Arctic Reviews

It's hard to look down the barrel of Steeltown in the twenty first century without lamenting the death of Stuart Adamson, the man who rapidly came to epitomise Big Country on almost every level. Although the band would record five more albums in a career which was finally truncated by his suicide in 2001, their second album - follow up to million selling debut The Crossing - which constitutes the most appropriate epitaph.

For all of The Crossing's fist pumping emotion, buoyant celtic ennui and e-bow'd approximation of the pipes, by accident or design it had still fallen neatly into the hands of the Here We Go crowd. This then was the dawn of British stadium rock's second wave, with producer Steve Lillywhite carefully welding the more anthemic tendencies of Adamson's former outfit The Skids with the more harmonic and complex guitar work which became their sonic hallmark. Lillywhite became the key progenitor of a scene which would soon also transport U2 and Simple Minds from the Odeon to the Amphitheatre.

Whereas some of Adamson's lyrical references on The Crossing were oblique, every minute of Steeltown seethed with barely repressed anger, particularly as the title suggests at the brutal de-industrialisation of his native Scotland. Within the space of a decade the country's traditional employment base of manufacturing, mineral working and maritime services were decimated, initially by bureacratic incompetence but mainly by the Nero of the free-market, Margaret Thatcher. The bloody aftermath was a once proud nation in shock, with chronic unemployment and rapid social decay.

Steeltown was released in 1984, the last great era of politicised rock in Britain, one culled by the introduction of the single issue Janet & John agendas of the Reagan/Thatcher oligarchy. Preceding single "Where the Rose is Sown" pulled no punches, unambiguously espousing an anti-war message, with lyrics straight from the Pentagon: "Sons of men who stand like gods, we give life to feed the cause, we run to ground our heathen foe, our name will never die, this time will be forever". Not exactly when a lover's voice finds the mountain side. There was little solace either in the title track, a grim dissection of the closure of the foundries in the English town of Corby, where a number of scottish emigrees - following the work - had made their home.

The musical shift was a more subtle one, but there nevertheless, with "East of Eden" especially meddling with any precepts of a strict limitation to churning out gauche anthems-by-numbers. The only songwriting contribution from bassist Tony Butler, the chorus was suitably elegiac, but the complex time signatures and lack of guitar chime much reduced the supposed formula down to bare bones. It was a song which more than any other here signalled change, but one thing that could still be relied upon was Adamson's ability to create ballads that were solemn but never sentimental, a quality further proven by "Come Back To Me", a darkly romantic lament for one of Where The Rose Is Sown's victims of war.

Rather than a complete departure however, Steeltown was more about transition than revolution. Opener "Flame of The West" - supposedly written about Reagan - galloped with an energy and narrative allusion that matched anything found on The Crossing, whilst both "Just A Shadow" and "Tall Ships Go" straddled the juxtaposition between thematic complexity and dumbed down terrace bounce. This contrast was an intelligent recognition that not all the million people in Britain who'd bought their debut wiped the sweat from their brow after a day at work, but it was dichotomy however which Adamson was never to fully master, continually from a songwriting perspective unwilling to dilute the message, despite it's commercial implications. Eventually joining the equally talented - and troubled - countryman Billy Mackenzie, the man from Dunfermline left behind a legacy which ironically compatriots Runrig would go on to convert into nineties success, but like the industries, values and culture which it mourned, Steeltown is the one of the finest swansongs for a now already sepia age.