LINER NOTES BY BAND MEMBERSjump to: Liner Notes by Tim Barr | Printed Credits | Sefton Park On Screen Credits Edinburgh Playhouse On Screen Credits | Reading Hexagon On Screen Credits |
The BBC, the mighty BBC. For years, I dreamt of being in a successful band that appeared on Top of The Pops, but the real prize was to be introduced by Bob Harris on The Old Grey Whistle Test. It was a programme that was part of the fabric of my life during my teens. Some of the most prolific artists of our time appeared on that programme. The possibility of performing on it seemed a long time coming in the scheme of things. By the time we got to appear, Bob Harris had long since gone. The then new breed rock journalists, David Hepworth and Mark Ellen hosted the programme. One genuine recollection I have was that I didn't think we came over very well. There was no real atmosphere in the studio; we found it difficult to really fire ourselves up, and I didn't think the hosts were that interested in us. I am still really happy that we are one of an illustrious list of artists to feature on that iconic programme. This archive of recordings is a history of the promotional activities that the band did, and did with vigour. The BBC seemed to like us then (even radio 1 played us now and again; thanks radio 2, you still do). I would like to thank the following people for their inspiration and support during this fab period; Mrs June Butler (my mum RIP), Alex, Joey, Jake and Jackie Butler, Ian Grant (and family), John Giddings, Chris Briggs, Sir Steve Lillywhite, Robin Millar, Pat Moran (RIP) & Joe Seabrook (RIP) Tony Butler ___________________________________________________ David Jensen/John Peel Sessions. This is the first time I have heard these recordings since they were broadcast in 82/83. I was surprised at the version of `Heart and Soul' and how fast the tempo was. Also how low Stuart's voice was back in those days. As he got older his singing voice actually got higher albeit with a slight American twang. On `Close Action' Mark's kit is crystal clear with none of the huge Steve Lilywhite trademark ambience that was huge in the 80's but I am sure those tom fills are definitely overdubbed lol. 'Angle Park' was the first song Stuart and I wrote together. The bass line at the top of the song came from a tune that my previous band used to play and it sounds like I may have been influenced by Peter Hook from Joy Division at the time. The fact that both of us made a conscious decision not to play blues bends whilst playing harmony guitar parts gave birth to our trademark sound. The name 'Angle Park' came from the last house on Townhill road in Dunfermline and we just liked the name of it. Stuart imagined it to be an old `Lunatic Asylum' hence the lyrics `In Angle Park the fountains crack' `Inwards' was always a live favourite and the arrangement never changed from when we first wrote it until the last time we played it live. The line And the scouts in the stairwell will meet again' is my favourite Stuart Adamson lyric. Once again loads of mad harmonised / delayed guitar overdubs. I would never record guitars like that nowadays. `1000 Stars' was always our opening number live in those days. The song is basically a re write of an instrumental called `Flag Of Nations' that Stuart and I recorded with John Leckie at Abbey Road Studio. Recorded entirely with 2 synthesizers in an overnight session, both Stuart and I could have become the next `Soft Cell' if Tony and Mark hadn't joined the band in a couple of months. The name 'Porroh Man' came from a Pan book of short horror stories and By Christ the tuning on those guitars are a bloody horror story. Were we using Braille tuners I ask myself? The over use of chorus on the guitars was fashionable for the day I suppose and again you can here the Bo Didley influence in the second part of the song. Not the best recorded version in my opinion but these songs were the first time we committed them to tape, almost like a free demo. (Thanks BBC). Listening back now I can imagine Steve Lilywhite being given the tapes by the company and then listening to them for reference before kicking us severely up the arse at Rak and the The Manor studios. I remember my manager Ian Grant asking John Peel over a cup of tea what he thought of `Harvest Home' to which the great man dryly replied `A Chart bound sound' It wasn't I would like to thank Stuart and Sandra Adamson. Donald Currie. Clive Ford, Sandy Muir and the Skids as well as Sandra Mc Alister. B. Watson. ___________________________________________________ Mark would like to thank, my mum Kathleen Brzezicki, Tina at Zildjian Cymbals, Pearl Drums, Vick Firth Sticks & Remo Drum heads. ___________________________________________________ “ We'd like to do something now, which is all about being proud of who you are and what you're about. |
LINER NOTES BY TIM BARRjump to: Liner Notes by Band Members | Printed Credits | Sefton Park On Screen Credits Edinburgh Playhouse On Screen Credits | Reading Hexagon On Screen Credits |
In a way, it all began with the BBC. As a fiercely intelligent schoolkid growing up in the Fife mining village of Crossgates, Stuart Adamson's love affair with the guitar took wings after he tuned in to the ten-part BBC2 tuition series Hold Down A Chord. Sitting cross-legged in front of the flickering screen, cradling his uncle Drew's acoustic guitar, he watched presenter John Pearse reveal the bewitching secrets of finger-picking, scales and vibrato. Brow furrowed in concentration, tentatively moving his fingers across the frets, the young Adamson joined a generation of guitarists inspired by Pearse and his programme. And while the presenter's folk-inflected blues may have seemed an unlikely inspiration for the blistering punk rock of Stuart's first professional outfit The Skids — with whom he made his inaugural visit to a BBC studio in May 1978 — the traces of that early exposure to roots music blossomed throughout Big Country's expansive canon. What Pearse kick-started was a journey that would lead to Stuart Adamson's well-earned reputation as one of the electric guitar's all-time great virtuosos, influencing artists' as diverse as U2's The Edge, Blur's Graham
Coxon and James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers. The journey that Pearse himself helped to inspire — "I owe it all to him," Adamson once, only half-jokingly, confessed to Smash Hits — brought Big Country to the doors of the BBC on many occasions. From their first explosive session for David `Kid' Jensen in August 1982 to an electrifying set at London's Hammersmith Odeon for Radio 1's In Concert series in January 1989, this two-disc set brings together some of Big Country's most memorable Beeb performances — many of them previously unreleased. It charts the band's progress from starry-eyed dreamers mining a seam of rock'n'roll as distinctive and original as, say, New York's Television or (another Adamson passion) Led Zeppelin, to assured hitmakers with a reputation as one of the UK's most thrilling live acts. Much of the music contained here serves as a timely reminder of just how strikingly original Big Country's contribution to rock's rich tapestry has been. The opening bars of Heart & Soul, which introduced Along the way, of course, the voices of lovers fired mountainsides, rain came down on factory towns and great adventures were recounted. Adamson's vision of Big Country as "the land of productivity and discovery... a great coming together of cultures" proved to be prophetic. Live At The BBC documents the constantly evolving sound of a band eager to explore and inspire in equal parts. "We never wanted to stand still," insists Bruce Watson, who co-founded the band with Adamson in April 1981 after the latter quit The Skids during the making of their final album Joy. "Music for me — and for Stuart too — was always about going forward, expanding your horizons, doing something more than you did the day before. It's part of our DNA as a band. We're always searching for that sound you've never heard before and that perfect song:' Big Country's first trip to the BBC's Maida Vale studios was to record the session for Jensen's Radio 1 evening show which opens this collection. When they pulled up outside the sprawling Edwardian complex in west London on that late summer afternoon in 1982, bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Brzezicki had been in the band for just a few months. Yet the results of their few hours in the studio with session producer John Williams — a one-time record promoter for acts such as The Who, Bob Marley and Slade — underlined the fact they were already firing on all cylinders. "When you're doing these kinds of sessions you don't have the luxury of time on your side," explains Watson. "The painstaking approach to recording that we might have taken on, say, the album sessions we'd been doing with (Pink Floyd/Roxy Music producer) Chris Thomas a few weeks earlier was out of the question. It was very much a case of us setting up and playing live. In that sense, they're very honest recordings. What you hear is a pretty faithful representation of what we actually sounded like at the time:' Williams, who was then also carving out a reputation for himself as a music industry player by managing chart-bound synth-pop duo Blancmange, clearly appreciated Brzezicki's virtuoso abilities. He pushed the drums high in the mix to create a solid framework for the twin-guitar assault that was a central part of Adamson and Watson's original vision for Big Country. The songs themselves — Harvest Home, Heart & Soul and Angle Park — comprised some of their earliest work together, forged from ideas Adamson had developed during the final days of his tenure with The Skids or compositions that Watson had originally intended for his own pre-Big Country outfit Eurosect. "Stuart and Bruce had worked really hard together in developing the early characteristics of the band," recalls Butler, citing the months in 1981 that Adamson and Watson spent developing the embryonic Big Country with writing and DIY recording sessions in the rented basement of a community centre just yards from the flat in Townhill, near Dunfermline, where the newlywed frontman had settled the previous year. Those sessions had resulted in some exceptional songs. The delivery mechanism took a little while longer. After borrowing Jam drummer Rick Buckler and Be Bop Deluxe/Public Image studio whizz John Leckie for an early demo, Adamson and Watson tried out a short-lived five-piece line-up, which made its debut at Dunfermline's Glen Pavilion on February 4 1982 and imploded weeks later after a prospective eight-date tour with Alice Cooper ended just two nights in. Butler and Brzezicki, then much in demand as session musicians under the name Rhythm For Hire, signed up in April 1982 after being booked for a memorable demo session at Phonogram's London studio. "They did three numbers with us," Adamson later told People magazine's Roger Wolmuth, "without rehearsal and they ended up sounding like masters. I knew then we had the right line-up for the group." His instincts proved correct. "From the ' very start," insists Butler, "we had a unique chemistry. That's one of the reasons I think that Kid Jensen session still sounds so good. We only had a handful of gigs under our belts by the time we got to Maida Vale but we were genuinely excited to be playing together:' Harvest Home, the song that opens this compilation — and, incidentally, the first song Adamson, Watson, Brzezicki and Butler ever played together — became Big Country's first single in September 1982. When follow-up Fields Of Fire hit the UK Top 10 following its release in February 1983, Big Country became frequent visitors to the BBC. "It all began happening very fast for us," recalls Watson. "It had been building slowly and then suddenly, Fields Of Fire was being played on the radio and things
didn't slow down again for a very long time:' They returned to Maida Vale in March 1983, this time to record a session for John Peel. The Radio 1 legend already had history with Stuart Adamson. For a long time, Peel had been an outspoken champion of The Skids, repeatedly playing their self-released debut and inviting them to do sessions on no less than five occasions between 1978 and 1980. Given his passion for Adamson's playing — he'd once dubbed him "Britain's answer to Jimi Hendrix" — what's surprising is that it took him so long to secure Big Country for his programme. For Bruce Watson, who as a teenager had sat night after night tuned into Peel, finger poised over the record button of a radio cassette, ready to capture choice performances by, say, Viv Stanshall, The Stranglers or even The Skids themselves, the invite was a dream come true. "Peel had been enormously important to me during the whole punk thing," he explains. "For those of us who didn't live in London at the time or who were just too young to get down to The Roxy or The 100 Club every other night, his shows were essential. That was how we heard The Damned or The Banshees or even Eater for the first time. So actually getting to do a session for John Peel was a very big deal for me. At that point, if someone had come up to me and said, `Son, that's it, you've had your shot, now go back home' then I'd have been quite happy. I'd got a single in the Top Ten and I'd recorded a Peel session. How much better could it get?" A highlight of Big Country's one-and-only session for Peel is the stunning version of the heart-stopping Inwards included here. To anyone with a passing awareness of the darker shadows that fired Adamson's creative brilliance, it's a strikingly personal song full of astonishing images — such as the beautifully-wrought `All the engines too loud, all the pavements hiss" — that hint at something deeper, more existentially profound than most contemporary pop. "Stuart doesn't get the credit he deserves as a lyricist," Watson observes. "Inwards is a good example, I love the `scouts in the stairwell' line, for instance, but there are Adamson and Watson were frequently spotted on the train from Edinburgh to London as trips to the BBC — particularly the Top Of The Pops studio — became a regular feature of life in the band. By May 1983, with the release of signature
hit In A Big Country — written, according to producer Steve Lillywhite, immediately after the recording sessions for Fields Of Fire because the band were so inspired by the sound he'd helped them find — they were back in the charts again, This time they tasted success on the other side of the Atlantic too as In A Big Country soared to No3 in the USA's Billboard chart. Back home that summer, Big Country were one of the hottest tickets on the live circuit. Though they weren't quite yet big enough to fulfil Mark and Tony's dream of playing the Hammersmith Odeon, they did sell out the slightly smaller Hammersmith Palais in June 1983. The show was recorded for Radio 1's legendary In Concert series, which had transmitted extraordinary shows by such long-term Big Country favourites as Be Bop Deluxe and Roxy Music. "At this point, so early in our career, there was a lot riding on these kinds of performances," recalls Brzezicki. "Stuart would say, `We're being recorded tonight so make sure you do this and you don't do that' and we'd naturally get a bit more keyed up. But, the truth is, as soon as you get out there and you get through the first eight bars you're gone — you've got no idea you're being recorded because you're totally in the zone, you're playing a show and it's you and the band and the audience. Everything else just goes straight out of your head. In a way, I even feel that's how it ought to be. It's just a more honest experience for everyone." One of the standout songs from Big Country's Hammersmith Palais performance — and one that was in the set at their very first Glen Pavilion show — remains the haunting performance of Balcony included here. Still one of the band's most experimental moments, it provides a good insight into the fertile leftof-centre musical imagination that drew Adamson to Watson in the first place. With a passion for those who opted for pop's less well-travelled roads — his teenage favourites included Doctors Of Madness and Deaf School as well as The Damned and The Sex Pistols — Watson's previous outfits The Delinquents and Eurosect demonstrated an already blossoming talent for minting unique melodies. That came to fruition in Big Country with classics such as Angle Park, included in their one-and-only Peel session, and the track that gave 1983's million-selling debut album The Crossing its name. At times, the atmosphere at the shows on the band's Crossing The Country tour that summer came close to Beatlemania-style hysteria. David Lloyd, frontman of Arista signings Uropa Lula — who opened for Big Country at Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre in June 1983 before supporting them on 12 dates across the UK from Swansea to Leicester — remembers: "The band were all very friendly and, on the last night of the tour, they invited us on onstage with them for the encores. I had to pull our keyboard player out of the crowd after she'd held her hands out for too long: This collection also includes three tracks from the band's incendiary set at that year's Reading Festival. Big Country had been added to the bill — which also included Steel Pulse, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Thin Lizzy — as special guests of The Stranglers, long-time admirers of Adamson since his days with The Skids. The helping hand they extended also stretched to assisting with the pyrotechnic set-up. "That was the show where The Stranglers blew us up," grins Watson. "They thought we should have something extra special during Fields Of Fire and their crew helped us set up for it. The roadies warned us that, at the end of the song we had to step at least eight feet back from the microphones. Unfortunately they miscalculated the amount of explosive they needed. We did move back eight feet, in fact we ran for cover behind the amps, but the pyros were so ferocious we all got burned. It was like a napalm attack. We spent The Stranglers' set sitting in the first aid tent with our faces and hands covered in Vaseline:' The hectic touring schedule kept up into 1984, first across America, then Japan. With barely enough time to catch a breath, they began writing and rehearsing for their second album Steeltown. But one of their superstar fans had other ideas. When the support act for his Summer Of 84 concert at London's Wembley Stadium pulled out at the last minute, Elton John knew exactly who he wanted as a replacement — Big Country. "He's so associated with the piano that a lot of people might be surprised he'd be such a passionate fan of a guitar-led band like ours," says Brzezicki. "But he's got a fantastic interest in new music and he went out of his way to sing our praises:' "He was really generous to us," adds Watson. "When he discovered we might not be able to play at Wembley because our equipment was on its way to the studio in Sweden where we were due to record, he offered to buy replacements for us: On the afternoon of the gig, which was being simultaneously broadcast on Radio 1 — source of the hat-trick of tracks included here — Elton dropped in to their dressing room to crack jokes and wish them well. "He was great," recalls Watson, "though we only saw his first three songs: Terminally homesick, Adamson and Watson took a fast car to the airport. By the time Elton finished his set, they were toasting the day's events in a Dunfermline nightclub. The dizzying pace that the band had set for themselves continued. After six weeks in Stockholm, recording Steeltown at Abba's Polar Studios, they were back on the road traversing the UK (twice), Scandinavia and Germany. Less than a year later, their third album, The Seer (released in July 1986) was introduced to fans on an eye-popping 85-date tour that took them from Holland to America, back across Europe and, finally, to London's Wembley Arena for two triumphant end-of-year shows. Their reputation as an extraordinary live act continued to grow, but the work ethic that fuelled it was equally impressive. "If there's one thing that runs through all of Big Country's work," Adamson told Smash Hits that year, "it's that it's all done with the same amount of commitment and excitement and genuine feeling. People identify with that: He was clearly delighted with the Robin Millar-produced sessions for The Seer, which also featured Kate Bush on the title track. "I was ecstatic," the frontman later confirmed. "Every aspect of it, musically, lyrically and live, has been a joy to work on. There's a lot of space and a lot of atmosphere in the album and it's brought out a lot of subtleties in the group that were always there but never quite came through before:' The release of Peace In Our Time also coincided with one of Big Country's more unusual gigs - and certainly one of the Radio l's most unique Evening Sessions. In September 1988, as the precursor to a string of gigs in the Soviet Union, the band became the first British rock band to perform inside London's Russian Embassy The specially-invited audience saw them play highlights from the new album, while Radio 1 managed to secure a first by conducting an outside broadcast on what was, technically, foreign soil without ever leaving London. "It was an interesting experience," insists Watson. "The audience was made up of press, foreign office officials and diplomats but the building wasn't designed for a rock concert. Every time Mark hit the drums especially hard, bits of plaster would fall off the ceiling:' And yet the tracks included here - the album's title track, Look Away, Thousand Yard Stare and River Of Hope - sound like a band at ease with their surroundings ... even if they were demolishing them. "The keyboard thing came from having Peter Wolf produce the album," recalls Butler. "He was this wunderkind keyboard prodigy from Austria, who had a very respectable musical and production background. Not an obvious choice to produce us. I guess we all thought that we had to try and move the sound on so, in many respects we embraced the keyboard element particularly the Synclavier, which gave us a lot of different textures." Adamson's death in 2001 robbed the world of a rare, often underrated, talent. But the songs in this collection testify to a precious gift for connecting, across the airwaves, with audiences around the world. Whether it's turned up loud on the Oasis tourbus - as long-term Big Country fan Noel Gallagher used to require - or turned down low in a working man's bedsit, this is music that reaches into the heart and touches the soul. "I've never seen it as a great quest," Adamson once confessed. "It doesn't matter to me if I'm playing to one person or a thousand people - it's still just a matter of sharing some songs ..." Tim Barr
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ON SCREEN CREDITS (SEFTON PARK)jump to: Liner Notes by Band Members | Liner Notes by Tim Barr | Printed Credits Edinburgh Playhouse On Screen Credits | Reading Hexagon On Screen Credits {DVD MENU} BIG COUNTRY SEFTON PARK Porrohman {OPENING CREDITS} POP {CLOSING CREDITS} BIG COUNTRY Location Liaison VT Editor Senior Cameraman Sound Stage Lighting Additional Lighting Production Assistant Executive Producer Director Producer © 2013 BBC Worldwide © 2013 Universal Music Group International (GB) ___________________________________________________ |
ON SCREEN CREDITS (EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE)jump to: Liner Notes by Band Members | Liner Notes by Tim Barr | Printed Credits Sefton Park On Screen Credits | Reading Hexagon On Screen Credits {DVD MENU} Whistle Test Just A Shadow {OPENING CREDITS} WHISTLE BILLY SLOAN {CLOSING CREDITS} © 2013 BBC Worldwide © 2013 Universal Music Group International (GB) ___________________________________________________ |
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