The Reading Rock Festival is an institution in the UK. It started in the 1960s and kept going for many a year at the Richfield Avenue site. Just about every classic British band will have played there during its first few decades.
The 1983 edition was the 23rd Reading festival since the beginning, and the final one held at that legendary location. The local council effectively banned the festival by designating the festival site for development and refusing to grant licences for any alternative sites in the Reading area.
For a while people feared that this would be it, but with a council change the festival would be back some years later. Since then it has not just persisted, but grown. Today it is one of the largest outdoors music festivals in Britain.
Reading Rock Festival 1983 was held August 26th through 28th, and Big Country performed on the first day. At the time, the festival profile had been the same since the latter part of the 1970s when it became known for its increasing focus on rock and heavy metal acts.
In 1983 they were trying to turn it into a more all-encompassing event with a more varied line-up. In addition to the usual hard rock and metal acts (i.e. Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Anvil, Hanoi Rocks and Magnum), they included punk, prog, and new wave bands (i.e. the Stranglers, Steve Harley, Pallas, Man, Marillion – and Big Country). The line-up was certainly more varied than in many years.
It really was shaping up to be a legendary event. The stories surrounding it are as plentyful as the actual musical memories it created. There is the tale about the devoted Thin Lizzy fan who was so determined to see them perform for the very last time that she discharged herself from the Royal Berkshire Hospital to get there. Unfortunately she had to be rushed back after suffering acute appendicitis before Thin Lizzy had played a chord. Another alarming story speak of swarms of bees and wasps invading (primarily on the 27th) which caused a great many to suffer stings.
Whatever else went on, today the festival is definitely remembered for the music.
John Giddings (Big Country’s booking agent) was keen to get Big Country onto the bill. “I decided Big Country should play the Reading Festival,” he recalled in the book A Certain Chemistry. “Ian Grant [band manager] said no. Stuart refused point blank to do it. Nevertheless I confirmed them on the show without telling them, and announced it to the music papers. When approached by the papers Stuart made a flat denial – the band would not be playing because he and his family were going abroad on holiday. I was determined. I was so convinced I was right that I persuaded Ian Grant and Chris Briggs, their A&R man at Phonogram. I even offered to pay for Stuart and his wife to fly back from their holiday to do the show and back again. This must have been enough to illustrate to Stuart how certain I was that to do Reading was a good idea. It was. That day put Big Country on a different level in the UK. A happy ending, but they could just as well have sacked me.”
Big Country were billed as “special guests” which normally indicates an opening band slot, but on a festival it meant playing before the headliner as a more featured attraction along with the main band. Big Country would come on second to last, before The Stranglers. The headliners were long-time admirers of Big Country and in particular their frontman Stuart Adamson, going back to his days in Skids who would frequently play the same circuit as them.
As the bands were going to play back-to-back, The Stranglers agreed to share their pyrotechnic set-up with Big Country. “They thought we should have something extra special during Fields of Fire,” remembers Big Country guitarist Bruce Watson on The Great Divide – the Big Country podcast. “They had a pyrotechnics guy there, I think his name was Martin Blake. He was a kind of strange looking dude, he had to keep smothering vaseline on his face and his hands because he’d been burnt so many times… he was slightly disfigured, you know? Anyway, he came up to us beforehand, saying he was going to set up these pyros for Fields of Fire – towards the end of the song, when Stuart sings “…on fields of FIRE”, he’s gonna set the pyro off. They would be placed right by the base of the microphones, next to the pedals. And he basically said, ‘when Stuart’s going to sing “Fire”, make sure you’re about four feet away from the microphone.’ Well, that’s going to be pretty tough for Stuart, because he’s singing into the microphone, you know?”
Fields of Fire was to be the grand finale of the show, and they all looked forward to finishing the show with a bit more “oomph” than normal.
Before they got that far, though, there was the matter of a frustrated, cranky, bottle-throwing crowd to deal with.
It really was not Big Country’s fault. As the bill consisted of bands in many different genres, it was perhaps inevitable that some segments of the audience wouldn’t be keen on the bands currently playing. They would find themselves just hanging around, waiting for the next one of “their” bands to go on.
What would they do? Some retired for drinks. Others got into other types of mischief to pass the time. Some of that mischief was directed at what was happening on a stage. Rather than unifying different type of festival-goers with a diverse line-up, the varied line-up split them into camps. There was the metal camp, there was the post-punk camp, there was the new wave camp, and variants thereof.
Bottles had been thrown towards the stage well before Big Country went on, and the band directly prior to Big Country has to take the main blame for this escalating. That band was Steel Pulse. They walked on, and immediately seemed to get on the wrong side of the audience. Their brief introduction came across as arrogant, then they started playing. The majority of the crowd hated them. It became mutual and they didn’t hide it. Bottles started flying.
After the first song, in a very mistaken sense of power and authority, Steel Pulse’s lead singer foolishly said “if you throw one more bottle we’re leaving.” With that, the bottle throwing promptly reached its peak. The band still struggled on, their panache dwindling by the second. Eventually they stormed off the stage for good, barely having made it one and a half song into their set. That cheered the crowd somewhat.
Things soured again when the PA announcer started throwing abuse at the crowd for their behaviour. He also pointed out that the next band would come on at the appointed time, and that the audience would just have to do without music until then, and that this was their own fault. The crowd booed at this ridiculous form of punishment, even though most people seemed to have no problem with missing out on Steel Pulse.
This is the backdrop to Big Country’s appearance on the festival. They were the ones who had to go out on that stage after that enforced break, in front of a provoked and restless audience, trying to turn the negative vibes around.
Things were still tense from earlier, but the band started playing without any major issues, being warmly welcomed by most of the audience. Where Steel Pulse had demanded respect from the get-go and got none, Big Country displayed their usual genuine appreciation for playing for people just like themselves. This is always what the band was about in any case, but especially on that day, it was exactly the right vibe to come out on stage with.
The odd bottle would still be thrown, though, particularly early in the set. This led Stuart Adamson to stop Close Action mid-song, just as he famously did with Inwards on the Live in New York concert film from 1986. He addressed the small group of bottle-throwers directly. Stuart spoke clearly, yet respectfully, to them. Unlike Steel Pulse, there was no posturing, no threatening, and certainly no ultimatums involved.
There was definitely a concern at that stage that things could get out of hand. By addressing it, and more importantly, only making it a short break before carrying on, the band had made their point. They would not suffer fools, but at the same time they made it clear that they were here for the audience, and they would not abandon them but stay and finish the job.
This actually managed to calm the bottle throwing down as the band gradually won the entire audience over. Someone in the audience later quipped “it was hard to dance to the music and chuck bottles at the same time!” By most reports, people were really getting into the music and the smiles were back on people’s faces again.
This cannot be overstated: Their fans had every reason to be proud of Big Country on that day.
The band did great, and everybody were thrilled that they came back out for an encore. That, of course, was going to be Fields of Fire, with the prepared addition of pyrotechnical firepower at the very end, courtesy of The Stranglers.
The band sounded fantastic. At this point, the crowd was bouncing and singing along. The set had ended with a genuine moment of triumph for Big Country.
Then came the end of the song.
BOOOM!
The explosion was immense, taking out a lot of the stage equipment and giving the band members nasty burns.
Bruce Watson will certainly never forget it. “We got to that part of the song,” he told the Big Country podcast, “and I saw Stuart just walking back from the mike before he would have shouted “…on fields of fire!” And these pyros went off. We did move back the agreed four feet – in fact we had to run behind the amplifiers to get away from the heat. It was like a napalm attack. We had guys up on the lighting trusses, and could see them jumping off, stuff like that. Even the crowd got burnt. That’s how bad it was. I heard a recording of the gig, and you can actually hear it going off. You can hear the crowd going, ‘Oooooooh, fuck!‘”
Fortunately, a first aid tent had been erected on the festival grounds, and the band spent The Stranglers’ set there getting treatment. “We had to go to a medical tent they had set up,” remembers Watson, “to get our faces covered with yoghurt to calm the residual heat. We also had no eyebrows. They had all been singed off, so we had no eyebrows for the next few gigs! Oh man. ‘Make sure you’re four feet away.’ How about four miles away? It was unbelievable.”
Was it a miscalculated prank by The Stranglers or just a miscalculation period? Big Country clearly got a very large amount of explosives, to put it mildly. It had been set up by experienced people who should know the correlation between used explosives and the effect you will get. Is it likely that they were going for “a bit extra” but overshot the mark? I can’t say, but at the very least the question is fair.
Bruce Watson takes a pragmatic approach, dismissing the suggestion that it was an overstated prank: “No, I don’t think it was. Pyro guys are just like that. I’m sure they have orgasms when they set off the pyros. They just put too much in, because, why have a small explosion when we can have a fuckin’ HUGE explosion, you know? The pyro was just… these guys are maniacs, and they overdo it. They always put too much in.”
Whether it was a prank or not, the gigantic explosion turned out to be yet another thing the band’s performance was remembered for. It was the biggest blast of the festival, and certainly big enough to fill every metal band on the bill with envy!
Fortunately, several songs from this performance were later broadcast on BBC’s long-running In Concert series, and were included on the Big Country at the BBC box set released in 2013. The intensity of the situation may have given the performances an edge. Things could have gone either way early in their set, and the developing mood and ambience can be picked up on the audio from this show.
The recordings capture Big Country on their upward trajectory. All of the shows they did at this time in their career were sensational and played with a combination of high enthusiasm, skill, energy, and passion. A few bottles and explosions did not derail that. It was widely regarded as a really good set by a great band. Many bands would not have fared well in the situation Big Country was put in.
Unfortunately no video or photo has been shared of the incident, but Watson knows that at least a photo exists: “There is a photograph kicking about. I saw a photo which showed how the flames were shooting up. Someone came backstage once and showed it to us. We were in hysterics – we could not believe how tall the flames were!”
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