Big Country

If you’re going to be a quasi-one-hit-wonder in the United States — at least as far as Casey Kasem is concerned — you could hardly do better for name recognition than these shrewd Scots, who had the IQ to enshrine forevermore their band’s name in the title of said hit, “In a Big Country.” But let’s not give them too much hindsight credit — they also saddled themselves with one of the worst band names to Google in all godliness. Try finding out what the next stop on their “The Journey” tour is, and you’ll be redirected to a dozen big country music festival sites. And if you thought they might be playing the Crescent Ballroom, you could be reading a recipe for delicious buttery Pillsbury Big Country dinner rolls right now! Since the 2001 suicide of the group’s main guiding light, Stuart Adamson, the guy who wrote, sang, and came up with the whole “make the guitars sound like bagpipes, only bearable” idea, you’d be within your rights to think that Big Country was annexed for good. Yet original member Bruce Watson enlisted Mike Peters of the Alarm for vocals, along with the bassist from Simple Minds, and wrote a new chapter in the band’s canon with the first Big Country UK hit in decades, called — wait for it — “Another Country.” If you don’t expect them to play “Rain in the Summertime,” they won’t expect to grow flowers in the desert. Deal? — Serene Dominic