By the second night of the tour, Cooper’s tour manager was on the phone to Grant: “Your band’s off the bill, no arguing”.įaced with all this negativity, Grant persuaded Adamson that the band needed a shake up. I still have all the letters.”Ī support slot with Alice Cooper went disastrously too, the band’s half-baked sound grating on an audience looking for glam-metal thrills. Polydor passed, Arista passed, CBS passed. Heart And Soul was the song at one point – ‘This is what we’ll get a deal with’ – later it didn’t become anything other than a B-side. “I think the songs were Heart And Soul and Inwards. Stuart AdamsonĪn early version of the band cut demos with Rick Buckler from The Jam on drums and shopped them around the major labels. Someone’d play the guitar or the fiddle or an accordion. Music used to be a thing where working people got together on a Saturday night and played some songs. As he once said: “Music used to be a thing where working people got together on a Saturday night and played some songs. It was at that time when synths were in: it was all Human League stuff, and I do love all of that stuff…”Īdamson had something more traditional thing in mind. “Stuart and I were fucking about with synthesisers on ironing boards. “We could have went the other way ,” says Bruce. Hooking up with guitarist and long-time friend Bruce Watson, an early Big Country line-up also featured Peter Wishart, later of Gaelic rockers Runrig and now an SNP MP for Perth, on keyboards. By The Absolute Game, Jobbo had formed a writing partnership with the band’s new bassist, Russell Webb, and Adamson wanted to start again with a project where he was in charge. He had formed the Skids and was the nominal leader but Jobson – a 17 year-old during the first album – had grown to be a strong-willed and principled artist himself. And not being ashamed of that.”īut by 1980 Adamson wanted to be his own man again. If you were really going to analyse all the work, I think you’ll find that’s at the root of it all – finding some kind of grace in the whole process of being a man. If you look at the sleeves of Masquerade and Charade, thematically, they’re about masculine grace. “I think trying to understand masculinity in a way,” says former Skids frontman Richard Jobson. Even lyrically, the Skids had established a blueprint that would be echoed in Big Country: rousing songs of arms and adventure – Boy’s Own stories with a new wave twist. Inspired by the energy of punk, his playing style owed less to the power chords of Johnny Ramone than it did the mercurial lead lines of Be Bop Deluxe’s Bill Nelson (who produced the Skids’ second album), the jerky rhythms of Nils Lofgren, or the steely solos of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner (Alice Cooper, Lou Reed).
#Teen suicide band discography full
Skids guitarist Stuart Adamson was already honing the sound that would find full expression in Big Country. Virgin put the late Dave Batchelor, producer of many Sensational Alex Harvey Band albums, behind the desk, but Burnell didn’t hold a grudge: the Stranglers later took the Skids on tour with them and by the time of the Skids’ third album, The Absolute Game, Grant was managing them alongside Alan Edwards (now head of famous PR firm The Outside Organisation). The Skids got a Peel Session and a deal with Virgin out of the trip. Grant was bringing Scottish acts like Penetration and the Rezillos down to London and “ said, ‘Would you bring down the Skids? I’ve found this band that I want to produce’.” It was JJ Burnell of The Stranglers in fact who first turned Grant on to the Skids, having witnessed them in Falkirk while on tour. Grant went from that to gravitating, like so many of the supposedly redundant ‘hippy’ generation, towards the trouble-makers of punk, managing The Stranglers, among others. So these cops come with torches and don’t know what to do: ‘Get down from that tree’ ‘…or we’ll arrest you’.” We were all tripping, hanging upside down from the trees like bats. The first time they came they brought dogs, ten of them. “The thing was, it was so remote, if the cops came you’d see them, cos they had to come up the hill.
Brian James ’s band played a couple of times, the Pink Fairies came down once, Michael Chapman. You’d buy a ticket, and the acid tab would be stuck underneath a postage stamp on the ticket. “We did these nights on the Cissbury Ring ruins. Grant fell into management after promoting and staging illegal ‘happenings’ around his home town of Worthing. Future BC manager Ian Grant was an agitator and troublemaker.
0 kommentar(er)
