15th - 28th November 1984 (No 81)
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KERRANG! 15th - 28th November 1984 (No 81) |
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| Page 1 · Pages 36 & 37 · Page 38 |
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Front Cover Purple Passages. Beginning a major series of all-new interviews with members of the reformed Deep Purple. Picture: DEEP PURPLE circa 1972: hand tinting by Helena Zakrewska-Rucinska. |
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Pages 36 & 37 That's (Country) Life Bruce Watson (guitars) sparks, STUART ADAMSON (guitars/vocals) fumes and DAVE DICKSON (paraffin) lights the blue touch-paper... DOOMED. If ever there was an interview doomed to abject failure this was it. From the start it had been an organisational f**k-up but then, as we say in the trade, when the going gets tough... Honestly, I didn't mean it to end this way it just happened. Big Country guitarist/vocalist Stuart Adamson is the first person I have ever had walk out on an interview with me. Why? cos we argued... about bikes! Stupid really, especially since Adamson is a Willie Nelson fan, but then these things happen; call it volatile temperament clashing with pissed journalist. You just have to adopt a kind of laissez faire attitude to this sort of incident; there's no point getting worked up about it, it's simply NOT THAT IMPORTANT! Stuart Adamson would probably disagree. Mick Wall (curiously enough) seemed to put his finger on the problem when he reviewed BC's latest vinyl offering, 'Steeltown', last issue. Simply, this band appears to lack a sense of humour; or, to be more specific, it's the mainman, Adamson himself, who seems to lack this all important trait. What he sees as 'cause' I see as 'entertainment'; what he sees as 'message' I see as 'movement'. Stuart Adamson, to further lift from the review according to Wall, is "so earnest, so deeply Celtic and sentimental". Adamson is clearly a moved man; moved by sentiment and passion to weave his stories of plight through a Celtic tradition in a modern setting. But he seems to achieve this through such angst and anguish that he loses the humour deeply imbedded in all human action. We are funny creatures, if we weren't we'd all be psychos. Stuart Adamson takes his bikes seriously, too. He views the things as a challenge, a functional challenge to see just how far you can push both man and machine. To me they can be functional works of art in the same way that a Morgan is a functional work of art as far as the motor car is concerned - a thing of extraordinary beauty that also works. Adamson fails to see this, too; he told me I was having the piss taken out of me hankering after a Morgan. We are obviously doomed never to see eye-to-eye on the subject of mechanisation. THE BRIEF had been to interview Big Country and see the show. With a new album out and a major tour in progress this was obviously the time to catch them in the raw. "You can interview Bruce (Watson, guitarist) now," I was told by Steve, the harrassed press man from Phonogram, "and Stuart in the morning." The morning interview, however, was aborted - for obvious reasons - as the creeping mists of doom slowly engulfed this whole feature. Having finally persuaded the record company to give me a time and a place to do the business (pre show, Liverpool Royal Court), I vainly hoped things would slot into place. No chance. There'd been a derailment at Wembley that sent shudders of confusion and terminal anxiety through the precarious time-tabling of British Rail Inter-City. I arrived an hour-and-a-half late, missed the first 20 minutes of the show and generally felt down, defalted and depressed. I can do without this, this is no way to treat the press. Screw you, son, remember: when the going gets tough... But it was worth it for the show. The best thing about this rather grey, drab and interminably damp city is the people. Liverpudlians are great, warm and wonderful people who know how to rock out with a vengeance. On stage, Big Country were having serious technical difficulties; Adamson's guitar was simply refusing to work to his direction... doomed, it seemed. But the crowd didn't care, they were kicking some serious ass all of their own. They were patient, they were kind, they were understanding; they cheered, they danced and they sang. In short, they partied down. And they wouldn't let the band go either. Big Country were forced back for an encore lasting an incredible 35 minutes. So totally enraptured were both band and audience it seemed that they couldn't get enough of each other's company - BC played for so long that they ran out of songs and were forced to crank out 'In A Big Country' for a second time. They would have gone on, too, but one of their guitar roadies "f**ked off, he couldn't handle it: 'I'm not working for you any more, I want double-time!' " The show was a triumph. "The best gig Big Country's ever played!" according to Watson. BRUCE WATSON is the antithesis of his frontman. He is quieter and more relaxed; he is prepared to listen and to laugh. Life comes easier to him and, while his commitment to Big Country is certainly no less than Adamson's, he clearly recognises that it has to have a humorous aspect, too. Big Country play two nights at Wembley at the end of the year, but Watson remains unawed by this: "We've played there more times than Denis Law!" he chirps with understandable pride for a Scotsman. They started off their Wembley career playing five nights supporting the Jam and followed that up last Summer by supporting Elton John (at the Stadium this time) when Paul CONTINUES OVER |
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Page 38 FROM PREVIOUS PAGE Young dropped out at the eleventh hour. Is there anyone, I wondered, who Big Country wouldn't support? "Aye, Soft Cell! There's nothing worse than watching a wee poof singing his heart out and some c**t with an iron going doo-doo-doo on his ironing board! To me that's got nothing at all to do with anything!" You can take it as read that Bruce Watson doesn't like Soft Cell... he goes for something a little raunchier... "To me music is like Alex Harvey and Tom Verlaine, Television, stuff like that, that's what started me playing guitar and being in a group!" Have you SEEN Tom Verlain?!! God, what a self-indulgent bastard! "No, I've never seen him, I've only ever heard him on record, but I've seen video-clips and loved them all. He's definitely one of my Guitar Heroes, Tom Verlaine. He was what first made me pick up a guitar. When he was in Television he wasn't going solos he was just doing nice wee melodies, it was brilliant! "I hate guitar solos, I've never played a guitar solo in my life. In fact, I've never played any cover versions in my life apart from 'Tracks Of My Tears', 'Prairie Rose' (On the B-side of 'East Of Eden') and a Deaf School song I did with my old band years ago!" CONTINUING the guitar banter has he, I want to know, ever seen Danny Ash, to my mind one of the finest exponents of the guitar currently treading the boards? "I'm not really keen on him, actually. You see, I'd seen Bauhaus a few times with my little brother who used to follow them. But I could never get into them, I thought they were rubbish! To me it was all white noise!" Then he should check out his new band, Tones On Tail, wherein Danny As does things with a guitar I never knew were humanly possible! "I think Bauhaus could have done a lot if they hadn't done the cover versions (specifically, T-Rex's 'Telegram Sam' and Bowie's 'Ziggy Stardust'), not as A-sides anyway. That's why I like Siouxie & The Banshees; 'Helter Skelter' (as a B-side) was really good." Certainly I preferred it wo the Beatles' original version. "From 'The White Album', isn't it? Aye, the original's too bluesy, too rock 'n' rolly." Yeah, the Banshees' version is more like a nightmare! "That's what our version of Roxy Music's 'Prairie Rose' is like - screaming bag-guitar sound at the beginning! The song's about Jerry Hall - her with the tits and long legs!" And what made you choose that particular song to cover? "It's got 'Big Country' in the lyrics!" Yeah? I figured maybe the name of the band came from the movie, 'The Big Country'... "Yeah, I saw it when I was about five but I can't remember anything about it." It's the one where Gregory Peck returns to Texas and refuses to carry a gun. "Actually, I tended to see all the musicals when I was young; y'know, your mum takes you along..." SOME TIME later, having traverses the joys of Disneyworld and Japanese bath-houses, we ascend to the serious discussion of serious music. "I liked the Faces; I tell you what, I preferred Ron Wood when he was in the Faces rather than the Stones. For me, Keith Richards is the man for the Stones. but I did like the Faces, thought I'm too young to remember all that stuff." You should try and get an album called 'Mahoney's Last Stand'; it's a film soundtrack by Ron Wood and Ronnie Lane, all guitars and banjos and stuff, real deep South country rock. "I'll tell you what I like; this Ry Cooder stuff. I don't know if you've seen the film 'Southern Comfort'?" Is that the one set in the Louisiana swamps? "Aye, and it's all cajun music! The movie's about the National Guard - like our Territorial Army - and they're in the middle of the swamp and one guy is mental and he fires off his gun, only blanks, at the locals. Anyway the next minute they're retaliating with their shotguns and blowing the Guards' heads off and all the rest of it. And Ry Cooder did the soundtrack and it's this cajun music - accordians and spoons...it's f**kin' amazing stuff! "So I've been getting into that and for the first time in my life I've taken up the slide guitar and the mandolin. And I thought, f**k it, I'm gonna try it on the album. So I said to Steve Lillywhite (the producer), 'Any chance of me playing the slide and mandolin?' And he goes, 'Do what you f**kin' want', so I got my guitar roadie to buy me a slide and a manolin [sic]...they sound alright, actually." But did you see 'Deliverance'? "No, I've heard about it but I've never seen it." Well, there's one scene where the four guys in the canoes (Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty & Ronny Cox) come across this village where all the people have obviously been inter-breeding for generations and they meet this deformed, mentally retarded kid. Now this kid's got a banjo and one of the guys from the canoes has a guitar and he starts strumming along. So the kid picks up his banjo and just blows this guy away he's playing so fast! "Yeah, I've heard about that. That's the trouble, I love watching movies but in Dunfermline you get the James Bond movie one week and f**kin' 'Friday The 13th Part 12' the next! I really want to see that new James Woods/Robert De Niro movie, 'Once Upon A Time In America'. I want to see that film so much! I'll kill to see that film. It'll never come to Dunfermline though!" Eventually the Conversation winds up, the drinks run down and we retire to the hotel lounge to join the rest of the band...and that's where the trouble began. FOR THE record then; Stuart Adamson runs the third best motorcycle racing team of production racers in Scotland. His rider, Iain, runs a close second to Howard Selby who himself finshes second in the TT this year. The Adamson man races a Kawasaki 2PZ 900, and "We're talking real bikes here, mate," he assured me. And "The important thing about biking," I was informed, "is going hard round the f**kin' corners!" So now you know, and so do I. Later we devolved into probably the most rediculous argument I have ever engaged in; 'ridiculous' because my knowledge of bikes is severely limited and Adamson's is obviously encyclopaedic - but there was also his annoying refusal to listen to anyone else's point of view. After he's stormed off he began arguing socialism with someone, announced that he was a card carrying member of the Communist Party and that is was his grandfather who had started the Communist movement in Scotland. He can be justifiably proud of this, but it doesn't mean that he's right ALL the time; c'mon Stuart, give us a break! Back at the gig, Adamson spots a T-shirt saying 'Doing Anything Deadly Tonight?' As it happens, yes... trying to interview you! Oh well, that, as they say, is rock 'n' roll. The plan was to talk to him about 'Steeltown'; ask him about the rumours of its month delay and whether that was really because he couldn't come up with the songs. Get his opinion on U2, since so many punters at the gig had 'U2' emblazoned across their chests, and find out about THAT sound, whether it's limiting and whether they can develop beyond it or with it. There was so much to ask but we just never got around to it; bikes are such a consuming passion, you see. But then you can't fight a grisly concept like 'Doom'. You just chalk it up to experience and remember to ask after his children first next time; much safer, much safer. |