5.1.22 Two Three Four

 Yesterday's contemplation of the Scottish edition of my own radio show from years ago led to a mate tweeting me and asking, "Have you ever heard Karine Polwart's Scottish Songbook?"

I hadn't but I had a look at it, had a listen to it and was taken immediately. She was covering The Blue Nile's 'Rags To Riches', The Waterboys' 'Whole Of The Moon', Strawberry Switchblade's sublime 'Since Yesterday' (which was the deal clincher for me) and a whole load of others. Including this:

A Big Country song. A bloody wonderful Big Country song.

And let's be honest, in 82/83 there were a lot of us who were of the opinion that Big Country were the next band that would matter as much as The Jam did.

That didn't happen but those early gigs, god they were something. The band quickly gained this reputation as 'the group with guitars that sound like bagpipes' but that was never true. They never really sounded like bagpipes, they just sounded gaelic. They sounded like a band with an identity born of the place of their birth. 

Their shows were communal experiences. Sing-a-longs, chant-a-longs, there were moments where the most important lyric to join in with was Stuart Adamson (ex of The Skids and a wonderfully inventive, unique guitarist)'s shout of 'shah' or 'shah' between lines, a percussive sound that meant nothing and literally everything at the same time.

There were the big songs, the Fields Of Fire, In A Big Country, the ones you know, and then there were the ones we loved just as much but weren't as public: Inwards, Angle Park, Harvest Home, Lost Patrol.

Checked shirts, string vests. Identity. Probably all looks a bit naff now. At eighteen? God they were a force.

And their emotion sat in the song above. 

A simple kitchen sink drama with a heart breaking lyric of loss, abandonment, betrayal; a song of small dreams stolen away.

And when you hit the chorus the band would break down. Not emotionally, musically. They'd take everything down to the beat because they knew the communion between musicians and audience was large enough to take this:

"Oh lord, where did the feeling go? Oh lord, I never felt so low."

And before the repetition of those lines that was needed and expected, Stuart would throw in a count of "Two, Three, Four". See the band once and you never needed him to supply the count again, that count belonged to the audience.

It's the small moments, it's the connections; they're vital.

Forty years on, twenty years after Stuart was lost to the world, the connections remain. Those of us that were there when it mattered so much to us can never hear that song without mentally adding the "Two, Three, Four."

That's the power of the whole thing.