slack

Yep, a fair statement, it's been a while since I posted anything, lazy I guess.

So anyway, I am sitting here with a half finished bottle of the BNJ at my elbow (if you don't know what it is, I aint telling!) and over the top of the screen I can see Brenda Blethyn on the gogglebox. Probably the best approach with wee Brenda, an excellent actor, but one given to adopting very annoying voices.

I can't actually hear her because I have a set of cans on and a cd playing, Rarities 6 a compilation of Big Country stuff, sort of early through mid period.

So I suppose it is time to at least partly explain the title of this blog, and talk a bit about a band who have got well and truly under my skin to the point where they are truly a soundtrack for my life. Melodramatic I know, but then isn't that the whole point of the weblog, and no I don't intend decending fully into the land of the cliche and starting chronicling the wacky antics of my cats!

So lets go back a few years, its the early 1980's.

Warm, balmy days in the Riverland, air that feels warm on the skin, muscle shirt and shorts, smell of summer in the air. Sort of a mix of dust, citrus, maybe the odd distant wiff of the river, and let's be real diesel and pesticide.

I'm up a ladder, this is my holiday job. Still at school and all that with faint hopes of a career in motorsport so need money.

The ladder is a 20 foot bow ladder, one of the more lethal ideas of the fruit industry, unstable at the best of times, with a six foot fruitpicker with a ten kilo bag of olives around his neck at the top positively lethal.

Tucked up under a tree is a little grey fergie, the classic postwar British Tractor with a fruit trailer stacked with olive boxes, waterbottle, lunch and radio.

This is a late 60's model with something like solid state written in natty silver cursive script on the front (bloody thing ran on Dry Cell battteries if I remember right) It is tuned to American Top 40 on Shortwave.

Amid the wanky tones of good old Casey Casem and his posse of studio singers music occasionally pops out, unless of course the sun passes behind a cloud when we get a noise like a Russian Submarine and bursts of what appears to be Japanese.

Anyway in a moment of clarity ole Casey says

And here is a new one from Big Country""

Out comes a sound.

A savage, feral noise and I stop work and hang off the ladder to listen.

A cross between Punk (1976 not the pseudo Good Charlotte wank of today), the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and God knows what.

It is In a Big Country.

Im lost, smitten isn't the word, but something close. All the hair on the back of my neck stands up, goose pimples and the lot.

Exciting, joyful, who knows and with lines that go straight to my brain,

"Pull your head off the floor, come up screaming, cry out for everything you ever might have wanted!"

This is great, this speaks to me. Make no bones about it, at 16 or so, I feel alienated, stuck in this stupid little country town. Lived there for the bulk of my life to that point, but not a local. God no! So much of rural Australian life, with its boof headed football focussed mentallity, its getting drunk on a Saturday and then marrying someone who might or might not be your cousin leaves me cold. Didn't really fit in, partly didn't want to, partly couldn't bring myself to make the effort.

Then comes this band, from Dunfermline, via the USA and space, to fight its way through the crop of aweful haircut bands. Come on, could anyone look at "Flock of Seagulls"without laughing? Guitars on the radio, for the first time in a while.

Big, fat, romantic Celtic guitars, check shirts and a lyrical sensibility far removed from the right wing conservative, redneck world I lived in.

This love stays with me, through girlfriends, through break ups, through success and failure. University degrees and jobs, sports highs and sports lows. Through bottles of scotch and those days where for no reason you put them on loud in an empty house and stand there with tears running down your cheeks.

Why?

Stuart Adamson, songwriter, guitars and great human being, the man who invented the Edge, who in my opinion (as biased as it is, and I make no apologies, this is a blog and blogs are about indulgence) one of the great musicians and songwriters took his life in December 2001. Just as I was on honeymoon in the UK, finally managed to get there, reaping a seed I sowed back in 1982 that day up the ladder.

I found myself driving through the kingdom of Fife with my wife (yes, yes get over it, it rhymes!) with tears running down my face.

Why?

I don't really know, loss I guess. Although I never got closer to this band in a physical sense than collecting albums, singles and so on, catching the odd glimpse of the guys on Rage and so on, they have been an integral part of who I am. Politically, musically, ethically I would lay claim to having been heavilly influenced by these guys and Stuart's writing in particular.

Could it be a nostalgic thing? Sure, I think back and perversely, find that period of my life takes on a bit of a warm glow. Happy days bombing around in my little Ford Escort, hanging the tail out, chasing BMW's up twisting hills, and all the while with "The Crossing"or "Steeltown"blasting out of the stereo. Or long summer afternoons on the bed reading, with my copy of "The Crossing"stretching thinner and thinner until the tape let go.

Anyway, enough revelation, time for another glass of the BNJ and sign off.