It’s the tenth anniversary of Princess Diana’s untimely death in a French road tunnel and how the media is full of it. This morning the two major channels covered the church service commemorating her death and f course there are thousands of words of text in the newspapers about the subject.
Does anyone tire of this scene, this mass grieving for someone most of us never met? I am ever incredulous at the supposed interest after all these years and can only assume that it is stoked up by a media who short of genuine stories to print and broadcast. This may all sound a little harsh and certainly I’d admit to being no fan of the royal family - far from it, but I find the way that the story of her life is continuously foisted on the public to be tiresome and transparent. It’s time they let it go and has been for a long period of time.
Most of us have lost loved ones along the way. I don’t see any vast outpouring of grief for those close to me and others, who have departed - after a much harder life than the Princess’s. It was a shame when she died, time to let it go now.
Big Country, Rescue Rooms, Nottingham.
Friday, 17th August, 2007.
It was a friend north of the border who gave me the heads-up about this impending gig in the heart of Nottingham’s Studentland. The gig and tour are being carried out as a twenty-fifth anniversary commemorating the band’s brilliant debut album. “The Crossing”. Sadly of course, the band’s singer, main songwriter and twin lead guitarist, Stuart Adamson is no longer with us after his desperate loss through his suicide in Hawaii in 2001. His influence on the band and it’s music is still evident though. So is the love and respect for him from his former friends in Big Country.
Big Country in 2007 consists of the remaining three members, Bruce Watson (guitar), Tony Butler (bass and lead vocals) and Mark Brzezicki (drums). The band felt Stuart to be irreplaceable and I have to say I am in agreement with this. It seemed fitting that the three should celebrate the band’s major, landmark success from all those years ago.
Big Country remained something of an enigma in the eyes of much of the music world. Perhaps one might even refer to them as having a cult following. Irrespective they achieved great success in record sales, particularly in their earlier career and gained a huge reputation as a terrific live band.
It was my first visit to Rescue Rooms and at first I was a little surprised at how small the venue is. Nevertheless it’s a good venue that feel comfortable with people in the various nooks and crannies drinking and socialising, happily much of it outside on a warm-ish night. We entered in the midst of what I hoped was the opening tune and took our place near the back of the crowd. The crowd demographic was an interesting one with many people of an age group that had them marked as fans of the band from way back. It was a good-natured crowd too.
Tony Butler mentioned a few words about Stuart Adamson and the reason they were back playing in front of us on this occasion. He also explained that they had written some new material to ‘get them motivated’. As one might imagine, many of the old favourites were there, ‘Look Away’, ‘The Teacher’, ‘Fields of Fire’ and ‘Chance’, spread amongst a healthy amount of hitherto unheard material, some of which sounded promising. A personal high spot came at the band choosing to play ‘Restless Natives’, written as part of the soundtrack for the movie of the same name.It was Tony Butler’s job to recite the memorable opening words
“Alone among the hills and stone Through summer sun and winter snow The eagle he was lord above And Rob was lord below”
I wondered how many of the audience understood the relevance of those words: “Two-hundred-forty years we lived, without hope and without pride”. Probably quite a few I reasoned. How well Stuart understood what it is to have a Scottish heartbeat and to feel the constant pull of those beautiful mountains and glens of our homeland, the love that is forever a corner in all of our hearts and will never die.
“I’m not expecting to grow flowers in the desert.
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in Wintertime”
Although a great fan from the past, I had never actually managed to see the original Big Country. Even so I had a strange feeling about the three playing up there on stage without Stuart. It was almost as if one expected him to run out on stage at any moment. Of course the loss was felt but that is meant in no way derogatively against the remaining members who toiled a little at times over the new numbers but excelled in the old ones.
The crowd lapped up every minute of it enthusiastically and the end came all too soon. I don’t believe the love and affection for this band will ever die. It certainly won’t in my mind. Apart from the Scottish sound which appeals to me for obvious reasons, I enjoyed the songwriting of Stuart Adamson, the way he tackled historical issues from his traditional, folk-inspired consciousness and the way he championed ordinary, working-class people and their trails and oppression. As well as THAT sound, that’s what Big Country and Stuart Adamson mean to me.
Just one encore of the expected ‘In a Big Country’ to a rapturous reception and the band were gone into the dark, inky night.
Will we ever see their like again?
Stuart Adamson, 1958-2001. Rest in Peace.
God Bless Scotland
So, thirty years today then. It’s three long decades since the ‘King’ of rock and roll died an undignified death. I remember the night but I can’t say it was memorable in itself. I’d paid one of my regular trips into the city of Nottingham to go drinking with college mates from my printing course of the day. On arriving home the TV was playing out a homage to the rocker from Tupelo Mississippi. It wasn’t exactly a ‘the day they shot Kennedy’ moment for me but, yes I do remember what I was doing that evening.
Perhaps everyone has been touched by one Elvis song or another. It would have been difficult to live in an exclusive bubble without hearing some of his music at some time. Though I’m not particularly a fan I do believe he was perhaps the original artist that one liked ‘at least something that he’d done’. Whilst respecting his huge and influential place – perhaps at the very paramount of the rock pile, he did however leave a somewhat strange legacy along with hours of vinyl history.
The Elvis impersonator.
There were a few ‘Elvis’s’ weren’t there. There was the snake-hipped young teen idol with the dark good looks that smouldered and shook all over a shocked America in the mid/late fifties. There was the slightly homogenised Elvis, post army in his celluloid reconstructions according the word of Col. Tom Parker. Then came a little time in Beatles-created semi-wilderness before he came back with a bang in his comeback ’68 special, slimmed down and be-leathered. Lastly, and devolving from the Las Vegas Elvis came a strange mutation of the original talent. A bloated and often ridiculous Elvis clad in ever-expanding white jump-suits beloved of the Vegas era, bedecked with glitter and not rarely a cape.
Can anyone please tell me why THIS is the incarnation of Elvis that the army of impersonators practically always favour? They’re legion aren’t they? They appear in the social clubs, they were even on my daytime TV programs this morning looking totally hideous. Please somebody tell me why, if there really have to be this army of impersonators, nobody try’s to be the young, cool and energetic Elvis belting out rockers and crooner with equal aplomb? No, instead we are regaled with men with ebony-blacked hair in overdone parodies of Elvis’s fifties quiff. Large real-ale bellies straining at the pearlised buttons of their glittery jump suits and the tired “uh-huh, thang ya very much ladies an gennulmen” stuff.
There is a saving grace though. The comic Elvis impersonator (aren’t they all?) In Nottingham there lives man known after his local suburb as “Sneinton Elvis”. Now I’ve never been “fortunate” enough to see Sneinton live but they tell me it really is a far-out experience man. Apparently this Elvis is actually a mentally-disabled man who once stood up at a karaoke when after people began booking him for gigs. Nice eh? Sneinton Elvis apparently still retains his admiring fans in the area, many who visit his live performances in t-shirts emblazoned with his features on the front. He’s apparently absolutely hopeless (which I can testify to from a YouTube video) but it’s not clear who the laugh is on here.
I am told also of another strange Elvis by a friend from County Clare in Ireland. Apparently this version travels between pubs performing to unsuspecting customers (whether they like it or not). In the inclement “soft weather” of Clare, he can be seen sporting a rather fetching ladies plastic head scarf to keep his luxurious dark locks in fine fettle. A problem is that when the rain does catch his follicles the black dye has a tendency to run in rivulets down his cheeks. Let nothing be said about this Elvis though. One leaving the room he will always bless you with “God loves ya baby…and so do I”
