Live review: Big Country, O2 Academy, Newcastle
BIG COUNTRY ... rolled back the years at the O2 Academy in Newcastle.
“OH Lord, where did the feeling go?”
Frontman Stuart Adamson (God rest his troubled soul) wrote those words in 1983, as he helped create one of the seminal guitar-band albums of the 1980s, The Crossing.
If the almost-full Academy was anything to go by, the feeling is still strong. The fire still burns.
OK, that fire may now be felt by those of an age who need it against the cold a bit more than they did then, but their (and my) affection for Big Country remains undimmed.
That much was obvious in the way we sang ourselves hoarse to the familiar old words and the familiar old tunes, united in homage to the man who wrote them.
And there could have been no better stand-in for Adamson than The Alarm’s Mike Peters, whose sincere immersion in the experience – especially when he ventured into the crowd to conduct the singing of Chance (“…where did the feeling go…?”) – made it feel like he’d been part of it all along. So it was in a delightedly uncomplicated way that we went on a journey with the band (also now including Jamie Watson, son of founder-guitarist Bruce, playing alongside his dad) through the album which won a place in our hearts.
Inwards, In A Big Country, 1,000 Stars, Lost Patrol, Harvest Home, Close Action, Porrohman – they belted them all out, driven along by smilingly solid bassist Tony Butler and big-hitting drummer Mark Brzezicki.
In the words of the man himself: “In a big country, dreams stay with you, like a lover’s voice fires the mountainside. Stay alive!”
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Monday 21 May 2012
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