be traced back to the release of the Skids’ debut EP on 17 February 1978 and three groundbreaking albums that followed. In one sense, the measure of his influence on music has not so much been on the list of guitar bands and artists he has influenced – U2, Oasis, Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, Manic Street Preachers, Graham Coxon and Arctic Monkeys to name a few – but on how many he hasn’t. Initially lauded by the rock press for tackling cynicism in music and, perhaps more importantly, for reintroducing guitars to the charts, the legacy of Big Country still shapes contemporary music today. As a live act in the early 1980s when synth duo ‘events’ in nightclubs threatened to turn live music into an anathema, Big Country were at the forefront of guitar music – with U2, Echo and The Bunnymen and Simple Minds trailing in their wake. In the 1980s they released three albums whose influence can be heard in the anthemic pop that would emerge over the next three decades from acts such as Blur, Kings of Leon and Arcade Fire. In other quarters, however, their constant themes of sincerity, hope and community saw the band mistrusted, with many a sceptical journalist queuing up to take verbal pot shots: ‘weedy delivery’ and ‘Combine Adamson’s hand-me-down Wellerisms and his band’s post-Lizzy Celt-rock and you have Big Country’ were typical of reviews of some of those early albums. Divisive? You could say that. Having spoken to many journalists who interviewed Adamson and having read every interview the Skids and Big Country gave to the three main UK rock magazines – Sounds, Melody Maker and NME – it becomes clear that he was at times deeply uncomfortable with the press attention; one minute charming,