Celtic rock was a significant cultural phenomenon for music fans born in the Sixties and Seventies, particularly in the U.K. and Ireland, where U2 and Simple Minds held sway over the charts and airwaves with their anthemic, soul-stirring music.
Less deliberately commercial in their sound but just as accomplished as songwriters, the half-Scottish quartet Big Country spent the Eighties as a serious recording and touring force.
Their classic lineup of Stuart Adamson (vocals, guitar), Bruce Watson (guitar), Tony Butler (bass), and Mark Brzezicki (drums) formed in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1981, rose to fame within five years, and did great business until 1990, when fashions changed and their profile diminished. Sadly, their career was curtailed by Adamson’s suicide in 2001, although their music has always remained in the cultural bloodstream.
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Bruce Watson now runs Big Country Redux, a band that reminds us of the innovative guitar parts at the heart of the original sound. You’ll recognize his repeated, melodic figures and counter-lines alongside Adamson’s from In a Big Country, from the 1983 album, The Crossing, as well as the interlocked riffs that the two men delivered in Fields of Fire (400 Miles) from the same album.
He plays a righteous slide guitar on Rain Dance, from Steeltown (1984), and on the group’s biggest hit, Look Away, from The Seer (1986), he underpins the song with melodic fills that never overpower the arrangement. All of this makes him a highly appropriate standard-bearer for Big Country’s legacy.
Big Country Redux have a new album, Eastworld, coming out in September.
We do. The songs on Eastworld are mostly Big Country demos that were never taken to a final conclusion. For example, with Winter Sky, from our second album, Steeltown, we needed a B-side really quickly.
We didn’t have time to get Tony and Mark up to record it, so Stuart and I wrote and recorded Winter Sky as a duo on a little 16-track recorder and drum machine. It was a great song, but it was still a demo, and it would have been nice to develop it live with Tony and Mark, but we never got a chance to do it at the time, although we played it live later on.
The songs on Eastworld are all like that: songs that were never finished. I didn’t want to do the lazy thing that people do and just re-record the hits: I would never do that anyway, because they would never be as good as the originals.
This is an anniversary year for Big Country, for better or worse.
Yes. Unfortunately it’s 25 years since Stuart passed away, and it’s also the 45th anniversary of the band first getting together, as well as the 40th anniversary of our third album, The Seer. We’re touring to celebrate that album soon.
Stay Alive, the recent biography of Stuart Adamson by Scott Rowley, content director at Guitar World, has also helped to bring the band back into the public eye.
Stay Alive is a great book, and a very honest one, too. I helped Scott out with information for it, and it’s all true. Even the stories that other people told in the book are definitely the truth.
For those of us who didn’t know Stuart, what was he like?
The way he came across in public, for instance if he was doing interviews like this, was as a very serious person, because he cared a lot about his music, and the band, and the audience. But when it was just us, backstage or in rehearsals or just hanging out, he was great fun.
He could be a comedian at times: some of the funniest moments we ever had were with Stuart
The public never saw that side of him, because he wanted to be seen as a serious musician. He could be a comedian at times: some of the funniest moments we ever had were with Stuart.
Big Country’s songs often contained loads of guitar parts. Where did they enter the songwriting process?
The song was always the starting point: the lyrics, the vocal melodies, and the music. The way we used to record demos back in the day was to create a rhythm track with a cheap drum machine, then record the guitars, and then do the bass, so it would sound a bit like the Shadows without Cliff Richard.
Once we had a few of those down, Stuart would take them away for a week and work on the melodies and the lyrics. Then, once he’d done his vocals, we would say, “That guitar line’s gonna have to come right out,” and we’d have to strip the song back a bit. We never really did guitar solos; it was more about little guitar motifs here and there.
The million-dollar question: How did you get the “bagpipes” guitar sound?
We never used pedals back in the day; it was always rack systems. The effects we used were MXR M-129 Analogue Pitch Transposers and Korg Space Echoes. We used an EBow, too.
I never used distortion; I just used the gain control on a Marshall amp, or on my HH VS Musician amp, which had the “Valve Sound” circuit in it. The clean sounds came from a Music Man 130-watt amp. I bought that from Damian O’Neill of the Undertones after they split up.
What are your current guitars?
I’m playing a one-pickup Fender Esquire, which I converted from a Telecaster, and a Gibson Les Paul Junior. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more into simple guitars with one pickup; I don’t even use the tone control. I like Stratocasters, but they have too many knobs, pickups, and switches that get in my way. I’ve still got my Yamahas from the old days, too.
How did you get started as a guitar player?
In the early Seventies, me and my friends practically lived in the cinema. At the end of the movie That’ll Be The Day (1973), David Essex goes into a music shop and sees this red guitar. That made me want to be a guitar player; before that I just wanted to play football.
Also, Manny Charlton of Nazareth moved to Dunfermline and lived a door away from me. I used to see Manny going around with his platform boots on, and I thought “I want some of that!” [Laughs] My first guitar was a cheap acoustic, and then I got a Woolworth Top 20.
My first real guitars were a Yamaha SG25 that I bought from a friend who worked in the dockyard with me, and then I bought a Yamaha SG500, which I used on the first two Big Country albums and I still have today, with Ghost pickups installed. I’ve also got a Gibson Marauder and a Gibson L6.
Talk us through In a Big Country.
Stuart played the clean guitar part and I played the distorted part. He played a 1978 or ’79 Strat with an Antigua finish, and I was using my SG500. I think we were still using HH amps and a Carlsbro Stingray at the time, because we didn’t have Marshalls yet.
And how about Look Away, from 1986?
I tried to make each verse different on that song. I’d bring in acoustic guitars that would hide behind the electrics, so you weren’t quite sure what you were listening to. I always used guitars as a means to an end, rather than being a guitar hero. We used a lot of drone strings, so most of the songs are in A, E, or D.
Was there an overall guitar philosophy?
Because we were a twin-guitar band, we loved groups like Thin Lizzy and Status Quo, but we didn’t want to sound like them, so we made a conscious effort not to do any blues bending. Instead, we played the melody lines with no bluesy playing, although all rock comes from the blues, of course. That’s how we got our sound.
When you do that it’s very simplistic, so to make it interesting we added echoes and delays and harmonizers. Steve Lillywhite was on board with that, too, so the guitar parts are really simple but they sound complicated.
How do those guitar parts stand up to you nowadays?
When you start out, there’s a naivety about your playing, and as you get better over the years, you lose some of that. That happens to bands, too; you become more mainstream.
There’s loads of mistakes in the Big Country songs, but those mistakes lead you to some great places. You hear a song now and you think, “Shouldn’t that chord be major, not minor?” But then you’d miss out on a load of interesting music!
