When I was a teenager, a friend introduced me to Big Country. I even remember the song he played: Fields of Fire. After that, I became an avid fan, buying and repeatedly listening to their first three albums. I’d got into them during the long wait for their fourth album, so The Crossing, Steeltown and The Seer got a lot of plays. Through university, and my entire adult life, I’ve turned to Big Country: for inspiration as a writer, for soundtracks to write to, and for enjoyment. Writing this Stay Alive Stuart Adamson book review feels like I’ve come full circle.
So I’ve been looking forward to Scott Rowley’s Stay Alive – The Life and Death of Stuart Adamson, a biography of the band’s lead singer, guitarist and song writer.
I ended up listening to the audiobook. Scottish actor Mark Bonnar did a great job of narrating and bringing to life the various voices involved in Adamson’s life: both wives, both children, Stuart himself and members of The Skids and Big Country.
No Happy Ending
There’s no happy ending to this story. In 2002, Adamson died aged forty-three, alone and drunk in a hotel room in Hawaii. He committed suicide, but as the book says, really the drink killed him.
The book starts with the build-up to that event. Writing wise, Rowley makes an interesting decision, telling the events of Adamson’s disappearance and his son Callum’s frantic search for him in the second person. It’s a clever way of making events almost twenty-five years ago intensely personal, moving and immediate. Rowley uses the same technique when he returns to Adamson’s death at the end of the novel.
Conflict
So the story doesn’t end well. A lot of the time it doesn’t go so well. Adamson was a very private, almost shy man who struggled terribly with the demands of fame. He was in the music game for the music, nothing else. Conflict is a constant, friom his time in the Skids, songwriting and performing with Richard Jobson to establishing and fronting Big Country. Most of all, the conflict was with alcohol. At times, it’s a grim, heartbreaking read of a man struggling with addiction who died too young and could have had so much more to give.
But along the way, you get a real sense of the kind of man and musician Adamson was. Committed to his Scottish roots, he loved football, fishing and folk music. He could be very funny, and he was a voracious reader who often had four books on the go. A lot of his lyrics sprouted from the books he read.
Song Insights
Rowley gives some great insights into the meanings and backgrounds of many of the songs, particularly on the first three albums. His theory about East of Eden from the Steeltown album was particularly interesting – I always thought it referred to the Steinbeck novel.
Perhaps most enlightening was his explanation of the lyric from Fields of Fire, that first Big Country song I ever listened to, “400 miles without a word until you smile, 400 miles on fields of fire.”
No spoilers, but I did sometimes wonder why it was 400 miles. Read the book (or listen to it) to find out.
A Minor Niggle
If I have one gripe, it’s that The Skids at the start of Adamson’s career were covered perhaps a bit too much. But then, I’m a Big Country fan, so I would say that, and it’s a very small flaw. Overall, Stay Alive is well-researched, authentic, sympathetic without being blind to its subject’s flaws, and well-written.
Further Reading
Links
Stay Alive – The Life and Death of Stuart Adamson
How Big Country Made Steeltown – an article by Scott Rowley
Comments
Have you read Stay Alive? Do you agree or disagree with my review? Or do you have any insights about Stuart Adamson you’d like to share?
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