Big Country return to the Granite City next month. Here, Bruce Watson, the band’s singer and guitarist, explains the story behind two of their biggest albums
Steeltown is the second studio album from Big Country and was recorded at Abba’s Polar Studios in Stockholm, with Steve Lillywhite producing.
It was released on October 19, 1984. Bruce Watson remembers the time very well, amid the nationwide strife back in the UK, fully in the grip of the Miners’ strike.
He said: “We started work on Steeltown back in June 1984, at Abba’s studio. We worked alongside Steve in Studio One as Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber worked on Chess next door in Studio Two. Stockholm felt like the most expensive place on Earth – it was as if we were on a different planet to how things were back home. My dad was a miner, so what we did was knuckle down to hard work for six weeks.”
Regarded by many as a classic, the multimillion-selling Steeltown went straight to the number-one slot in the album charts.
Big Country will perform songs from this album as well as other classic hits and favourites at their gig at Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree on October 3.
Heading down memory lane once again, Bruce explains the story behind their debut album, The Crossing, and two of their biggest hits:
“Harvest Home, Chance, Inwards, Lost Patrol, Close Action, Angle Park – basically half of our debut album The Crossing was written at Townhill Institute, which is just north of Dunfermline. Stuart Adamson had just got a flat in the village and the institute was just over the road. I used to get the bus up the hill Monday to Friday to go and co-write songs there.
“We had two Yamaha SG guitars, one Fender Strat, and HH combo and Carlsbro combo amps. Effects-wise, we had an MXR pitch transposer and a WEM Copicat echo unit. We even had a couple of synths at our disposal – a Minimoog and a Yamaha. We recorded all the songs on a Tascam four-track studio with a drum machine that had pre-set rhythms such as bossa nova and cha cha.
“Angle Park was the name of a house at the top of Townhill Road and Stuart thought it would make a good song title; that was the first thing we worked on. The bass line came from an old song I had written for my previous band. Stuart’s Harvest Home was next in line and became our first single. Angle Park was kept back as a B-side for single two, Fields of Fire. I took the porta studio home for one weekend and came up with the music for Chance, the only part I couldn’t write was the chorus, so Stuart came up with that part. Most of the songs were written like that, basically both of us adding to each other’s rough sketches.
“Stuart and I managed to get demo time from Virgin at Townhouse Studios in London. Our manager Ian Grant got Rick Buckler, from The Jam, to play drums on the demos. We went through a few musicians before settling on Tony and Mark and we ended up recording demos for our record label Phonogram Records with them. We worked all through the night and into the early hours of the morning to finish them. The label signed us the next day.”