Stay Alive by Scott Rowley

Stay Alive by Mark Rowley

Publisher‏: ‎ New Modern

Publication date: ‎ 26 March 2026

An authorised, definitive and comprehensive look at the life, the times and the death of Stuart Adamson, founder member of The Skids and Big Country, featuring first-hand testimony from Adamson’s wives, children and bandmates. It is also a tale of music, family, alcoholism and working-class pride. 

I have long been a fan of Stuart Adamson and his music – The Skids were one of the first bands I saw, at a crowded matinee show at Liverpool Eric’s, and a Big Country gig was where I chose to spend my 21^st birthday.

But despite all this, I didn’t really know that much about Adamson’s life, or indeed his tragically early death. The narrative I had constructed in my mind was to do with him having been in successful bands twice over and then finding himself, in his late 30s, on the wrong side of success and fame. As we know from other stories, early fame and fortune can have seismic effects on later life, and it was this that I thought had got the better of Stuart Adamson. The truth, as it usually is, is a lot more complicated and involved. A turn of phrase that can equally well be applied to Start Adamson himself.

The full story can be found in Scott Rowley’s excellent and in-depth book, Stay Alive. It is a full, excellently researched, and comprehensive book that involves interviews with many of the people closest to Stuart, including his bandmates, his managers, his wives and his children. It is the story of a man who never felt comfortable with his fame and who always seemed to be looking for the next thing to satisfy his artistic urge. It is also a harrowing tale of alcoholism. And thirdly, it is a sad read because, as when we are watching Titanic, we know how the story ends – no matter how we approach the book and the story it tells, we know that it ultimately ends in tragedy. The death of the book’s subject is not shied away from and is referenced throughout the book, keeping the denouement constantly in our minds as we journey through the book and through Stuart’s life.

Rowley has given us a book that takes a deep dive into Stuart Adamson’s life and gives us a real, personal feel for who he was. It is written in chronological order, with each phase brought to life by commentary from the people he shared it with. It is this that gives Stay Alive a feeling of peeking behind the curtain of celebrity and helping us feel that we are seeing the real Stuart Adamson. It is relatively free of photos, instead choosing to concentrate on testimony. It also doesn’t feel the need to pull punches, such as when it details Adamson’s dad handing himself into the police for crimes of paedophilia. One of the few times Stay Alive deals in supposition rather than witness statements is when it questions whether Stuart Adamson himself could have been a victim of this and whether the carried trauma could have had an effect on his alcoholism and, eventually, his suicide.

The book introduces the various members of the cast as they appear in Adamson’s life, with mini biographies and interviews with band members, wives, children, managers and key players. This is quite a neat way of doing things, as we learn about people at the point where their lives interact with Adamson’s. It also ensures that we get to know the characters that populate the book in a good amount of detail before they impact the story.

One amusing aspect of this book is that Rowley decided to write up interviews with Adamson’s Scottish connections, keeping their dialect and idioms intact, meaning that the book has to have a glossary at the end to explain what is meant by the likes of ‘fitba’, ‘pish’ and ‘blootered’.

This story really starts early for Stuart Adamson, as his initial fame found him at a young age, being just 18 when he formed The Skids. Their more arty approach to punk won them many fans, and they were soon signed to Virgin Records. Chart placings and Top of the Pops appearances soon followed, but even this relatively modest level of fame jarred with Adamson’s desire for a normal life, with him later saying, “My personal dissatisfaction began after the release of the super white Sweet Suburbia. I just wanted to get out. I wanted to get some peace and quiet and rid myself of the disorientation I was feeling. Meeting people you’ve known since primary school and not being able to speak to them just about sums that up.” Clearly, this was not someone who lusted after fame; a common theme for the book is that Adamson may have been happier writing his songs and playing his guitar to a much smaller crowd, or even no crowd at all.

But soon the Skids time was over, the seeds of their demise being sown into the band from the beginning, with Adamson and frontman Richard Jobson being so different and both wanting to take the band in different directions. Jobson says of this, “I was more out there, Stuart was more reserved… Stuart was the opposite.”

The end, when it came, was drawn out and messy and left its mark on Adamson. As Rowley says, “Stuart Adamson wasn’t even twenty-one, and he’d already walked out on two recording sessions and left his band. Before he’d even made it – before he’d even had a hit, never mind tasted real fame – he felt like he’d been chewed up and spat out.”

After leaving The Skids, Adamson went about putting Big Country together, with friend and fellow Dunfermline local Bruce Watson, before eventually landing on session musicians Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki. It was with Big Country that he would find real fame. He would also discover what the price of this fame was.

Single and album chart success followed, both at home and in the US, and Big Country were soon hot property, but the touring and recording schedules didn’t sit well with Adamson, who longed to be at home with his wife and kids. There are several reports of him threatening to walk off tours and out of studios unless his first wife, Sandra, was there with him. Sandra is rightly quoted extensively throughout the book and comes across as a grounding force in Adamson’s life, unimpressed by the life of a successful musician to the point that she opted to stay in the hotel when Big Country supported Queen at Knebworth, rather than join in what must have been a momentous occasion.

It may be the result of selective editing, but Sandra does come across as having little sympathy, empathy or enthusiasm for what her husband is doing and going through. Although, to be fair, this may also be the result of living with someone who was a chronic alcoholic and serially unfaithful. I must admit that I had no idea about the extent of Adamson’s problems with drinking, but alcohol and alcoholism play a huge part in Adamson’s story. One sad part of the story is that Adamson stayed sober for over 14 years, only to spectacularly fall off the wagon later.

Talking of the lack of support available for this kind of thing at the time, Bruce Watson says “If you went to the label and said ‘I’m having a nervous breakdown’ they’d drop you. There wouldn’t be any sympathy” and “You didn’t really talk about things like drinking because we were all ‘blokes’ and we all drank. So the problem would be, well, you haven’t had enough to drink.” He also sadly acknowledges that things may have been different if Adamson could have weathered the storm, concluding that “He would have been much happier now, I think, wouldn’t he?”

It is easy to assume that this reliance on drinking could have been how he coped with a life and a job that was making him unhappy. There is a brief chapter that details the loneliness and the demands of touring America, written in an observational diary style. It shows that the burdens on Adamson, as songwriter and frontman, were constant as well as dulling in their repetitiveness. The chapter points out that Adamson, with his desire to be at home with his family, wasn’t equipped for this in the same way that the likes of Bono and Jim Kerr were, and that this amplified his longing for a quiet, normal life.

All of this left Adamson deeply unhappy, something that was reflected in his lyrics if not his music. As Rowley puts it, “If Big Country’s music had been more sombre, like Joy Division, then it would have been more obvious. But instead, the lyrical content was wrapped up in music so passionate, so uplifting and beautiful that its message was obscured. Soon, the band’s big guitar music fell out of fashion, with dance music and Madchester changing the cultural winds. Manager Alan Edwards says, “Everything about Stuart, when you think about it, is so sad because he’s a guy out of time…Very talented, but just in the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

One sad note to add to this is that, due to Adamson not turning up to a meeting, a decision to sell the rights to Big Country’s music for a million dollars turned into a demand to also include all royalties from radio play, which was essentially the band’s ongoing income and pension. Unsure what to do, the band acquiesced, meaning that none of them receives a penny from Big Country’s music anymore, which may explain why the band have reformed and are still on the road. And really, who could begrudge them that after their efforts, after everything they went through and created?

Eventually, Big Country ran out of road and split up. Adamson decided to relocate to Nashville to pursue his love of Country music. Here he met and married his second wife, Melanie Shelley, and it seems alcoholism took him once more. This seemed to be mostly done in secret, and visitors were shocked to discover huge caches of empty bottles in cars and rooms.

His lifestyle earned him an arrest for drink driving, and it seemed his life was becoming ever more chaotic. After his arrest, he called his first wife, Sandra, from jail, and she recounts the time “he wasn’t incoherent, but it was difficult to talk to him. His brain was racing, and it was a mess. From then on, I was just in a state of panic for him because I couldn’t help. Geographically, it was just impossible. I tried to say to him, ‘Come back, buy a flat here’, but it’s just total chaos in the mind of an alcoholic.”

Adamson went missing, checking himself into hotels in Nashville and drinking in his room. His son Callum swept the bars in the area looking for him and keeping an ear out for an incongruous Dunfermline accent, and his manager hired a private investigator to try to track his movements. But Adamson didn’t want to be found.

For reasons unknown, he flew to Hawaii, where he checked into the first hotel he came across, taking supplies of wine with him and ordering more sent to his room. He called people from his life, maybe saying his goodbyes, before hanging himself from a wardrobe rail by an electrical cord. Callum Adamson takes some solace in these phone calls saying, “I feel really happy about that, because it means it was conscious choice. It wasn’t a mistake or a moment of panic” before adding “It was probably just ‘I’m never going to be able to kill this part of me so I have to kill all of me.’”

Given that this is essentially the finale of the book, it isn’t dwelt on unduly, with the reasons and the buildup being the major part of the story. The end is handled with deference and tact. Not that this detracts from the sadness at the heart of Stay Alive, but there is nothing we can do about that. It is a tragic tale, and I am reminded of something I read shortly after Kurt Cobain’s death, that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. As Bruce Watson pointed out, I do wonder if Stuart would be happier now.

Maybe it would be enough that the pressure was off and that Big Country could make a reasonable and enjoyable living playing occasional gigs on the festival nostalgia circuit without having to commit to arduous tours. The dream of being a musician, but with as little of the accompanying baggage as possible.

We will never know, and this is what really brings tears to the eye. If he could have stayed alive, as his lyrics and the book’s title suggest, things may have worked out to a place where he could have felt comfortable and even happy.

The final word here goes again to his son Callum, who points out that “Kurt Cobain is not Kurt Cobain because he’s a good businessman” adding, “Want to be Jimi Hendrix? Well, you’ve got to die alone in a hotel room. It’s part of the fruit salad. There’s fucking kiwis in there as well as cherries. There’s bitter, horrible shit in there too, and sometimes it gets the better of you. Some people come through it; a lot don’t.”

~

Words by Banjo, you can find his Louder Than War archive here