Thread by @IAMKP

(one day late) in minding of Stuart Adamson -

Glasgow was far away then. The 18 miles between the Stirlingshire village of Banknock and Buchanan Street Bus station might as well have been eight hundred. We travelled to Glasgow twice a year, via the back roads ...

of Banton and Kilsyth, whenever we’d outgrown our skins and needed shirts from Goldbergs, Day Glo socks from What Every Woman Wants. That number 14 bus, in its northerly return from Glasgow, was marked Dunfermline. We never once travelled across the river to Dunfermline.

But it was mythic. Dunfermline was home to Big Country.

All the rain came down
on a cold new town
as he carried you away
From your father's hand
that always seemed like a fist
reaching out to make you pay

We knew about cold new towns in Banknock, because we sometimes fetched our messages from Cumbernauld. And we’d heard about those Glenrothes roundabouts. Roundabouts were fancy. Like soda streams. And video recorders.

There was this lad in my year that I fancied ...

through the whole of high school. I never stood a chance. He was a white T-shirt and red plaid shirt kind of a guy. Short of Stuart Adamson himself breenging into the Denny High Youth Club with those cheeky dimples and gravity-defying spikes, a Les Paul slung across his back ...

this lad was the focus for my eternally unmet desire.

He came like a hero from the factory floor
With the sun and moon as gifts
But the only son you ever saw
Were the two he left you with

I was a late starter on the physical entanglement front ...

eliciting nothing more than a hapless fumble behind the technical department in third year. My best pal from Bankier Primary meantime gave birth to her first child when she was thirteen, following in the footsteps of her older sister. And they weren’t alone at our school.

She and her sister were ferried by taxi each day to Camelon High, where I hope they got less of a merciless slagging than they would have done if they’d stayed at our school.

Now the skirts hang so heavy around your head
that you never knew you were young

because you played chance with a lifetime's romance
and the price was far too long

Ach, see, it looks like I’m judging their lives there, surmising something I’ve no business surmising. I don’t mean to do that. Who knows how it was except them?

But the fact is every one of us at the Denny High Youth Club could point to some lass, some woman, right where we were, beaten down by living. And sometimes literally beaten too. I’m not sure exactly when I realised, looking back ...

that one of my childhood crushes had been living with domestic abuse. The signs were all there. I just didn’t have the words or lived experience to make sense of it. The revelation of it explained a lot about him, retrospectively, how scared he was ...

how gentle he wanted to be, how much unending bother he got into as a way of trying to ask for help.

Oh Lord where did the feeling go
Oh Lord I never felt so low

And it wasn’t just the lassies, the women. There were men utterly robbed of dignity, caulked and hardened ...

in those Thatcher days.

Big Country got all of that. They were from just across the river, where things were worse. Yards and mines shut. Factories locked out.

They wrought it in their glorious melancholic anthems.

Fields of Fire. Harvest Home. Steeltown. The Storm.

In A Big Country
dreams stay with you
like a lover's voice ...

Aye. They do. And they’re seared in me in those guitars that reek of fiddles and pipes and industry and pain.

“Popular music can never be valid and worthwhile unless it reflects the environment that it comes from. I think it should be more like folk music in that I can talk about these situations with people, that I can specify events. Music of any kind should be a working, living ...

breathing part of a community, something that is everyday and completely natural for people to think and feel about, not something that is tied up in a fantasy-island world of sex and drugs and fast cars. That, to me, is all the bullshit of modern music ...

the distance that it has from being ... a genuine part of life.”

(Stuart Adamson of Big Country in Rolling Stone magazine, Feb 1985)

Stuart Adamson took his own life in a Honolulu hotel room on April 11th 2001. I never knew him. But I miss his voice.

Love to those that did know and love him in his person.

Ocht bless, thanks.