Big Country were a rock band from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, popular in the early to mid-1980s but still releasing material for a cult following. The band were notable for music heavily accented with traditional Scottish folk and martial music styles, as well as for playing and engineering their guitar sound to resemble the bagpipes, fiddles and other traditional folk instruments. The album “The Crossing” was a hit in the United States, powered by “In a Big Country”, their only US Top 40 hit single. The song featured heavily engineered guitar playing, strongly reminiscent of bagpipes. Former members: Stuart Adamson Bruce Watson Tony Butler Mark Brzezicki (Adamson was found dead in a room at the Best Western Plaza Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii on 16 December 2001) Lyrics: Come up screaming Come up screaming I’ve never seen you look like this without a reason Another promise fallen through Another season passes by you I never took the smile away from anybody’s face And that’s a desperate way to look For someone who is still a child In a big country dreams stay with you Like a lover’s voice fires the mountainside Stay alive I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert But I can live and breathe And see the sun in wintertime In a big country dreams stay with you Like a lover’s voice fires the mountainside Stay alive In a big country dreams stay with …
Tag Archives: Scotland
Stories of Scotland Queen Mary and World War 2
HelloStoriesfromthePast.com Special thanks to the Clydebank Library, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, for the use of its archival photographs. This memoir, just released in January 2, 2012, is about a child growing up in the duration of World War 2. It is rare because people of that era are dying off rapidly, and their stories with them. Elizabeth O’Neill was born in the Glasgow Maternity Hospital in 1934. She grew up in industrial Clydebank, Scotland. One of her earliest memories is of the great ocean liner, built in Clydebank, the RMS Queen Mary, going down the river Clyde in March of 1936. The child knew poverty, abuse, neglect, and illness. Evacuation in 1940 proved to be a blessing and ended too soon when her parents brought her back to the danger zone in time for the Clydebank Blitz in March of 1941. She and her family were made homeless, and her mother deserted the family a few months later. In early December of 1941 Elizabeth saw the newsreel of the Japanese bombing of the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. She wondered how much pain a child could bear. In the ensuing years Elizabeth attended thirteen different schools; her little brother attended eleven. The school leaving age was 15. Stability came for two years when they lived in a childrens’ hostel, and for another two years when they lived with the Doherty’s. Now a teenager, Elizabeth, her father and brother rented a new Council house of their own and found stability again. There were still disappointments …