Transcript of interview with Bruce Watson of Big Country, originally broadcast on Kaleidoscope Ears, Edge Radio 99.3 in Hobart, Tasmania, on Sunday 20th September 2009.

DWAYNE BUNNEY: It’s a privilege to have on the line from Dunfermline in Scotland, founding member and guitarist of Big Country, Bruce Watson. Thanks for joining us.

BRUCE WATSON: That’s no problem Dwayne, how are you?

DB: Yeah very well. Now we’re going to talk about the new music you and your son Jamie are making in a moment, but, I want to talk to you about Big Country.

BW: Yeah that’s not a problem.

DB: The band, it’s renowned for being a Scottish band, but no of you were born in Scotland were you?

BW: No I was born in Timmins, Ontario in Canada. Stuart was born in Manchester, England, and Tony and Mark, well they were also born in England.

DB: Well you certainly don’t sound Canadian I can tell you that.

BW: No definitely not. I lost that accent a long, long time ago.

DB: Tell us about how you first hooked up with Stuart Adamson to form Big Country.

BW: Well Stuart was in a band called The Skids as you probably know. He decided after about three and a half years that he wanted to do something different. And he’d also told me while he was in The Skids that he wanted to start a two guitar band and that at some point he’d give me a call in the future. I think it was about two months later, he turned up at my door and said I’ve booked this little rehearsal room and I’ve bought this portastudio, would you like to come up and collaborate? I wasn’t doing anything at the time and I had a couple of songs under my belt from my previous band and Stuart had a couple of songs under his belt that he was going to use with The Skids. So we just collaborated and the results were the first album The Crossing.

DB: So which ones off that album were yours?

BW: I think Angle Park was one of my ones. Obviously it was an instrumental at the time. Stuart had Harvest Home. Those were the first two songs that we worked on although they weren’t called that at the time, they were just kind of instrumental little jams. We just developed them further.

DB: Now why did Stuart refer to you as the man who invented the seagull?

BW: He didn’t actually, I think that was just one of those silly in-jokes you know, that you do when you’re on tour. Actually it came from Mark. Mark used to sit there, he had this little remote control with him. I don’t know why he had it but he used to say you know I’m controlling these little seagulls that are flying above the bus as we were on tour. It’s just one of those little daft things.

DB: Is it true that the band almost broke up after the recording of the second studio album Steeltown?

BW: Yeah that’s correct. We had kind of you know been on the road continuously for the previous two years as well as recording both the albums and we were kind of shattered. We got as far as Japan and it just took its toll. For two years constantly we didn’t even have a day off. It was just work, work. Obviously the tours, the more successful we became the more touring and the more festivals we were doing and it got to a point where it was now, let’s stop or we were going to break up. We didn’t actually break up it was just like, let’s take time away from this you know. I’m kinda glad at the time we did because we were just heading for severe burnout. So we almost got as far as Australia but we had to cancel that tour.

DB: Yeah that was a shame. I do remember you being in Australia once and you had very interesting hair at the time.

BW: Yeah I’ve always had interesting hair. We went down to do a couple of videos for the Peace In Our Time album.

DB: Somewhere in Western Australia in the outback somewhere?

BW: Yeah. And it was great, we found ourselves living in this old asbestos shack and then going out during the day and doing a bit of filming.

DB: What is your personal favourite period of Big Country?

BW: Favourite periods would have probably been the early days when we first started touring and recording because it was new and I’ve got a good memory about that stuff. And the other favourite would have probably been around when we did an album called The Buffalo Skinners and we did a bit of extensive touring in America. I loved that.

DB: Yeah The Buffalo Skinners is definitely one of my personal favourites. You took over producing at that point in time, is that one of the things that made it stand out for you?

BW: Well we kinda co-produced it with an engineer called Chris Sheldon, who we’d worked with before, and we actually had Nigel Godritch, the was his first job, and he was actually the second engineer on that album. The A&R guy Chris Briggs who originally signed us to Phonogram, he started this new label called Compulsion. We’d sent him the demos that we’d just produced and engineered ourselves. And he kinda liked what was going on and he said you know you’ve had umpteen producers over the years, why don’t we just as an experiment, why don’t we just go into the studio and we’ll do the first three tracks, we’ll produce them ourselves with Chris Sheldon and see how they turn out. And he was happy enough with the results and he said you know if it aint broke don’t fix it, let’s just go along with this.

DB: Yeah you’re right the result from The Buffalo Skinner particularly to me, stand out to this day. Why do you think that it didn’t have the commercial success that you probably would have wished for?

BW: I don’t know, it’s just one of those things. I guess we weren’t a new band anymore and I think people had got used to our sound. I mean when we came out in the early days it was a new sound and a new band. People got interested in it. But it’s like any band. After about six or seven years, you know people have heard it all before.

DB: Big Country has a very devout and loyal fanbase, still very active today. Why do you think that is?

BW: I don’t know I guess people just made a connection to the band. We were never one of the biggest bands in the world like a U2 or a Bon Jovi or a Rolling Stones. I think people kinda like bands that are like underdogs and it’s their band you know, almost like The Smiths or another band like that where you get to a certain stage and you still a kinda underground band you know, and I think people like that.

DB: And I guess you’re still not too huge to have that personal connection with the fans too.

BW: I think a lot of people perceive Big Country as being bigger than we really were. I think it’s because we did all those like, we were always like a big support band for band like The Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper and Meat Loaf and all these kinds of bands, and we were a good festival band, so I think people thought we were bigger than we were.

DB: Have you got any stories you can relate to us from those days supporting?

BW: I’ve got loads of stories but there’s no way I’m gonna divulge them on the air. [laughs]

DB: Can’t do that?

BW: Oh definitely not. I think I’d have lawyers at my door. I mean it was just great fun. We had good times and bad times. I think the bad times were as far down as the good times were up.

DB: I wanna ask, some of the other projects you were involved with outside of Big Country. Fish is interesting to me being a big prog rock fan as well. Are you a fan of prog rock and how did you get involved with Fish?

BW: Well I think, Fish being from the east of Scotland as well, we only live about 30 miles from each other. The first time I met Fish was at Live Aid. Our paths had never crossed because he’d moved down to England but he’d moved back to Scotland and he’d left Marillion and he was putting a band together to do this benefit for the Lockerby disaster and he got me involved in that. Every now and then Fish’ll give me a phone call and he’ll say I’ve got a track on the album I’d like you to get involved with and I’d go across and play a bit of mandolin or guitar or e-bow. And after Big Country he putting another band together and he just wanted me to get involved so I started writing with him and I wrote this album with him called Field Of Crows. We toured that one extensively. We did about two and a half months around Europe which was great fun. I love Fish he’s a great guy, a great character and a great storyteller.

DB: Apart from Fish, who else have you worked with recently?

BW: Well after Big Country split, the phone just starts ringing and you become a gun for hire almost. I did some stuff with Derek Forbes and Nick McNeil from Simple minds, that was a little project called Four Good Men. I also did another project, a touring thing we did every year, a band called Dead Man Walking with Mike Peters Kirk Brandon, Glen Matlock, Slim Jim Phantom and myself. We’d go out for two months a year and just do shows and just play everyone’s back catalogue. Again that was good fun. Nowadays I prefer just to concentrate on doing my own stuff you know?

DB: You mentioned Big Country splitting, that was around 2000. It wasn’t too long after that that Stuart passed away. How did you guys all cope with that. I mean personally. I suppose you can’t speak for the other guys but yourself, were you in touch with Stuart around that time?

BW: Not really because Stuart moved out to America. He left Scotland, went into the States and started a new life across there so apart from, you know we’d email each other quite a lot and occasionally we’d phone each other. But obviously it was a hard hard thing for everyone who was involved with Stuart.

DB: Was it difficult for you putting the memorial concert together?

BW: To be honest, I was kind of on auto-pilot when we were doing it. I don’t actually remember much about it. All I remember was the Barrowlands, and the scorching heat of the place. It was like, I was just dehydrated and my brain was numb and I can’t even remember anything about it.

DB: Only a couple of years ago you guys, you, Tony and Mark got back together for the 25th anniversary of Big Country. How was that for you? And after the release of the EP under the name BBW, would you have liked to have gone on?

BW: The only reason we did that, the story that leads up to that was the Skids 30th anniversary. And I got a call from Richard Jobson’s brother Michael, who’s an old friend of mine anyway, and he was saying would you MD the Skids, for the 30th anniversary, they’ve got a show Tea In The Park and we’re trying to do two shows in Dunfermline. I said well, I’d love to! So basically we did that, and it was also the 25th anniversary of Big Country the same year. And the two for me kind of led on you know it was like, Tony and Mark wanting to put BC back together for the 25th anniversary. And I thought since I’m doing this, it makes sense to do the BC one as well. So the thing just kinda meshed into one for me even though they were both separate for both separate bands. And we went out and basically the Skids one was just a weeks worth of work which was you know the Tea In The Park festival and the two local shows whereas the BC one we decided to go out and tour it, but to stagger the touring so it was just like at weekends. So we’d hit Glasgow one weekend, the head down south for one weekend. And we went into the studio and recorded a batch of new songs which became BBW. We just thought, it’s not really Big Country even though we’re all members of Big Country. So we called it BBW just like Butler, Brzezicki, Watson.

DB: Did any of you consider a fourth member?

BW: It was spoken about, but...

DB: I definitely know Tony was against it, but what about yourself?

BW: Tony and Mark said let’s just keep it the original members of the band and not bring anyone else in and I thought well I’m going to have to take on two guitar parts here. When we did the Skids I got my son Jamie in, and I concentrated on the main bulk of Stuart’s guitar parts for the Skids stuff and Jamie picked out all the little tricky overdub bits and synthesiser bits. When it came to doing the BC stuff which was basically a two guitar band it’s like, well we need another guitar player, and it’s like I’m sure we can do this. And I’m going oh God! And I found myself, it’s kinda hard when you’re concentrating on two parts, and I found myself, some nights it wasn’t too enjoyable because I was concentrating too much. You just want to have fun, and put in a good performance and I found myself concentrating on these mad guitar parts. I was trying to intertwine Stuart’s parts with my parts. It was a good exercise but I felt we needed that extra guitar player and possibly vocals as well.

DB: How did you like taking on lead vocals on a few of the tracks. And how did you decide who would do the majority of them, obviously Tony did, but how did you decide?

BW: It was impossible, I mean I’ve never sung before. I’ve always just been a guitar player. Tony said he was quite happy, because he was playing bass he was just playing rhythm, whereas if I was doing Stuart’s parts and my parts, there’s a lot of cross rhythms and different timing and it’s just impossible to play those parts and sing at the same time.

DB: Now there’s a new Big Country release that’s coming out this month. That’s the ’83 New Years Eve gig that’s being released on DVD for the first time with a CD along with it too. Have you had much to do with that release?

BW: No, basically Ian Grant our manager, he takes care of all the business, and there’s been a lot of stuff that’s been released on old formats like VHS and stuff like that. And of course everyone nowadays days is having their albums remastered because technology is so much better. So Ian’s been taking care of that, and a lot of people have been crying out to see the Barrowlands video again. So we managed to track down the masters and it’s all been digitally remastered, so hopefully that’ll be out in the next couple of weeks.

DB: Yeah I tell you the fans all over the world can’t wait for that either. So what are you and your son Jamie doing recording together? How did this project come about? The upcoming album, is it called The Portastudio Diaries?

BW: No, no basically The Portastudio Diaries was more of a fun thing you know, just doing a bit of recording in the house. The whole thing with Jamie and I is that it is more of a fun thing. It’s basically just a few of us, writing songs together, and Jamie’s got a friend who has a little studio and we go in the studio, in fact we’re going in there tomorrow. We just go in, and whenever we get a new song we just record it and up it goes onto the old MySpace site and also out own site which is www.bruceandjamiewatson.co.uk So what we’re doing is we’re kind of recording an album, we’re about halfway through it now. Hopefully by the end of the year we should have all the tracks recorded. And what we do is maybe once a month we’ll go and do a couple of shows somewhere in Scotland. It’s mainly new material. We’ll chuck in maybe a Skids song and we’ll do a Big Country song, put in a couple of cover, but I’d say seventy percent, it’s just stuff Jamie and I have written recently.

DB: I was looking at your website a little earlier and I was reading that Jamie would like your sound to get a little bit louder. Is that right? And you’re trying to keep it softer?

BW: Yeah there’s talk about next year, maybe adding another guitar player, bass player, not another guitar player, three guitar players would be far too much, but a bass player and a drummer and put a band together next year. But at the moment we just want to concentrate on getting the songs recorded.

DB: So you’re just going to release the album under the name Bruce And Jamie Watson?

BW: Yep, that’s basically what it is.

DB: And you’re looking for sometime in the New Year for the release?

BW: Yeah, I think it’ll start off being like an internet release. I’ll maybe take a look at this digital downloads market thing. It’s all new to me. That’s just the way things are going nowadays you know? Gone are the days of the seven inch vinyl though it’s getting a bit of a comeback now.

DB: I’m a bit old fashioned myself. I like to hold an album in my hands with the artwork, something that enhances it. Downloads just don’t have that.

BW: We brought out this live record, Jamie and I, we did a show at this place called Lathones. We had it recorded and we brought that out. A good friend of mine called John, over in New Jersey, he did the artwork. And he sent across the artwork and it looks great you know, when it’s blown up to twelve inch size and then it goes down to a little five inch CD size and it kinda loses everything you know. So make compact discs twelve inches I think it would be great.

DB: So until the album is released in some format, can we hear some samples anywhere?

BW: Yeah just go to the website www.bruceandjamiewatson.co.uk you’ve got the five tracks up there. Also the Bruce W Watson MySpace site you’ve got the same five tracks.

DB: Ok all the best with that. Really nice to talk to you. It’s been a long trip for me, being a fan for most of my life of Big Country. So thank you for the music.

BW: Not a problem Dwayne. Thanks very much.

© Copyright 2009 Dwayne Bunney