I don't give a damn, it's been a tough day.

Do your worst, I'm still humming along to "Look Away" anyway.

Great band....and even though I love a lot of the new ones, they were still better than 95.3% of the bands out there today. And they weren't even indie.

i love those guys, especially Come Back To Me, The Great Divide, Lost Patrol, In A Big Country. they're a fav of the peeps here at work.

My only beef with this is it doesn't have the track with Kate Bush on it. Still, one of the better anthemic best-of's around.

I can't hate... I'm actually looking forward to listening to Blind Melon's unreleased collection later on tonight. [/lame]

Hey, dead guys are always better. If it worked for Hutchence and Adamson's cachet, why not Hoon's?

Does that best of thing have the track with Kate Bush?

I really enjoy The Crossing, The Seer, and the Wonderland EP, and have since they came out. I never explored their work any further than that, but I guess I probably should.


The shining eye will never cry
The beating heart will never die
The house on fire holds no shame
I will be coming home again

The Bush track is the best thing they ever did, not that I'm biased. It's not on the best-of. The Seer is great. Some later stuff, they tried to get heartland rocky and lost some of their Scottishness, I think.

Absolutely nothing wrong with Big Country.

Other than Stuart offing himself, yeah.

Big Country are the musical equivalent of those tacky awful tartan stores that sell little plastic piper dolls and cuddly Loch Ness monsters and 'humourous' postcards with jokes about how it always rains here and possibly a highland cow or west highland terrier on it for good measure.

Basically I think it's a national embaressment while you guys can't get enough of it.

Darrin, they had exactly ONE hit here (and a handful of minor chart-scrapers). Your situation is a bit different there, where you've not been able to escape them for twenty years.

Besides, the actual songs can be quite good, regardless of cultural embarrassment or homeland eye-rolling. I suppose it's a bit like a Japanese person deciding Bob Seger is brilliant, but there you are.

I bet there's some band I think is a national embarrassment that you like. I bet.

You like Bon Jovi, maybe?

Sod off. Simple Minds, maybe. "The Crossing" should have been the fourth Skids album. "Scared To Dance" and "Days In Europa" are enough to give Stuart a free pass for whatever he wanted to record. He was great once.

At least Simple Minds started off good!

Nah, Cuban Heels get the best parts of Johnny and the Self Abusers. Don't get me wrong, I dig a lot of what Simple Minds did. But they got as crappy, if not more so, than Big Country. If anyone reading this thread hasn't heard the Skids, and whose knowledge of Big Country extends only as far back as "The Crossing", please do yourself a favor and buy "Scared To Dance" and "Days In Europa" or any of the "Best of" comps that are floating around out there. Your money will have been well spent.

Who remembers these guys?

They did the mid-80's "Funkytown" cover, right?