7th - 20th August 1986 (No 126)
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KERRANG! 7th - 20th August 1986 (No 126) |
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| Page 1 · Pages 38 & 39 · Pages 44 & 45 · Pages 50 & 51 |
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Front Cover Special Donington Preview Issue. The Ultimate Din - Crankin' It Up For The Castle Kooga, Warlock, Scorpions, Motorhead, Def Leppard, Doc Holliday Win Ozzy's Platinum Album! Picture: Ozzy Osbourne by Ross Halfin. |
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Pages 38 & 39 Charts SINGLES 10 6 THE TEACHER Big Country (Mercury) ALBUMS 3 1 THE SEER Big Country (Mercury) 31 30 THE UNFORGETTABLE FIRE U2 (Island) |
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Page 38 The Tomorrow People With the release of their third album, will BIG COUNTRY seer prophet? CHRIS WELCH gets to the future with band guitarist and anti-ironing board campaigner BRUCE WATSON (pictured right) I MET Eric Clapton for the first time and I was awestruck. He's brilliant!" Bruce Watson, wild wee guitar strummer o' Big Country, beams at me from the recesses of a capacious tartan suit that threatens to swallow him up. Bruce's pleasant Scots accent rolls with all the locomotive rhythm of a Big Countiy song from 'The Seer', the band's latest album which has revived their fortunes. He is filled with a refreshing enthusiasm, complete candour and a generous spirit. Far removed, in other words, from the grumbling cynicism one so often encounters in the halls of rock. Does he agree Big Country are hot news? "Gosh no, we're not STARRRS!" Does he hate touring like everybody else? "I love it! Hotels, gigs, girls... when we first started out I went wild!" Bruce, one time punk rocker, has only just discovered the joys of such ancient practitioners as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, looking on his seniors with a new-found admiration. It's all part of the learning process which has been going on since Bruce first teamed up with Stuart Adamson to create the band who defied all trends and brought guitar music firmly back into perspective. As Bruce says: "When we started out, it was all guys playing ironing boards on 'Top Of The Pops' with one finger!" Bruce still lives in Scotland but we met for a dram (actually a coffee) in his palatial Bond Street record company office, where the walls are plastered in 'Seer' covers. Big Country are one of my favourite 'live' bands, so it was good to meet Mr. Watson for the first time. First, he explained how the meeting with Eric Clapton came about. "I was talking to him at the Prince's Trust show. It was the first time I'd ever met him. It's funny, when I first started out in music, I didn't think about him very much. It's in only the last couple of years that I've started getting into Clapton. Before, I was only vaguely aware that he was a great guitar player. Same goes for the Beatles and Stones. I was never into them when I was young. But I got bored with the New Music that was coming out and found ... 'Hey, that old Stones album sounds really good'. A lot more ideas and thought went into their songs than goes into a lot of the new stuff." BRUCE ADMITS when he first listened to pop music it was Gary Glitter, Slade and Sweet. "I liked the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and Nazareth too — it comes of being Scottish!" What happened when he met Clapton — did they discuss the merits of the nut position? "I said, 'Hello Eric, I'm pleased to meet you' and then I got stuck." Playing the star-studded Prince's Trust charity show alongside Clapton and Tina Turner was an exciting occasion for the Anglo-Scots. "We were the first band on and played five songs. It was magic, though we never got a chance to meet Charles and Di, but I thought it was good to be cool and mysterious! We also made the 'Nine O'Clock News' and 'News At Ten'. We were the band they said 'sounded like bagpipes'." Big Country have made big strides since they first burst upon the scene five years ago, hailed as the great new band of the Eighties. But there have been some mysterious troughs in their otherwise mobile career. "Aye,it's been paced out," says Bruce wryly. "When we first started out we worked all the time, gigging everywhere. I remember us doing five TV shows in one week. We got a media onslaught. We always hoped to be successful because we wanted to be the best band in the world. "We started off as a punk band before we were Big Country. We played all these punk Thrash Metal things. Punk, to me, was not having to be a technical whizz-kid to play. We could just get onstage and sing our songs. I didn't appreciate people like Eric Clapton then. I was just 16 and bashing out a few chords." IT'S PART of Bruce's charm that he owns up about his playing. "I can't play a 12-bar boogie to save my. Not that I would anyway, because I'd find it old hat. I'm so used to playing original material in bands. But we are doing a version of Stones' 'Honky Tonk Woman' onstage. We do that because it's so unexpected for Big Country. It's quite a good version and close to the original." Bruce has fond memories of his first gig away from Scotland. "Five or six of us drove in a van to Newcastle. It was fantastic, the first time we had played through a real big PA. We were only the support band, but it was magic. I thought then I could do it for the rest of my life ... travelling around in vans, meeting women and getting wasted. When you are 19 and mad, it's great fun." Was the whole idea of Big Country, then, to get wasted and laid? Bruce cocks a quizzical eye. "The idea was to create something that was completely... great ... different from what everybody else was doing... and using guitars to do it. At the same time there were all these synthesiser bands with funny haircuts playing ironing boards with one finger." You don't mean Depéche Mode, by any chance? "Oh, I'm not mentioning names, but that kinda thing. But, I dinna find them appealing because when I was young I remembered seeing Keith Richards on 'Top of The Pops' standing there with a guitar and his legs open, or Pete Townshend, and it always looked great. Now it was some guy with his legs shut and a funny haricut playing with one finger. I thought 'Nah, there must be more to rock music than this!' "So tried to put spark back again. Me and Stuart spent three months in the snooker hall of a community centre with a portastudio, putting songs together, which was the basis for our first album, 'The Crossing'. We got a couple of local boys to play bass and keyboards. But being brothers they were arguing all the time and it just wasn't working. It was a complete wall of sound, and everybody was going of at a tangent playing solos. "We did a couple of gigs supporting Alice Cooper on his tour, which was a complete and utter joke. We did Brighton and Birmingham and it was, like, our first experience of big gigs. I thought it was terrible to see the road crews being paid in cocaine before they'd set the gear up. So we split up after that. Me and Stuart stuck together, then bassist Tony Butler got in touch with us. We came to London and got on well in a hotel bar where we had a few drinks and a laugh. It was a good crack. We went into the studio the next day and recorded three songs. We decided there and then - this is a group!" The remaining member, the wonderful Mark Brzezicki on drums, came in via his mate Tony. Once they were together - stardom beckoned. "I wouldnae say that," says Bruce, shaking his head. "We're just a bunch of punters, that's all. But we're busy punters! The new album went to Number Two this week, and only Madonna beat us. We started recording the album last September and worked through until February. We had two different guys working on it, because we rejected the first mix. Walter Turbitt, who's worked with the Cars, re-mixed it for us and that took a while. SINCE THEN, we've done lots of European festivals and two major tours of the UK. We've been playing non-stop. We're playing with Queen and Status Quo at Knebworth Park (August 9), then a long onslaught on America, Japan and Australia. It's like an assault course. "But I love every aspect of touring. When we arrive in town I love to meet the people and get the atmosphere. In the band we're all great friends. We know enough when someone is feeling down to leave them alone. Everyone has to have their own space. And the rest of the time we just go out to play our songs to as many people as possible. In our set now we play five songs of our third album, 'The Seer', plus some other stuff off the other albums, a couple of B-sides and singles. We're on stage for over two hours and we try not to make it boring! "We've got a great new stage set. It's like Dunfermline Abbey. It's all done by back-projection. All we need are some gargoyles. Come to think of it, there are three gargoyles at the front of the stage. At least we don't use any backing tapes, like some live bands. It's just the four of us playing live. We're just a standard rock outfit really." Whence came the title of their new album? A 'Seer' was a kind of prophet, right? "Aye. I think Stuart saw a TV programme about a Scottish female Nostradamus who could into the future. I dinna ken too much about it. Stuart writes all the lyrics - not me. I make everything rhyme and it ends up corny. Stuart disappears for a few days and comes back with a whole bunch of lyrics, a completely arranged song. We never strived to get a Big Country sound particularly, a lot of it just comes out of jamming." After a promising beginning with their first album, Big Country didn't get anywhere in the American charts with 'Steel Town', their second. "That was our brutally frank period," laughs Bruce. "It went to Number One in the UK, but went right out again. "Stuart put down all these heavy lyrics and it didn't go down well at all. But I still think it was a great album. We still have our opinions, but music is our bag, not politics." Bruce had to rush off to a meeting and rose to reveal the full glory of his outfit, which included a tie knotted at half-mast. How do you describe the suit, I asked? "It's plaid," said Bruce. Well, that was plaid to see. Meanwhile, what did the next five years hold for Big Country? "I dunno. It's a mystery. Who knows? Hopefully, lots of work. Lots of great things will happen, if it's meant to be." I suppose we'll have to track down the Scottish Nostradamus to find out. If you seer, let me know! Picture of Bruce by Fin Costello. |
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Pages 50 & 51 KONCERTZ FROM PREVIOUZ PAGE MERCURY RISING QUEEN/STATUS QUO/THE ALARM/INXS, Wembley Stadium, London So over to the Alarm, next up, a band who've got 'well-meaning' stamped right the way through them like a stick of rock. At their best they play stirring stuff, and they're at their best on songs like '68 Guns', dedicated to the crowd - we've given them "the best two days of their lives," they tell us - and 'Strength', real rousers, all hands-on-heart and sweat-on-brow and glorious inspiration, with the band looking workmanlike and singer Mike Peters doing that gawky dance with his white-fringed arms flying about like cosmic octopi. Best of the lot though is 'Spirit Of '76', which starts out all poignant harmonica and builds into a clapalong Springsteen Supreme. "Let's hear the famous Wembley roar," yells Peters and the crowd obliges, though it's a pale echo of what Freddie and the boys are going to get later. Still, the Alarm and INXS have done a good warm-up job so far. SYLVIE SIMMONS |