Todd in the Shadows Finally Gets Around to Big Country

 

You all know I love Big Country, and I always will. Their first two albums especially were the very powerful soundtrack to a very powerful time in my life, and seemed to manifest themselves exactly when I needed them most.

I grew up hearing jigs and reels all over the place, as my town and my neighborhood had a lot of first-generation Irish immigrants. So hearing all those ancient melodies and harmonies played at punk-rock intensity -- and with heavy metal dexterity -- was an instant sell for me. 

The story got a bit messier after that first burst of energy from Stuart Adamson and the boys, but not many bands can boast two absolutely perfect albums and an equally perfect EP (not to mention a bunch of very good B-sides and interesting outtakes) within the space of little over a year.

Last week marked the 42nd anniversary of the release of The Crossing, an album that didn't come to my attention until late September. It came to rule the autumn of 1983 for me, so much so that I had a little ritual where I'd give it a spin every year when the first chill of fall set in. 

THOSE FRIGGIN' GUYS AGAIN

Big Country got dismissed as Scottish U2 clones, but the opposite interpretation is closer to the truth. The Edge cut his teeth copying Stuart Adamson's playing for The Skids, but never came close to the skill or the fury of it. 

U2 might be mediocre players - and their records largely the creations of their producers - but U2 were also definitely rock stars. They were very heavily groomed and packaged by producers, stylists and photographers, a proposition which Big Country had little interest in. Nor were they, as Todd points out, interested in slogging back and forth through America all year. They were interested in making more music.

The problem was that Big Country were real musicians: Stuart Adamson had been called the "Scottish Hendrix" by John Peel and Tony Butler and Mark Brzezecki were top studio players before joining the band, playing with acts like Pete Townsend, The Pretenders, The Cult and Procul Harum. But they were not rock stars. That mattered in the 80s, which were often unkind to musicians who didn't (or couldn't) play the ridiculous pantomime that U2 and the rest lived and breathed for.

Be that as it may, I was a bit taken aback by Todd's panty-pissing terror of the hurricane/ earthquake/ volcano of sound that is the Steeltown LP. But I really shouldn't have been: Todd always caves to conventional wisdom, and always follows the party line. Which I reckon you have to do when you're running a big channel.

Don't get me wrong, I really admire the dude on many levels, but he has the same problem with Peace in Our Time, the most underrated and misunderstood entry in the Country Catalog. Todd seems stymied by the leadoff, and couldn't just man up and keep his objectivity. The leadoff track to Peace in Our Time, "King of Emotion," is indeed absolutely shiteous, and is nothing at all like the rest of the album, or the lovely Celtic/acoustic b-sides to the singles. 

I would also bet dollars-to-donuts "King of Emotion" was also written at the record company's insistence, since the rest of the album is very much a late 70s, harmonically-rich kind of vibe and doesn't have much in the way of dumbed-down late 80s radio fodder.

Which brings back to that complicated 90s Big Country catalog...

Since albums are a dead format and only playlists matter, I've been going through the 90s portion of Big Country's discography, looking for top tracks for a BC megamix, and finding there are actually quite a few. Nothing really containing the magic of the Eighties material, but some fiery and stirring numbers nonetheless. 

The real problem with that era is that losing out on the Eighties star-making sweepstakes seemed to deeply rattle Stuart Adamson. After Peace stiffed, Big Country dropped the Celtic rock vibe - meaning their entire identity - and struggled to find anything worthy to replace it. 

So they lurched into American-style heartland rock and then 90s-style post-grunge meathead rock, not seeming to fully recover their bearings until 1999's Driving to Damascus, their last album with Stuart. I even thought the highly-regarded Buffalo Skinners got a bit stodgy, plodding and colorless.

Then lifelong struggles with alcohol and depression took their toll, and Stuart died by his own hand in an Hawaiian hotel in December 2001. 

The band briefly reunited as a trio a few years later then reformed with Mike Peters of The Alarm on vocals and the great Derek Forbes on bass. That lineup fell apart rather quickly, and then some replacement randos came in. I still kept my eye on the new-model Big Country, but wasn't impressed by what I saw.

Until this happened back in June, at the Totally 80s package tour show in Bethlehem, PA...

But then Big Country came on, and everything changed.

It’s a totally different lineup than the one I listened to in school: it's the original guitarist, his son (also on guitar), a singer from a Big Country tribute band, and a new rhythm section. Which sounds really dire, but was actually one of the best shows I’ve seen in a very long time. 

The tribute singer sounds uncannily like the (deceased) original singer, and might even be a better guitarist. And the band understood that they were there to give people a nostalgia fix, which they did with an absolute blazing wall of sound.

Big Country are dismissed as a one-hit wonder to most people, but they represented my freedom. I got into them around the same time I was accepted to art school and began doing freelance art for local businesses. 

Then they stood for my escape from an unhappy home life (this scene from Boogie Nights was literally any day or night of my life in high school). And their second album came out just around the time I got up the nerve to ask the future Mrs. Wibble out on our first date. 

So to hear those songs played by a young and hungry band wasn’t sad at all — on the contrary, it was invigorating.

WARNING: Mark Brzezecki  and one of those lousy replacement singers are doing the Lost 80s tour as "Big Country" now too. They sound bloody awful, judging from the clips I've seen. The outfit I saw are touring the UK and Europe in the fall, so just be sure you're seeing the five-man official band, and not "From Big Country."