Bruce Watson is standing in what used to be Kenny’s Music in Dunfermline, one of a chain of music shops across Scotland until it closed in October last year.
Today, the shop floor is a hive of industry again. There are guitars everywhere – too many for one guitar shop – and we’re adding to the chaos, with the guitars of Big Country founding member Watson being set up in the corner for Guitarist’s photoshoot.
“I’ve been coming here practically every month since, fuckin’ hell, 1973, I think,” says Bruce. “Apart from when I’ve been on the road.”
Watson has a studio downstairs in the same building. “It’s part of my life,” he says. “And we thought we were going to lose it.” The current activity is down to new owners who bought the stock after Kenny’s went under, and are reopening soon as Mo’s Music. “And that’s why they’ve got four shops’-worth of gear in here,” says Bruce. “The internet – it’s killing guitar shops everywhere.”
The building used to be studios, rehearsal rooms and a venue. Joe Cocker once played here. Stuart Adamson’s first band, the Skids, rehearsed in the corner that now houses walls of Fenders, Squiers and Jacksons.
Before Stuart asked him to join what would become Big Country, Bruce’s band Eurosect recorded demos there, including a song called Forbidden Whispers. It was that song that made Stuart Adamson think that he and Bruce could work together. It became Angle Park, the first song they wrote together.
Stuart Adamson died by suicide 25 years ago this year, after succumbing to the alcoholism and demons that plagued him at various points in his life.
For the first time, Bruce and his former bandmates – bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Brzezicki – as well as Adamson’s family, and former bandmates in his first band the Skids, have opened up about the life of the man John Peel once called “Scotland’s answer to Jimi Hendrix”. There’s an authorised biography, Stay Alive, a new Stuart Adamson website, and a forthcoming documentary.
Bruce Watson has been celebrating the music he and Adamson made together since 2007, in a reactivated Big Country that initially included all the surviving members, with the late Mike Peters, singer of the Alarm, on vocals and Watson’s son Jamie on guitar. When Tony Butler left in 2012 and Mike Peters soon followed, the band continued with a revolving cast, with Bruce and Brzezicki at its core.
It was when the drummer left last year that Watson decided it was time to make a change: the band – now fronted by Tommie Paxton of Big Country tribute band Restless Natives – has been rebranded as Big Country Redux. “Stuart’s words, music and presence were at the heart of Big Country,” said Bruce. “Without him, it can never truly be what it once was.”