Wonderland - The Essential Big Country

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The Irish Charts - All there is to know". irishcharts.ie. Archived from the original on 5 January 2010. The gig was a disaster. “We were a karaoke version of what we were,” says Butler. “The whole thing was just painful and he was in such a bad condition, I just thought, ‘That’s it, I’m not having anything to do with this until things get better…’ I said to him, ‘I seriously think we need to have a break’. You know, stop, drop anchor for two years, just give everybody a chance to go off and clear their heads. I didn’t think we were helping Stuart by carrying on.” Big Country – Steeltown". Rotherham Theatres. 19 December 2012. Archived from the original on 11 March 2014 . Retrieved 8 April 2014.

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I’ve survived a lot to get this far,” he says, “and I wish Stuart could have had one more day to think about what was happening to him. Maybe he’d still be here, and I wouldn’t need to be and I’d be sitting here just as a fan, just like you, and we’d be going up the front and singing our heads off to the songs,” he shakes his head. Their second album Steeltown (1984) was a hit as soon as it was released, entering the UK Albums Chart at No. 1. [3] The album featured three UK top 30 hit singles, and received considerable critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, but like Wonderland (and, in fact, all subsequent releases) it was a commercial disappointment in the US, peaking at No. 70 on the Billboard album chart. [6] Cherry Red Records – The Journey, Big Country". Cherryred.co.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2014 . Retrieved 8 April 2014. Opening the evening is the wonderfully talented Charlotte Grayson. Please come and show her your support. You’ll be glad you did.

Reminded of that today, even he’s surprised: “Wow. I was good in those days…”) Initially contracted to just do a single, the sessions for Fields Of Fire produced not only that classic song, but gave birth to the Big Country sound and inspired a new bout of songwriting from Adamson. The sound made pictures. It spread out wide landscapes. Great dramas were played out under turbulent skies. There was romance and reality, truth and dare. People being people, no heroes, just you and me, like it always was.” Big Country was originally formed in 1981 by guitar playing founder members Stuart Adamson and Bruce Watson both native of the band’s hometown Dunfermline in Scotland.I think [we were] trying to understand masculinity in a way,” says former Skids frontman Richard Jobson. “And that military imagery is so potent. If you look at the sleeves of Masquerade and Charade [pictures of the battle of Culloden and uniformed men playing cards with a gun on the table, respectively], thematically, they’re about masculine grace. If you were really going to analyse all the work, I think you’ll find that’s at the root of it all – finding some kind of grace in the whole process of being a man. And not being ashamed of that.” Tony Butler, a session musician tired of being a gun for hire, had found the band he was looking for: “I thought what Bruce and Stuart were doing guitar-wise was immense. And it was lyrical, it was melodic, it was powerful – it was just lovely. I’ve got Scottish roots and it really kind of erupted from me when I first heard these guys playing…”

Big Country star found dead – The Scotsman". News.scotsman.com. 18 December 2001 . Retrieved 8 April 2014.I know that really hurt Stuart a lot. I mean, big time,” says Butler. “It wasn’t fair and the album died because of it. A lot of things went sour because of that scenario. It definitely hit Stuart bad. And it really did kill the commercial potential of the band – losing that made the industry feel as though the band had no space.” There are two schools of record producers,” says Lillywhite. “One will look at a band and say, ‘Who’s the leader? Stuart: OK, I’ll go and really work with him because he is the creative talent’. Whereas I’ll go into an album and go, ‘Who is feeling insecure? Who do I need to bolster up?’ Bruce was so nervous. His hands used to shake like crazy in the studio. I try and inspire a sense of team work rather than divide and rule.” But by 1980 Adamson wanted to be his own man again. He had formed the Skids and was the nominal leader but Jobson – a 17 year-old during the first album – had grown to be a strong-willed and principled artist himself. By The Absolute Game, Jobbo had formed a writing partnership with the band’s new bassist, Russell Webb, and Adamson wanted to start again with a project where he was in charge.

The Skids got a Peel Session and a deal with Virgin out of the trip. Virgin put the late Dave Batchelor, producer of many Sensational Alex Harvey Band albums, behind the desk, but Burnell didn’t hold a grudge: the Stranglers later took the Skids on tour with them and by the time of the Skids’ third album, The Absolute Game, Grant was managing them alongside Alan Edwards (now head of famous PR firm The Outside Organisation).

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Big Country Star Believed To Have Committed Suicide | News". Nme.Com. 18 December 2001 . Retrieved 8 April 2014. On Steeltown the lyrics – the Falklands war, unemployment, tales of people trapped by circumstance and crushed by forces outside their control – and the intensity of the music combined to make something relentlessly grim.