BIG COUNTRY

In September, 1983, I picked up the latest issue of Rolling Stone over on the stands at Crown Books, and read this featured review of a band I'd never heard of named Big Country:

Here's a big-noise guitar band from Britain that blows the knobs off all the synth-pop diddlers and fake-funk frauds who are cluttering up the charts these days. Big Country mops up the fops with an air-raid guitar sound that's unlike anything else around, anywhere...Like the Irish band U2 (with whom they share young, guitar-wise producer Steve Lillywhite), Big Country has no use for synthesizers, and their extraordinary twin-guitar sound should make The Crossing a must-own item for rock die-hards.

So wrote Kurt Loder in a piece that has, I guess, become semi-iconic.  Well, it turned me on.  Burning with it.
a passion for 60's rock, a increasing passion for punk, hardcore, and especially the precursors of same (Velvets!), an interest in U2, and a loathing for the synth-pop diddlers and fake funk frauds then cluttering up the charts, I was ready for a new band to the blow the knobs off rock music again.   Loder's review made BC sound like they might be

1983 was a Dark Year.  The height of Reagan-era brinksmanship, many of us growing up in that time (myself included) feared (some even believed) the bombs might fall at any moment.  The economy was bleak.  "In A Big Country" and "Fields Of Fire" hit the airwaves, and they sounded pretty good.  They seemed to express something other than despair and resignation, but also something other than simple good times.  They sounded like hope.

But 1983 came and went, and by the time I had a copy of The Crossing my interest in sincere British Isles rock bands ala BC and U2 was fading fast.  I preferred The Clash.  Even more I preferred Husker Du, who really delivered on the guitar-army sound Loder claimed for BC in his review.  I liked U2 (still do), but I had my problems with them (still do).  American bands were filling up my favorite-band slots pretty fast, and BC just couldn't hold the post, even though The Crossing wasn't a bad album.  It just wasn't what I wanted to hear any more.  British rock had been eclipsed, and I was happy about it.

The other, even more serious problem, was that BC just went on to disappoint.  Watching them on SNL, I was struck by their thin sound and total lack of stage presence.  The Wonderland EP kicked off well with the title track ... and was totally forgettable otherwise.  The Steeltown album that followed left me cold.  Their passion had turned to mere pretense, their bagpipe guitar move had overstayed its welcome.  Where U2 seemed to expand into a real rock band more and more, BC just seemed to contract into a one-hit-wonder gimmick.  1986.  Just three years after The Crossing, their latest (The Seer) was getting slagged in Stone next to REM's Life's Rich Pageant - hardly the Athens boys greatest, but still one that was (and still is) of greater interest to me.  Sometime not long after that I recall Pulse, Tower Records' house organ, covering their galsnost-era tour of the Soviet Union. The author depicted them as bunch of well-meaning has-beens.  Well...

Everything I heard after Steeltown (which admittedly was not much) seemed to be a bigger dud than what I'd heard prior.  Next thing I remember was seeing an ad for The Buffalo Skinners and thinking "Christ - are THEY still around?"

And the next thing I heard was 10 years later - that Stuart Adamson was dead, an apparent suicide.

I guess that must have haunted me a bit, because about a year later I felt compelled to buy myself a new copy of The Crossing (my original vinly long having been purged from the collection).  For $10, what the hell?

Heard with new ears, outside the context of a dozen plus fellow U2 sound-alikes, it sounds better than it did last time I heard it.  It rocks hard.  They don't actually sound like U2 (though a similar attack and approach is obvious).  Adamson wrote better lyrics than Bono.  There's a Celtic-ness to the music that I really like.  It evokes green hills and valleys full of heather, a fantasy Scotland that exists only in the imagination.  Maybe that's what it was meant to do.  It's pretentious at times, and more than a little corny.  But it's good.  Not great.  The Crossing is no classic - not by my standards, anyway.  But its unique, its solid, its consistent, and I like to listen to it now and then.

It makes me a little sad, looking back.  In the end, Big Country was just another of many, many bands who failed to follow up on a particularly strong debut.  This only puts them in the company of, oh, Television, among others (and no, The Crossing is no match for Marquee Moon.  But its better than Adventure). They were a nice, earnest little band who made a promising debut, and whose greatest sin was to never be the band some thought they would be.

Big Country Wiki
Big Country Allmusic
Big Country - The Journey Continues

Essential Listening

The Crossing is all.  It's been reissued numerous times.  The version I have has the Wonderland EP tagged onto it, and that's a good deal.