A bush in the country
By Bruce Watson
Tracks, 1986

We started writing the material for this album about August/September of last year. We did about six weeks actual writing of the album. There'd been a few ideas kicking around all year which we'd saved up - guitar riffs and things which we'd stuck on cassettes or a Portastudio, individually. So we had a few good ideas and took them into the rehearsal studio to work on them. We'd just sort of use the various parts we'd written until we were ready to go into the studio and record. We booked ourselves into RAK Studios to do the bass and drums because Mark, our drummer, particularly likes the drum room at RAK Studios. We did the guitars and vocals at a place called The Power Plant in Willesden which is owned by Robin Millar, who produced the album.

I think that took us up to around February, then we decided to mix the album at Maison Rouge Studios and we got an American guy called Walter Turbet, who's worked with The Cars and Malcolm McLaren.

The songs are written in different ways. Sometimes the four of us can be in soundcheck, just jamming, and one of us will come up with a riff and we start jamming around that. Sometimes either Stuart, myself, or Tony will have a guitar riff or a bass riff and we'll start playing it and the other three members will start jamming along. Sometimes Stuart might have the whole arrangement to a song written on cassette which he'll bring along to the studio and we'll add our own little bit on to it. Sometimes it's been known that Mark will go in a recording studio and put down a drum part and the rest of us will go in and do something on top of it. So it works in different ways, we don't have a set formula and a lot of stuff happens accidentally.

Making the album was enjoyable, although it can have its problems as well. It's not all plain sailing, but it's really good productive work to make an album - and you can see, when you're actually writing a song, you can see the song shaping up and building up and it's very satisfying. It's the most satisfying thing in the world at the time and then when you go out on tour the most satisfying thing is actually playing it in front of people.

The Power Plant's got good facilities for relaxing. they've got a little pinball room, a TV room upstairs, little individual rooms where each member of the group can sit if he want's to be alone. If somebody, say Stuart, wants to be alone to write lyrics, or if one person was sick of the rest, there are plenty of little rooms and annexes where one can go and be by themselves or whatever. But when we're actually in the studio, there's usually a couple of us there all the time because we never actually play live when we're in the studio. So it's not as if everybody has to stay and get bored with hanging around all the time. What we actually do is, we usually lay down a quick track which Stuart and Mark will usually work out for timing. Then either myself or Stuart or both of us will put down a guide guitar, or two guide guitars. Then Tony will put down a guide bass and Mark will play along to this on his headphones. So it's not as if we're asked to play live. Then Tony will usually put down his real bass, which only takes him a couple of hours. Tone's really quick. The next couple of days are usually spent doing the guitars. Then, when Stuart's got the lyrics ready we'll come back and deliver some good backing tracks.

'Eiledon'
The female vocals were done by a girl called June Miles-Kingston who used to play drums with Feargal Sharkey and The Fun Boy Three. She's got a really good voice that compliments Stuart's. A lot of people think the start was done on keyboards, or it sounds like that. But it wasn't really. Stuart used E-Bow on it and Tony used bass pedals and I put my guitar through an old Leslie cabinet and miked it up so that I got the reverb of piano strings as well - so you've got a good sort of organ-type sound, sort of ice rink or cinema type organ sound on it as well. We did a few wierd things with guitars and pedals on this song, and the song itself is about a perfect place to live, a perfect place to be.

'Hold The Heart'
This was my problem song, actually. I had to spend three or four days actually doing the guitar on it. I came and played twelve-string on it and it was like and old Fox Phantom I was playing on and the tuning was just impossible, you know. You'd tune the guitar up and strike a chord that would go out of tune, so I had to play each chord near enough individually, so it took a couple of days to record. I think it'll be one of the singles to be taken off the album.

'Look Away'
The idea for the song was taken off a video Stuart watched called "Harry Tracy". It starred Bruce Dern and was about the last of the Wild Bunch, who were sort of outlaws in America. It's pretty straightforward recording really, with no sort of weird tricks or gadgetry on it.

'One Great Thing'
This is a sort of typical Big Country sounding record. It can mean anything great that's happened to you in your life, I suppose. This is also a very straightforward number.

'Remembrance Day'
Yet again we have the great vocal talents of June Miles-Kingston on this one. We put some nice effects on the guitars. I actually used the immortal chords guitar synth on that one to get a sort of pipes effect - but not a bagpipes effect, just a sort of flute-type effect on it. Different weird and wonderful things happened on the guitars on this track. We had my guitar triggered off Mark's hi-hat and put a little bit of an echo on it to make it sound like fiddles. It was good because the middle section of the song is very moving because of that, because we were triggering different instruments off each other. It was one of the first times I've ever done that and it worked very effectively on this track.

'The Red Fox'
This features the sort of famous twin-lead guitar sound of Big Country, I suppose. Straight sort of guitar harmonies, almost Thin Lizzie-ish in parts. Yet again, at the end section there, triggering of a lot of odd guitar sounds from Mark's tom-tom this time. I also played slide guitar on this which turned out to be quite effective - and we also had the great kebab middle-eight section - which is good for the kebab seller!

'The Sailor'
I played mandolin on this song and it's one of our slower, softer pieces. It starts off really sort of nursery rhyme-ish, sort of ballady, and ends up in a sort of Meatloaf thrash towards the end.

'The Seer'
We'd done the song and one of our mates, a guy called Davy Duncan who used to play and sing in a band called The Shaking Pyramids, put down Barrad which is a sort of ethnic Scottish-Irish type hand-held drums - and it gave it a sort of folky feel, along with the mandolins and sitars. We thought 'this song needs girl vocals on it' and Stuart immediately thought 'why don't we get kate bush?' We said there's only one way to do it and that's phone her management. They said that Kate would do it but she'd like to hear a cassette of the song first. So we sent a cassette there and she liked the song and she worked out her parts for the song, orchestrating them really well. Then she came to the studio and did them, it took her about twelve hours to do and it was just great, it was fantastic. I think the woman is just a complete genius. She was very shy. I think we were quite sort of awestruck as well when she walked in. Tony was like 'Oh, hello Kate, would you like a cup of coffee, would you like a glass of orange juice?', running about saying things like that. I think we were quite shy, she was quite shy as well. But she was good fun, she's got a very 'Comic Strip' type sense of humour which we immediately identified with and after that it was a great time.

'The Teacher'
This track has Stuart's famous Duane Eddy-cum- Hank Marvin type guitar sound on it.

'I Walk The Hill'
This started off as a Big Country parody of ourselves. We were sitting thinking to ourselves: 'Let's do a parody of 'Fields Of Fire' or something like that'. So we just started playing these guitars on a typically Big Country style, with the drum beat and Tony playing typically cod-work bass type stuff and it actually ended up sounding quite good. We decided to use it, so what started out to be a joke in a way turned out to be really good.

Bruce Watson

General chat about life & "The Seer"
Smash Hits, May 1986

"It's all a bit disorientating for me," admits Big Country's Stuart Adamson, shaking his head and tucking into one of the many Cokes he drinks these days (he gave up alcohol last year). He's not that keen on event's like Montreux - "I find it really hard to be witty and chatty because I'm pretty serious about what I do and I'm really bad at making jokes on TV". And he's even less keen today because the virus that he, his wife Sandra, son Callum, daughter Kirsten and just about everyone else he knows all got is coming back again. "It's like the flu," he sniffles, "all shivery, and sore limbs and tired."

Even so, he's still enjoying life a lot more than at the end of their last tour. "I was heartily sick of the travelling and spending so much time being away from home - I draw a hell of a lot of inspiration from my home life." So Big Country stopped for a while (and, it was rumoured, may even have split up for a short time) while Stuart started doing all the things outside the group that he values - "a bit of fly-fishing, supporting the local football team, going to the motorcycle racing and shopping with my wife and kids." And, eventually, writing a few songs.

"I think I'll always write songs," he explains, " to comunicate the way I feel about things and to show a little bit about the culture I grew up with." In particular, the area of Scotland where he grew up and still lives and where people treat him "just the way they always have".

Finally, having gathered enough songs together and taken long enough off to "create a bit of an aura around the band and make this new album something special", the group met up and recorded their new LP "The Seer".

"It's named after the album's long track, 'The Seer'," says Stuart. "It's based on a tale of a Scottish woman called the 'Bramin Seer' - I don't know how you spell it. She was like a Scottish Nostradamus (mediaeval French bloke who predicted lots of "things") in drag, and the song's about some of her prophecies coming to fruition. We asked Kate Bush if she would come and sing on it and she agreed - she was just amazing."

And now he's ready to start all the promotion for the LP, and the travelling and the touring that he grew to hate last time. He's already beginning to miss home: "I still phone my wife twice a day...at least," he admits shyly. "I love her, you know. She's my favourite person."

But he also says there's almost nothing better than running onstage with Big Country.

"I still get a rush up the spine every time we play together. It's become very unhip to say 'I love to play live' but I do. That's why I wanted to be a musician in the first place. And I can't think of a better band to play in," he grins. "It's not embarassing. I find it very spiritually uplifting and I'm not afraid to admit it."

One Great Thing
Jackie, 1986

Fife, Dunfermline to be exact, home of... erm, Big Country! OK, so Debbie Gibson is only 16, writes her own songs, and makes quite a bit of dosh out of them too, but did you know that Stuart Adamson of Big Country started writing songs at the age of 13? nah! Bet you didn't!

Don't suppose you realised that the theme music for the very funnee film "Restless Natives" was written by Stuart and performed by Big Country, either, did you? Clever chaps these Big Country lads. But that's not all: Big Country have appeared at the Prince's Trust Gala at the Wembley Arena, appeared on stage at the finale of Live Aid, supported David Bowie on tour, and had their song "One Great Thing" used as a theme for a Scottish-type advert. Not a bad set of achievements for the four piece Scottish band with the distinctive bagpipe guitar sound. (Ner ner ner ner - ha ha! - Jackie Office.)

Ahem! Now we know all that, what about their singles? What kind of record success have they had? Well, a lot more than you think! Fields of Fire, Chance, Wonderland and Look Away have all been top ten hits, with In A Big Country, East Of Eden, and One Great Thing, all reaching the top twenty. They have also had several other songs in the top thirty. Not bad for an ordinary working-class bunch of lads who "just want to be musicians, not rock stars".

So where do these talented blokes come from? - Dunfermline of course - city famous for dead millionaire Andrew Carnegie and Dunfermline Athletic Football team. (Oh really? Ha ha! - the Ed.) In fact, many's the time Stuart's been spotted on the terraces at Eastend Park (Dunfermline's football ground, dummies!) shouting with the best of them... Here we go... here we go...here we go!... Enough of these football chants. This is a music page, you plebs!

Now, if you want to know more about the boys of B.C. look out for their official book "A Certain Chemistry" in most good bookshops.

Bye Bye Dunfermline, ...Look Away...Look Away.