You'd think the death of a band's figurehead might spell the end, but for Big Country and Thin Lizzy, finding a stand-in seemed the best way to honour their fallen leaders
It was October 2000, and Big Country were preparing for another gig. They had been one of the biggest British bands of the 1980s, attracting a particularly ardent fanbase with their distinctively Celtic take on rock and their everyman image ? at one point they were serious rivals to U2. But by the end of the next decade, tastes had changed and their leader, Stuart Adamson, had succumbed to depression and alcoholism. Bassist Tony Butler, who'd been around since the band recorded their first demos in his mother's kitchen, took the frontman to one side.
"I said: 'I'm not going to play with you while you're like this,'" remembers Butler, a thoughtful, conscientious man. "We were becoming our own tribute group. I think he realised the depth of my feeling. That something that had meant so much to us was dissipating. I said, "Call me when you're right.'" That night's gig proved to be Big Country's final show. "And that was unfortunately the last time I saw him," Butler says.
On 16 December 2001, Adamson hanged himself in a Hawaiian hotel. He was 43. The surviving members of Big Country have never talked about his death before. "It's still so raw," Butler says, alone in a dressing room beneath Newcastle Academy. He spends much of the interview in tears.
Despite what might have seemed to be an insuperable blow ? Adamson, to many, was more than Big Country's singer; he actually was Big Country ? the band are packing out big venues once again, but with Adamson's place taken by Mike Peters, the singer from Big Country's contemporaries, the Alarm.
Big Country are not the only band to have lost their talisman who have decided to go back on the road. Thin Lizzy, the archetypal 1970s hard rock band, are playing the same-sized venues as in their heyday ? last Saturday they sold out Hammersmith Apollo, where their classic album Live and Dangerous was recorded ? despite not having recorded a note in nearly 30 years. Lizzy had one of rock's most charismatic and striking frontmen in Phil Lynott, who died in 1986, aged 36, and the seemingly unenviable task of filling in for him falls to Ricky Warwick, formerly the singer of the Almighty.
What one might call "Frankenstein bands" ? reassembled years after their apparent demise with bits from other groups bolted on to replace those who have been lost ? run the risk of being tawdry, cynical affairs. Queen's poorly received reunion, replacing the late Freddie Mercury with the gruff blues-rock singer Paul Rodgers, was widely panned and didn't last. But, against all odds, Big Country and Thin Lizzy offer proof that it can be a life-affirming affair that paying tribute to the departed hero without becoming sentimental.
After Adamson's death, his bandmates couldn't listen to Big Country's music for years. When they did decide to revisit it, in 2007, a handful of live shows with Butler singing rapidly convinced them they had no future as a three-piece. Butler, who had left music and become a teacher, was particularly against the idea of "recreating former glories", but gradually came around to the idea of a celebration of what they were and "remembrance of Stuart" for the band's 30th anniversary.
Thin Lizzy were revived years before Big Country had even split. Scott Gorham ? the guitarist who played alongside Lynott in the band from 1974 until they split in 1983 ? is the driving force behind the current lineup (original drummer Brian Downey is in it, too), but was stung by accusations that Lizzy without Lynott was a joke. Now, however, he seems to have turned the fans around.
"There's always one guy going: 'Where's Phil? I walked out after four songs,'" Gorham admits before a gig in Leeds. He accepts the "massive hole" left by Lynott, but the genial Californian ? who has a right to earn a crust from songs he did, after all, help create ? says the current band is to satisfy those who want to hear "the songs as they were meant to be heard, with the power coming off the stage", and maintains that such events pay homage to their fallen leader. "There are a lot of people missing Phil. Including us," he says.
When Lizzy folded in 1984 ? with Gorham and Lynott both addicted to heroin ? the guitarist felt he would never want to play their songs again. He formed new bands, and worked with different musicians. But, as the years passed, he became niggled that people were started to forget about Thin Lizzy. When John Sykes ? who had played guitar with Gorham on the final Thin Lizzy album in 1983 ? suggested reuniting in 1996, Gorham agreed to contact Downey. "I was almost expecting Brian to say 'Fuck that,'" Gorham recalls. "He said 'When do we start?'" And, Gorham admits: "Secretly, I wanted to play the songs again."
Reforming without the acknowledged star takes what Gorham calls a "thick hide", and the choice of replacement is crucial. Warwick, who comes from County Down, joined Lizzy last year, and seems to truly empathise Lynott's poetic, distinctly Irish lyrics, and sings eerily like him. Certainly, Warwick seems to be a more suitable frontman than Sykes, who played lead guitar and sang from the band's reformation until 2009.
For Big Country, meanwhile, it quickly became apparent that Mike Peters would be a natural fit in the band. For a start, he had been close to Adamson ? they had toured together, their bands shared many of the same fans, and after his friend's death he would occasionally play Big Country songs with the Alarm. He'd even once rehearsed with them ? with Adamson's blessing ? and sang the songs at a fanclub event after Adamson died, which was "very emotional, like sticking your finger into a wound". Peters has his own reasons for stepping into the breach, though. "I've beaten cancer twice," he explains. "Now I tend to say yes to things and worry about the consequences afterwards." A piercing-eyed, passionate man, he is adamant this is not a cash-in. "I loved the band and I loved the guy. It was an opportunity to bring all the people together who'd been parted by a death."
And just as Gorham started fearing Lizzy fading from memory, Peters, too, is irked that Adamson ? one of the biggest rock stars of the 80s ? has seemingly been forgotten. "I see magazines and think 'There's Joe Strummer, there's Led Zeppelin. Where's Stuart?'"
In his first band, the Skids, Adamson created the stark, echo-laden guitar sound that inspired The Edge's sound in U2. But while John Peel recognised "Britain's answer to Jimi Hendrix", Adamson's influence on bands from Manic Street Preachers to Kings of Leon usually goes unsung. Peters remembers him as a sensitive, honest, principled man from a mining community near Dunfermline, whose lyrics captured the struggles of ordinary working people. But towards the end of his life Adamson felt as if his work was being swept aside ? by grunge, baggy and dance music - as Lynott had felt his had been a decade earlier, by punk and then synthesiser pop.
"Phil was particularly crushed when Bob [Geldof] and Midge [Ure] didn't invite him to Live Aid," Gorham says ? the blow must have been especially hard given that Ure, briefly and bafflingly, had been a member of Thin Lizzy. "But I don't blame them. He was in no fit shape." By the time of Live Aid, those who knew him well were shocked by his physical condition, after years of drugs and drink. "I do think Phil felt things were going south, which probably hastened his demise," Gorham says.
Gorham offers "confidence issues" and the physical pain from years of touring as the reasons he and Lynott sought refuge in heroin in 1979, but the drug didn't solve those problems. Instead, Gorham says, it robbed him of his ability to play. "That's another reason I wanted to do this, to show people that the last three years of Lizzy was the drugs playing, not me." He cleaned up; Lynott never could.
The guitarist last saw his bandmate three weeks before his death. "He looked terrible, shot. He was talking about getting the band back together. I'm thinking: 'You're not even close.' But when he said he'd quit, I believed him. The cruel twist was that by then he had too many things wrong with him, and was going to die anyway."
Bruce Watson, Big Country's 50-year-old guitarist, was not surprised when he received news of Adamson's death. "We'd spoken about his grandad, who'd committed suicide as well," he says. "The band were finished, he'd been through a divorce. Everything in his life was not happening."
The loss of his friend gets no easier, he says: "I miss him terribly. I have these dreams: the four of us are sitting at a table having a meal. I wake up and I go: 'Jesus Christ!'"
Earlier this month, Big Country played in Dunfermline, a show attended by the singer's family and old friends. It was only Peters's second show as singer, and he says the room fell silent as he started singing. "But then they realised it was done with the right intent, and the place went absolutely mad." Watson played with tears rolling down his face.
These gigs shouldn't work ? at first, it can be hard not to be preoccupied by what is absent rather than by what is present ? but they pack a powerful emotional punch. When Lizzy play the mournful Still in Love With You with pictures of Lynott flashed up behind them there isn't a dry eye in the house. Gorham ? who is also remastering the Lizzy catalogue to keep the name alive ? is sure Lynott would not have wanted live performance of his music to be lost. "He worked long hours and travelled thousands of miles get it to a certain level. There's no way he would have said 'No one should play those songs again.'"
And for Big Country's drummer, Mark Brzezicki, playing the old songs is a way to reconnect when all other means have gone. "When we play together [Adamson] is still here. I know he'd approve, because we're doing his life's work proud."
Big Country deliberately leave a hole centre stage where Adamson used to be, but Peters sings with sincerity and conviction. When he talks about the departed hero, a chant erupts of "Stuart! Stuart!"
A decade after his lonely death, his name is cheered to the rafters.
Big Country play Pyramids Centre, Portsmouth on 8 April, then tour. Deluxe editions of Thin Lizzy's albums Jailbreak, Johnny the Fox and Live and Dangerous are released on 31 January. Thin Lizzy play the Download festival in June.
The rise of the 'Frankenstein band'
Others who returned with their late stars replaced
The Doors
When original members Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger decided to reopen the Doors in 2002, with Ian Astbury of the Cult replacing the late Jim Morrison, their former colleague and drummer John Densmore was so enraged he secured court ruling that they could not use the name the Doors. Instead, the reconfigured band became the Doors of the 21st Century, then Riders on the Storm.
INXS
When Michael Hutchence died in 1997, the Australian band decided not to fold. In 2000 they recruited a little-known singer called Jon Stevens, and after he left in 2003, they announced they would recruit a new singer by conducting a search via a reality TV show. JD Fortune won Rock Star: INXS, and stayed with the band until 2009, when he was apparently let go with a handshake at Hong Kong airport.
New York Dolls
The Dolls were already adept at replacing dead members ? when Jerry Nolan joined in 1972, it was to replace Billy Murcia, who died after a drug overdose during the band's first UK tour. The Dolls split in 1975, but reformed in June 2004 at Morrissey's behest, by this time without guitarist Johnny Thunders, who died in 1991. Within a month of that, bassist Arthur Kane had died of leukaemia, but founder members David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain soldier on under the Dolls' name.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jan/27/bands-replacing-dead-rock-stars
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