Big Country On Tour…

BIG COUNTRY, the Legendary Scottish Celtic Rock band, are in the country returning for the first time since 2019 for The Greatest Hits Tour with a setlist that boasts songs in the ilk of In A Big Country, Chance, Fields of Fire, Look Away, Wonderland plus many more! Featuring the band’s de facto theme song, In a Big Country, their debut album, THE CROSSING, combined anthemic post-punk with folk-inspired guitar sounds to become the leading representative of 80’s Celtic Rock. It was a surprisingly influential mix that would inspire an entirely new wave of British rock artists who openly embraced their Celtic heritage. BIG COUNTRY achieved major international success plus two Grammy nominations and for a time rivalled fellow “big sounding” British guitar rock acts U2 and Simple Minds. Bruce Watson talks to Hi Fi Way about returning to Australia.

Hard to believe it’s been five years since the last Big Country Australian tour. Time’s flown…
Yeah, we should have been back out there. It was just after COVID, and I think… it might be the opposite way around, but I think Australia were okay with us coming in, and New Zealand wasn’t, or vice versa. I think the COVID rules were different between New Zealand and Australia, so we couldn’t come down, because you can’t really do one without the other kind of thing. That was one of the reasons we haven’t been down in a while.

Are you looking forward to this tour?
We’ve not been touring, this will be our first dates for a while. We got back from America about a month or so ago. That was the last time we really did any touring. Apart from a few festival gigs, I haven’t been doing any touring, it’s just been occasional weekend gigs, but I’m looking forward to coming down there and we’re going to Hong Kong as well, on the way out.

Promoted as a greatest hits tour, do you enjoy the nostalgia factor and it being a celebration of the band?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think people want to hear the songs that we played all those years ago. We mix up our set sometimes. We do a lot of the greatest hits, album tracks, fan favourites, and just stuff that we want to play ourselves anyway, so it’s always a mishmash from over our career.

Are you enjoying the touring side of life more now than ever before?
No, it’s always been the same. I’ve always loved both aspects of the job, touring and recording. The only difference for me nowadays, because I’m a lot older, it’s a bit more painful getting there. It’s the travelling that’s the hard part. The gigs are the easy part. As I always say, the head and the heart still wants to do it, but the body’s going, “Stupid, stop doing this.”

Is it pleasing to see generational shifts in the supporter base now coming along to shows?
Yeah, I think due to the way social media is now with YouTube and Facebook, a lot of youngsters maybe picking up on what some of the parents might have been listening to. It’s good to see a different age groups coming along to all the gigs, young and old. I think a good song is a good song, and if people like them, then they might want to hear or see a few more.

Good music stands the test of time, and that can be said for Big Country. Even now, I hear Big Country on commercial radio in Adelaide. That must be humbling?
It’s great, it’s brilliant and like I say, young people who’ve never known the band hear that song and want to explore the catalogue a bit more and come and see us. The more the merrier. I want our songs to be heard by as many people as possible. I think that’s one of the reasons we do it.

With some changes in the line-up has that brought a fresh dynamic?
We’ve got Tommie on vocals and guitar, Chris on bass, Reece on drums, as well as Jamie and myself. Both Chris and Tommie are great musicians. They’re both Big Country fans. They’ve got a band called Restless Natives that go out and play a lot of Big Country songs. So they’re quite emotionally invested in Big Country. They know the back catalogue probably better than I do, and they play these songs great, and they’re really nice people as well. It’s brilliant. They’ve given the name Big Country a real new lease of life by coming on board and supporting me. Really sympathetic to the songs. It’s been brilliant the past year.

Does that create the possibility of doing new music with them to keep the fire alive?
We’ve just finished doing an album with the guys. Basically, we’re revisiting some Big Country songs that were never developed properly, like demos. There’s a lot of demos that ended up as B-sides or extra tracks that were never really developed. It’d maybe be Stuart and myself, or Stuart and Tony and myself, doing demos that might have just had a drum machine and rough sketches of songs meant to be revisited later. But during the 80s, the record company would say, “The single’s out in a month, but we don’t have any B-sides,” so Stuart and I would go into a studio in Edinburgh and record a song really quickly. The song would end up as the B-side to Just a Shadow, a song called Winter Sky, for instance. So I’m taking songs like that and finishing them. All the songs on the album are ones die-hard Big Country fans will know about, but the general public probably won’t. So to a lot of people, they’ll be new songs, but they’re not really new songs. To me, that was a good starting block for what could happen.

How exciting was it to give these songs a dust-off and a new lease of life, and actually see them take shape and realise their potential?
Yeah, normally what happens when you write songs like that are sketches, you just put them in the bank and save them up for whatever you want to do with them, or if you’re writing songs, let people write songs and give them to other people. So, to do that, it was just an idea that I had to come up with an album. We’ll probably get it finished by the time we get back from Australia, in a few weeks’ time, hopefully before we go off to Germany, which is four days later. I’m not sure when it’s coming out. It’ll probably be next year before it comes out now, but I’m really pleased with it.

Sounds like another reason to come back to Australia next year?
Well, every eighteen months is the plan. I think we’ve been down there three times, maybe four. But what the promoter said most of the bands from overseas come down once every eighteen months. So as long as we’re able to do it, then I’m quite happy to come down there every eighteen months, because I love it down there. Apart from the people that come to see you, you’re in a place thousands and thousands of miles away, and we’ve never played there with the classic line-up. We should have done, but we never got there, even though we did a couple of videos down there. Just the fact that you can travel right around the world, and people have bought your records and are in to the band. The venues down there are different from anywhere else, sort of big clubs or big pubs. It’s just different. It’s a joy being there, but it’s not a joy getting there, because it takes so bloody long. But the first time I went there to play, it just blew me away, the amount of people that turned up. We’re not the biggest band in the world, but we’ve got a fan base down there, and it was great and then going down to New Zealand as well. It was good seeing a lot of friends and people I used to work with who had emigrated. That was a pleasant surprise, just meeting people I hadn’t seen for twenty or thirty years.

Do you worry about where music’s heading, or is it just part of how it’s evolving and it is what it is?
You can’t change what’s happening. The music’s changed, it’s always evolving, whether it’s good or bad. I still like the early days of when we did have a sympathetic label, like Phonogram. Phonogram were a great label for Big Country, especially the first album. A lot of record companies get a lot of bad press, but when we brought The Crossing on it, we had a great label, a great management team, a great agent, great road crew. It wasn’t just the band, we created the songs and performed the songs, but there was a whole infrastructure behind us that worked equally as hard as we did, and credit to them. I kind of miss that, where you’re a whole department. A lot of people batting for you, working behind the scenes that never really got the credit for it. It’s good working as a party, a team like that. Nowadays, we’ve just got the band members and a couple of other core people behind the scenes. It’s almost like a cottage industry, but I think most bands are kind of like that anyway nowadays. You’ve got to take care of your own business a lot more. I’m terrible at that. I tend to drive the people behind the scenes a bit mad, because I only get involved in my main focus, music and performance, and that’s it. When it comes to the business side, anything else behind the scenes, I’m terrible at that.

Anything else coming up for Big Country?
That reminds me, we’ve got a book and a documentary coming out next year. There’s a book on Stuart and a documentary on Stuart. The book’s been done, and that’s definitely getting released, I think, maybe about March. The documentary’s over halfway through, and that’ll be out as well. There’s always things coming out, and I think if something new comes out, there’s always something else to get released off the back of it. Like I said, I don’t instigate those things, but if I think they’re worth pursuing, if I think they’re worthy, I’ll help out. So there’s always going to be something coming out.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Big Country on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring…