Stay Alive: The Life & Death Of Stuart Adamson
★★★★★
Scott Rowley
NEW MODERN
At 1997’s Glastonbury Festival, Ray Davies performed a Kinks set on the Pyramid Stage, accompanied by three-quarters of Big Country. Davies could have called upon any of the ’90s groups indebted to his original Britpop scripts, yet instead he was singing You Really Got Me with Stuart Adamson. Possibly Davies empathised with a fellow misfit, someone whose ambivalence towards the music business now saw this one-time Grammy nominee without a record deal, his career stubbornly flatlining for nearly a decade. “For a while, it looked like Ray Davies was going to throw Big Country a lifeline,” writes Scott Rowley. “It didn’t work out.”
At this point, two-thirds into Stay Alive – titled after a lyric from Adamson’s signature song In A Big Country – such an outcome is no more than the reader has come to expect. Even Big Country’s mid-’80s glory days didn’t really “work out” for Stuart Adamson, the post-punk generation’s most gifted guitarist, a brilliant songwriter and charismatic performer but temperamentally incompatible with fame and fatally haunted by personal demons: alcoholism, an abusive father, a family history of suicide. Four years after Glastonbury, Adamson hung himself in a Honolulu hotel closet, aged 43.
The basic facts of this life have been told before, but here we have the fullest measure of a complex, conflicted man, thanks to the co-operation of Adamson’s family, friends, bandmates and associates, whose candid testimonies the author sensitively shapes into a detailed yet brisk narrative that’s both crushingly melancholy and profoundly uplifting – like the best of Adamson’s music.
It’s a tale of two bands and contrasting moods. The Skids’ rapid transit from working-class Fife’s dead-end streets into the world of Top Of The Pops is a ripping yarn, with considerable humour amid the foreshadowed darkness, plus key cameos from early champions The Clash and The Stranglers. Although the dynamic between shy musical genius Adamson and show-off frontman Richard Jobson became awkward, their partnership served both well, and it’s unfortunate Adamson didn't anticipate the agonies that combining these two roles would cause him in Big Country. The relentless pressures of touring 1983’s hit-packed debut The Crossing intensified his drinking, impacting hurtfully on wife Sandra and young children Callum and Kirsten. While a 14-year period of sobriety brought calm at home, it also paralleled Adamson’s alienation from the business – Big Country became an obligation, to which he was resigned and resentful – and eventually from those who loved him most.
Fans will relish Rowley’s perceptive analysis of Adamson’s work, yet Stay Alive also tells a fundamentally human story. The agony of his final unravelling in Nashville reads like the denouement to a Southern noir mystery, albeit Adamson, by then covertly drinking again, knew how it would end. In 2000, he and his second wife Melanie Shelley moved house. Before leaving the empty old property for the last time, Adamson called out: “Are you coming, ghostie?”
If Stuart Adamson had shaken off his ghosts, where might he be now? Perhaps enjoying the overdue respect of peers like U2 and forebears like Bruce Springsteen, making music on his own terms without having to play the game. This superb book rues his absence while celebrating his music’s still audibly beating heart.
What we’ve learnt from Stay Alive…
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Stuart Adamson’s wife Sandra was a Scottish Highland dance champion. His famous ‘bagpipe’ guitar style evolved when he played along to her practice tapes by piper Willie Law.
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The Skids caused a riot at a 1978 Chile Defence League benefit gig organised by the Socialist Workers Party of Scotland.
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Big Country didn’t play Live Aid because Bob Geldof thought they had split up, when in fact they were on hiatus while Adamson got sober. But the band were persuaded to go by managers Ian Grant and Alan Edwards, and were on-stage for the finale.
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Kate Bush chain-smoked dope for five hours while recording her vocal for 1986’s The Seer. She kept her stash inside a small hollowed out book.
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On a plane after a Big Country gig he saw Kenny Dalglish and asked for an autograph for his son. “You were brilliant last night,” said Dalglish. “I’ve been to see you seven times.”
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