Release date: 19 October
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Sort of.
I liked Big Country’s first album, The Crossing, but didn’t own it. I didn’t pay much attention to the release of Steeltown but encountered it a couple of years later in someone else’s record collection. I was a bit sniffy. Even in the 80s, I found romantic elegies for industrial masculinity passé and regressive – they said nothing to me about my life – and explicit politics of any kind were inherently naff (I didn’t like Billy Bragg either).
This is very definitely a rawk album, not a pop one, but it has in common with Rattlesnakes not only its Scottish connection but the fact that it’s ten bangers in a row without a duff track, and every one of them fizzing with energy. Of course Cath Carroll (again) in the NME hated it (I’m really beginning to enjoy her invective):
So strong is the crusading tone of the recorded Big Country that a stubborn image has formed in the old mind’s eye: it concerns Stuart Adamson who, each and every time he undertakes a vocal track, cannot reach the emotional peak required unless he is standing in front of a wind machine and a blinding light. … As usual Big Country here sound heroic, tempestuous, impossibly romantic. Every instrument and voice has been put through their unique ‘Cavalry Charge’ effect and still, every time Adamson opens his one mouth to sing, at least three other Stuarts are heard in varying stages of folksy harmony. Nothing has changed. The diddle-diddle solo is given plenty to do and must by now be ready to take its place in Celtic history alongside tartan-edged white parallel trousers and hung-over New Year’s Days at Balmoral.
Once again, Carroll’s review is shadowed by Steve Sutherland’s in Melody Maker. But he was a full-fledged believer:
“Steeltown” is, simply, superb, and everything Big Country ever said they were and everything we sort of hoped, with fingers crossed, they might be. There’s no ifs or buts about it – no “if only they weren’t so naïve”, no “if only we weren’t so cynical”, no “if only The Clash hadn’t cocked it up so badly for everyone else”, no “if only they didn’t wear those checked shirts”, no if anything.
The sound that emanates from this album exhilarates – the power is internal, dynamic and emotional, not external cosmetic bluster. All the rockist arguments have been defeated, we never stop to consider this passion might be posturing. Thin Lizzy doesn’t come into it, nor do those nagging doubts that the bagpipe guitars might be a gimmick. This is sheer purpose made practise, adrenalised action.
The debate whether Adamson is capable of reinvesting cliché with meaning is rendered redundant. The deed is done.
What’s interesting about this gushing is how closely it replicates the emotional arc of a Big Country song – if you’re willing to give yourself over to it – staring off into the middle distance, avoiding paying attention to inconvenient particulars under your feet.
In fact, only two of the group’s four members were Scottish (and both of them were born outside the country). In any case, the group’s fetishisation of ‘Scottishness’ might seem to contradict my generalisation that few of the albums I’m discussing here show any real commitment to place. But if one were to be unkind, one might say that Big Country’s songs are set in the same country as Braveheart: an idealised, fantasy landscape, as opposed to, say, Glasgow – or Dunfermline. Let’s call it ‘Wonderland’. Here’s a 1984 performance of a track from The Crossing:
I should clarify that ‘The Storm’ is my favourite track on the The Crossing, and seeing it played live only underlines the group’s high level of technical skill. They have fantastic chemistry together onstage – no doubt the result of a lot of practice. So I’m being unfair: the film that Big Country actually soundtracked in 1985, Restless Natives – which I went to see at the cinema, surely because of their association with it (it was probably a deserted cinema, since no one in England followed my example) – is cleverer and funnier about Scottish identity than Carroll’s review is able to imagine.
As for ‘Steeltown’, well, in the early 1990s, I did a few shifts as a security guard on the old Ravenscraig steelworks near Glasgow. That enormous site, itself as big as a village or small town, had closed, but was yet to be decommissioned or dismantled, and so it had to be patrolled – for years – to prevent thieves, and for insurance-liability reasons: that is, to stop any trespassers from injuring themselves and suing. Some of the men I worked with had once been steelworkers there, at far higher wages. Not so much the world of Steeltown then: more that of The Full Monty. I described this experience obliquely in my first novel, Five Wounds:
Everything was preserved in a sticky grease coat, to which dust stuck and was fruitful and multiplied. The uneven concrete floor was encrusted with ridges of once-molten metals and alloys, with oil and with pigeon droppings, which fanned out in pale, luminous layers under the places where the pigeons squatted in the roof. … As he grew up in these massive enclosed spaces, Cur rose from the floor onto gantries that had once moved over mysterious pits. Long-dead jokes and insults were sprayed on walls and pinned to bits of paper in the rest quarters. Cur read them with curiosity, and began to feel nostalgia for a life he had never known. He spent much of his childhood enclosed in what had once been a control booth for one of the gantries. It had scratched plastic windows and cracked leather seats. Underneath the windows, every inch of wall space was covered in pictures of naked women with spread-eagled legs.
I think the legacy of these places is more complex than clichés normally allow. So I prefer the Big Country songs that sing – very effectively – not from the point of view of the men working in these places, but the women who love them: ‘Chance’ on The Crossing, and ‘Come Back to Me’ on Steeltown:
I have your child inside me
But you will never know
I never will forget you
While I watch that child grow
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