It was 15th December 2002 – a busy, but normal Sunday afternoon at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport. Christmas traffic was definitely starting to pick up, but had not yet reached the crazed frenzy that it would get over the next week.
Suddenly, a different type of announcement arrives over the speaker system. All passengers and crew are asked to leave the terminal due to a bomb scare.
Security workers had noticed a case travelling around a carousel on its own, long after all the other luggage had been picked up, and took it to be x-rayed. The security operator nearly shat himself when he saw wires, pedals, a power supply and a battery-operated switch. Concerned that this could be a bomb, they took no chances. The terminal was immediately evacuated.
This is when they started wondering who the owner of the case might be. They found that it belonged to one Bruce Watson from Dunfermline, Scotland.
Watson was returning from a weekend in Zandaam, where Big Country had just performed at a fan convention with Mike Peters fronting the band. This was the first time the band had reconvened and done anything at all after the death of founding member Stuart Adamson a year earlier. It had been an emotional weekend for all involved, with a lot of communal healing and the start on the road to celebrating the music again.
When Watson arrived at Edinburgh airport, he noticed that one of his cases was missing – the one holding his guitar effects pedals. After realising that it wasn’t going to show up, he started heading on over to the Service Air desk to report it missing when he heard the message “Would Bruce Watson please contact Service Air desk immediately.”
A slightly concerned Watson arrived at the desk and was promptly handed a mobile phone. The voice on the other end introduced himself as a DCI with the airport police in Liverpool, let him know that they had found his case, and wanted to know urgently what was in it. He pointed out that the case was locked and they couldn’t open the combination lock. Watson jokingly asked, ‘You haven’t blown it up, have you?’ The extremely concerned voice replied, ‘Not yet, but we are just about to.’
Watson told him that the case contained guitar effects pedals, a power supply, and a battery-operated guitar tuner, and that all of these things were linked together with cables. “I explained who I was,” Watson told the Bolton News a few days later, “and told him what was in the case. I was saying, ‘Honestly, I’m a musician. I was in Big Country.’ Luckily he was a bit of a musician himself and he knew what I was talking about.”
Watson aso gave the DCI the combination code. The voice told him to wait for five minutes, after which he would get back to him.
True to his word, when he returned he was able to tell Watson that the case and its contents were safe. ”Full credit to the security people,” Watson said. “They acted really quickly and sorted it out.”
As it transpired, the trouble was caused by Amsterdam staff sending the case to Liverpool by mistake. In a true display of logistics bureaucracy, the case it had to be returned to Amsterdam before it could be sent on to its correct destination of Edinburgh.
Watson reunited with his kit the next day, and no big harm was done. The airport terminal was only evacuated for 15 minutes, during which air traffic was able to continue as normal.
The incident still made the news, and in an interview with the Scottish Daily Mirror, Watson commented “It was a comedy of errors, but I would like to apologise to everyone at the airport who had to be evacuated.”
In the same article, Robin Tudor, business services manager at the airport, said that the security staff was able to see the lighter side of the incident. “We were all very relieved to discover the case contained something to innocuous and we all saw the funny side once it was over,” he said. “But these incidents go to show how seriously we take airport security and if that means evacuating a terminal, then that is what we will do.”
When Watson summarized what had happened in a blog post a few years after the fact, he ended it matter-of-factly with a “Apart from that I had a great weekend.”
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