Jamming! January 1985

Page 1 ·  Page 3 ·  Page 16 ·  Pages 24 & 25 ·  Page 26 ·  Page 35

 

Back to top	Front Cover   THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS!   BIG COUNTRY · R.E.M. KANE GANG · SIMON FRITH COOK DA BOOKS · ZERRA 1 MINERS STRIKE THE GREAT BRITISH FILM REVIVAL!
Back to top	Page 3 (Contents)   FEATURES 24 Big Country: Martin Wroe treks off on a Paris Match B&W inset photo of the band   SPECIALS 16 CLASS OF '84: More seasonal excess. Jamming! writers choose their year's favourite records
Back to top	Page 16   CLASS OF '84   In next month's Jamming!, we will be publishing the results of our first ever Reader's Poll. But in case we find we don't agree with your choice of records for the year, we decided to let you know our votes here and now. After all, you've been reading us criticising people all year; you might as well find out what we all actually like!   Tony Fletcher Singles 1 SEVEN SEAS - Echo & The Bunnymen (Korova) 2 COME BACK - The Mighty Wah! (Beggars Banquet) 3 PRIDE (IN THE NAME OF LOVE) - U2 (Island) 4 THE DECEIVER - The Alarm (IRS) 5 HEAVEN KNOWS I'M MISERABLE NOW - The Smiths (Rough Trade)   Albums 1 OCEAN RAIN - Echo & The Bunnymen (Korova) 2 DECLARATION - The Alarm (IRS) 3 WORLD SHUT YOUR MOUTH - Julian Cope (Mercury) 4 THE ICICLE WORKS - The Icicle Works (Beggars Banquet) 5 RECKONING - R.E.M. (IRS)   Russell Tate Singles 1 MOMENTS IN LOVE - The Art of Noise (ZTT) 2 WHITE LINES - Grandmaster Melle Mel (Sugarhill) 3 MADAME BUTTERLY - Malcolm McLaren (Charisma) 4 TOUR DE FRANCE - Kraftwerk (EMI) 5 NO SELL OUT - Malcolm X/Keith Le Blanc (Ze)   Albums 1 THE FLAT EARTH - Thomas Dolby (EMI) 2 SPARKLE IN THE RAIN - Simple Minds (Virgin) 3 THE JAZZ CLUB - Various (Phonogram) 4 HATFUL OF HOLLOW - The Smiths (Rough Trade) 5 ONE-EYED JACKS - Spear of Destiny (Epic)
Back to top	Pages 24 & 25   ANOTHER COUNTRY   Big Country sold nearly 2,000,000 copies of their debut album world-wide. In Europe, however, they mean nothing. Martin Wroe, meanwhile, has never seen the inside of a Holiday Inn or a luxury coach. With Big Country in Paris he sees both. All photos: Paul Cox.   "There goes a flying brick." Stuart Adamson is pointing out of the Big Country tour-bus window to a large white diving-boot on wheels crawling around a Paris roundabout. Suddenly the realisation dawns — Adamson is referring to the latest model in the BMW motorcycle range. Fear grips me by the throat. One of the two golden rules when interviewing Big Country is about to be broken. There was a time when writers merely avoided questions which related the words "guitar" and "bagpipes" but recently in the wake of at least two music-press interviews ship-wrecked and ruined on the rocks of motorbike conversation, a second rule has become law — "Never talk about motorcycles unless you are a complete two-wheeled fanatic and prepared to agree with Stuart Yamahadamson on everything' But suddenly the tour-manager's proud announcement of Phonogram France's kind donation of a crate of best French wine rescues me from replying to Adamson's comment. The moment passes. A writer lives to question another day. The tour-bus heads for the afternoon soundcheck. A flying brick flies off.   A GUITARIST Bruce Watson plays guitar and founded Big Country with Stuart Adamson. Growing up in Dunfermline he got a job as a joiner at the dockyard but, as he recalls with some disgust, he was forced to make ships ladders eight hours a day. When he was fifteen or sixteen he ran away to London and squatted in places like Camberwell and Brixton but only stuck it for three or four weeks before returning to the docks. On the European tour he's been growing an apology for a beard and he looks a bit jaded, but his conversation is sprightly and his attitude a warm one. He's probably missing his girlfriend in Dunfermline who's living in the house he's bought near Finefare. With some of the respect and money he's earned with Big Country, he's helping out one or two young Scottish bands but he won't say much except mutter about "studio-time in Bruce Watson's name" When he first appeared on Top of the Pops his mates thought he was a millionaire — his dad thought he was still down the dockyard. A DRUMMER Mark Brzezicki has a Polish surname which to his relief I didn't request pronouncement instructions for. He appears remarkably fresh at first meeting and, more remarkably, remains so all day. He has eleven or twelve blisters on each hand which, he says, is a sign that he is in good drumming form. Tall and English, he buys a model of the national bus at every stop on Big Country's world travels. He got a green and white Parisian model in Printemps next to our Hotel. He enjoys touring and refuses to let the strenuous details of the routine become tiring or tedious. "This is the whole point - you mustn't get down about it because there's loads of people who'd give their right arm to be in your shoes. As well as mixing metaphors he drums like there's no tomorrow. "If I was on a desert island I'd want my drum-kit first and Brigitte Bardot second." A BASSIST Tony Butler bounces around the stage like Blondin tightrope-walking an electrified power-cable, even though he's got a heavy head from a thick cold. The suppositories ain't doing the trick. He's a family man with a 15 month old baby and another on the way. Big Country play the kind of music "I dreamed of playing when I was twelve or thirteen" and he wants "to finish that dream". "I want to be 64 sitting in an old drinking man's club and looking back to Big Country as the proudest period of my life. When it's over I'm not going to become a waning pop-star making solo albums. I'm not in this to become a star, I'm just doing it because I fucking enjoy it." Butler sees "no dignity" in The British chart-system so when Steeltown went in at No. 1 "the record company were pissing it up on champagne but me and my wife shared a Guinness at home." ANOTHER GUITARIST AND A VOCALIST When Stuart Adamson skidded into Big Country he brought one of the most distinctive guitar sounds with him, but he also brought his wife. He's been in music eight years now and five of those as a married man. He rings Sandra not once, not twice but three times a day - sometimes he talks to his little son Callum too. "When I left The Skids and Bruce and I were getting Big Country together Sandra was pregnant and she still had to go to work because I wasn't making any money. She was supporting me so it's nice to have the house and the car, it's good to be able to give that back. Stuart is a motor bike fanatic but as for my Kerrang-induced fears about getting on the wrong mechanical side of the Adamson - "That was the the most completely and utterly hypocritical interview you've ever seen with anyone. I couldn't fucking believe it when I read it."   Big Country are playing in France for the first time on the final leg of a 15 day, 12 concert tour to promote the new album 'Steeltown" Despite selling almost two million copies of 'The Crossing', in Europe, primarily through an absence of touring, Big Country are very little country. Guitarist Bruce Watson and I discovered how little when we looked for a copy of 'Steeltown' in 'Printemps' department store next to our Holiday Inn in Paris, "Big Country? Non, non... Pardon?... Non, non!" Now Alphaville...! Well, she could have done us a few copies of their album... but no thanks, really! Still it's not a bad thing to switch between 8,000 seater English stadiums to 1,200 standing and sweating European halls. It's like going back in time and a band has to work much harder as drummer Mark Brzezicki points out. "Europe's been good for us because it's given us a kick up the backside. Whether you like it or not it does hit home that you're in a territory where you haven't sold many records - everything isn't as easy." No doubt experiences in commercially barren lands keep a band humble which isn't a bad thing for Big Country when 99% of all known interviewers ask them what it's like now they've "made it" After all Steeltown went in at No. I in Britain and is platinum already. Mark doesn't understand that question, mimicking his exploding response to those questioners, "Made it? Blimey, we've only just started. As much as The Crossing was quite innovative for the time I think we've moved on a lot and it's only just begun - Steeltown is our first album as far as I'm concerned." Steeltown is immediately apparent as a harder, more blatant and less melodic piece of vinyl than The Crossing. Bruce Watson gets it about right when he describes the first album as more open to interpretation and the new one as "more direct, more 'Kill the Bastard'". The music is more aggressive - with an almost Led Zep - guitar on 'Flame of the West' and the machine-pumping intro to 'Tall Ships Go'. The lyrics are much angrier - the thinly disguised tyrade of the opening track against Ronald Raygun, the cynical chorus on the latest single 'Where the Rose is Sown' satirizing the slaughter of the Falklands War, and the title-track itself lamenting the seduction of Scottish steel-workers south to Corby only for the works to close leaving the "expatriate" Scots dole-ful and stranded. It's not just the cover that gives Steeltown an industrial face. In fact, although due to interview Stuart Adamson after the night's show I took a bet on a funny feeling and an overheard room number that afternoon and rescued him from a French radio-journalist relentlessly proclaiming the phrase "Factory-rock" to Stuart's combined humour and annoyance. "I'd much rather write about the things I know about than a whole load of fantasies. I'm aware of the danger of romancing the worker - if you come from the area that I do there's nothing very romantic about the work." Having retreated with relief to his own room, ("it's just nice to talk to someone in English again") Stuart, if a little pale after an arduous tour, chats cheerily away to yet another interviewer. So was it a compliment when one writer described Steeltown as "folk-music"? "I think so. It deals very much with people and the situations surrounding them. Obviously it's a rock album, loads of hard guitars and stuff, but 'folk- music's' a compliment. It's at least nice to pretend that's the case but you cannot take things like that too seriously or you end up disappearing up your own arse-hole." Well, that's true. Although a song like Steeltown sounds as though it's written in the key of sadness, like others on the album it was born in Adamson's anger. If he wasn't angry, he asserts, he "wouldn't write the songs" When he says it's "disgusting" that "they've sold off the oil industry so that Aberdeen will be like a f!x!x!x ghost town in ten years time" when the oil runs out and the Yanks run home, the "g" in "disgusting" is so emphatic that Adamson's head darts forward on his neck like that of a peacock. A man angry at social injustice... but I see no song for the miners, even though Bruce's dad is out on strike. "l think you've got to stay away from specifics like that." Adamson's answer is careful and thought through, the fruit of an easily pricked social conscience that has wrestled with the problem of mixing up art and propaganda, and of turning the former into the latter. And anyway Big Country are a band not just Adamson. As Tony Butler on bass puts it: "We've often debated Stuart's lyrics - he doesn't say 'Right, this will stick".. Mark: "I don't have anything to do with lyrics but I won't see the ba[n]d get tied down to black and white politics. But Stuart's a good writer because he knews where the boundary lies." Even benefit platforms (Miners, CND, et al) are out, being bandwagon - jumping in Stuarts' eyes. "To be overtly political in music is the wrong way to go about it - sloganeering is not the right way at all. The group and the music becomes unimportant because of the slogan - 'Oh Big Country, they're the Labour Party aren't they'? But that's not to say that Big Country don't want to change people's attitudes - American youth, by all TV accounts may be Reaganites to a man who 'ain't seen nothin' yet' but they also buy Big Country albums in their hundreds of thousands. In "Flame of the West" Adamson writes of the man who
Back to top	Page 26   Continued...   "strode the world like Caesar With a Trident held his fear... There will be dollars in His hand He has all hell to pay". Yes, they want to change attitudes-one hopes they'll have more success than Fritz Mondale. Stuart: "I do know how much music affected me when was young. I really like the way Leonard Cohen wrote about situations without actually mentioning them in detail. I like the greyness, for people to be able to take what they want from a song rather than have it rammed down their throat." The trouble with touring is that the hours and workload don't lend themselves to sightseeing. Breakfast at elevenish; interviews for local radio people who know nothing about the band ("How many black men are in the group?"; "Is it trade union music?"); trip in the tour-bus to a 4pm soundcheck; food; tour-bus back to the hotel; kip, walk or more interviews; tour-bus to the gig; gig; tour-bus to the hotel; bar, food, bar; bed or other things. The strange thing is that during the course of the day the members of Big Country seem to bear up remarkably well in fact, for a band who've been accused of lacking humour, they seemed to be having a whale of a time. Whether it's Tony asserting he won't require the 'gay' in gay Paree or the band's completely over the top reaction to Tony inadvertently buying suppositories for his cold. Mark reckons they "lark around too much" and Stuart would probably agree after falling and grazing his lég to avoid an army of cars we dodged as we charged over the road to the Tour Bus. It bothers Adamson that a Big Country are 'Humourless'. "I think we've a great sense of humour but because we believe so much in the music we'd feel a bit whimsical about it if we started sticking humour into the songs." Mark probably puts his finger on it when he says, "We do take our music seriously and how we are as people outside of it, others might find hard to accept." As a working unit the group gel quite well - only Tony admitting to occasional group disharmony, while the others assert continued surprise that four individuals with such different backgrounds relate so well. Bruce: "We don't have rows. We never sulk, 'cos if there's an argument it's made up right away." Mark: "If there's anything wrong it's told even if it offends." If anything is going to strain the relations in a band it's a moving hotel called a "Tour Bus" for accomodation — even if it is worth a hundred grand with a lounge area, sleeping area, video, TV; kitchen, toilet and, would you believe, a studio down below. Tony admits that "We do get up each others noses. "Big Country is like a marriage - you stop having sex every day. But we live together and when the four of us can't stand living together we should part ways."   The trip to interview Big Country was planned for Berlin. The setting was ideal: Jamming!, the magazine that breaks down the barriers, would meet Big Country, the band whose aim is to break down band-audience barriers in Berlin, the city with a barrier right through the middle. Berlin didn't happen and Paris did - a barrier of kinds still existed between Big Country's popularity in Britain and N. American and their relative obscurity in France. Paris' 'Palais de la Mutualite' is a rounded hall trimmed in its higher regions with a seated balcony which is closed off. The atmosphere below is reminiscent of the interior landscape of a magician's top-hat. Magic. Big Country, as France about to discover, are the eighties guitar-heroes, symbolized in the gangling uncoordination of Adamson and Watson, splintering a thousand emotion-drenched ears in every move up their phantom-frets. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Jock the Riffer - twice! Butler slaps rubber-robes on the bass-fret and Brzezick's piston arms pulp the drum-kit into voluntary liquidation. Raindance, Wonderland, Steeltown, In a Big Country, The Storm... the hits keep corning and, because of the limits of their fame in France, each song is as enthusiastically greeted as the last. You know Adamson means it when he says, "It's really nice to be this far away from home and be treated iike this." So what's it like playing live then, Stuart? 'Oh, its bruwyant. It's like scoring the winning goal for Scotland in the World Cup Final against England in the last minute." The profoundest of poets could offer no greater insight. Stuart Adamson is pouring himself a vodka in his hotel room as we continue our mutual interrogation. He is elated that the show went so well especially considering a renowned French reserve for new bands. While he's still recovering from the exertion of playing it's a good moment to sneak in the one about the 'New Rock'. "Oh, no" comes the exasperated reply. Ah, he spotted it. But Stuart, recently you said there were only 4 rock bands left - yourselves, the Minds, the Bunnymen and U2, surely you're creating your own categories by your statements. Anyway how do you define a rock band? "I just think those four bands do exactly what they believe in and don't get led astray. They are very straight-forward in their attitude towards music and that's admirable." Another swig of vodka. He also admires Bronski Beat for their straight-forward approach "although I hate their music". He doesn't include The Alarm in the "big four" (although he likes them as people) because, he believes, they're "ripping off U2". Adamson does like Silent Running, The Waterboys and The Blue Nile but, although he had hopes six months ago, he thinks the charts have "gone soft again... just some great marketing concern". In the beginning, as he recalls, Big Country set out to change the face of popular music. "We wanted to show people that you can still have guitar music which isn't clichéd, you can still make records without having to bow down to any tradition and style." But nowadays Big Country are much too preoccupied with Big Country to be concerned with the dross and dung-splattered character of "the Charts". As Bruce puts it: "We're one of the most unfashionable bands out... we have very little to do with other musicians or, whatever trend is happening." But Silent Running, to use a "new-rock" example, sound so much like Simple Minds, would you be happy if Big Country started spawning lots of Little Country's? Stuart: "We'd rather be inspirational than influential, we'd rather inspire people to get up and play, not to get up and play like us. "It's a sad thing when everyone blames malaise of the music business on the record companies when it's actually to do with the groups - there are so many groups who will pander to the idea that by doing a certain thing you can become successful and so won't piay what it is they feel." Money helps the world go round and a feature round off. When last we featured Big Country our esteemed editor did suffer some flack for covering a band who had all recently taken their accountants advice to buy their own houses. I mean, what is this, Jamming! Goes Capitalist? "The Economist, A New Optimism For The Eighties"? Bruce, how much was your house? "£25,000." Not exactly a palace, but cash of course, after selling 2 million albums? "No, it's a 95% mortgage actually." Ah. But I s'pose the other members have bought Big Country-homes with swimming pools to crash Porsche's into and underground tennis courts? Not at all actually, it transpires, not at all. The Daily Express rang Stuart to ask what it was like to be a Millionaire in Scotland. Stuart said he had nothing like that kind of money. The next day the Daily Express ran a "Stuart Adamson - Millionare" headline. Well you must be mini-rich Stuart? "No, I'm not mini-rich, I'm making a nice living." Well, I for one don't begrudge them a nice living - they're working hard for the money and making some powerful music. They're home as often as possibie to go down the shops, pick up the gossip, and after some initial hiccups, none of their peers and friends begrudges their success. Sitting in those Parisian hotels with luxury on tap, it was easy to see how rock 'n' becomes such a bloated, stale, self indulgent creature completely divorced from the real world. Success, stadium touring and million selling albums invariably attach a gross beer gut to the formerly trim belly of rock. Big Country sport no beer gut, they haven't given in - decadence may be on tap but they're not turning it on.
Back to top	Page 35   BACK ISSUES   No. 14 - Paul McCartney interview part 2/Dexys Midnight Runners/The Alarm /Aztec Camera/Cocteau Twins/Crass and Dirt in Belfast/Victor Romero Evans/Books To Grow Up With.   No. 15 - Elvis Costello/Echo & The Bunnymen/Bruce Foxton/Carmel/Truth/U2 and Alarm in America /Fantastic Something.   No. 18 - The Special AKA/Big Country/General Public/New Model Army/Steel Pulse/Under Two Flags.David Jensen/Alternative Theatre.

Back to the "magazines" page
Back to the "from the archives" page
Back to the "I hope you like it!" main page