“Automatically you go into blues when you do that”: Big Country's golden guitar rule that steered them clear of the blues

As Scottish rock greats, Celtic rock luminaries, and two-time Grammy nominees, Big Country can be called many things. Just don't call them blues.

Formed by Skids guitarist Stuart Adamson and his foil, Bruce Watson, in 1981 after Adamson's punk outfit had, err, hit the skids, the pair didn't have much of a vision at first.

One thing they did do, however, was look at Thin Lizzy’s marriage of traditional Celtic music with rock and draw huge inspiration from it. But not every facet.

“If you were to pick a song, it would be Whiskey In The Jar,” says Watson in the new issue of Guitarist. “That one would fit alongside [Big Country’s own] Fields Of Fire or something. But it’s more of a sound thing – the reverb on the guitars and a melody. There’s a lot of melody in what [Thin Lizzy guitarist] Eric Bell's doing, but there’s a bit of string bending, and we didn't want to do that.”

Consequently, the pair established one golden rule that they’ve sworn by ever since.

“Instead of bending, we’ll just play the note,” Watson affirms. “We’ll slide up to the note, play that note, and we’ll not bend up to it, 'cos automatically you go into blues when you do that.”

It was a musical territory they were keen not to find themselves steering into. That also meant avoiding the more free-flowing elements of the genre, too.

Fields of Fire by Big Country - YouTube

Watch On

“Guitar solos are meant to be almost free-form – you wouldn't play the same thing twice – and we wanted to keep everything exactly the same, so that when you played it live, it would be the same as how you recorded it,” Watson underscores. “There was none of this, ‘I’ll just do a solo and busk it...’”

Their playing ethos, then, was a world away from what Buddy Guy just did at NPR’s famous Tiny Desk – but what they created was wholly unique. Sure, there are echoes of Thin Lizzy’s twin-harmony guitars throughout their discography, but there were strange effects galore, too, including the use of a harmonizer pedal to replicate the sound of bagpipes as they doubled down on their roots.

Their 1983 debut album, The Crossing, went platinum as the band skyrocketed to success; the golden rule worked.

The band is featured in the new issue of Guitarist alongside a 75th birthday celebration of the Fender Telecaster and a new interview with Eric Johnson.

Head over to Magazines Direct to order a physical or digital copy today.