Stuart Adamson

William Stuart Adamson (11 April 1958 – 16 December 2001) was a Scottish rock guitarist and singer.

Adamson began his career in the late 1970s as a founding member and performer with the punk rock band Skids.

In the late 1970s the British music journalist John Peel referred to his musical virtuosity as a guitarist as "a new Jimi Hendrix".

Adamson was born in the city of Manchester, England, to Scottish parents Anne (née Muir) and William Adamson.

When he was four, his family relocated to the small mining village of Crossgates, about a mile east of Dunfermline in Fife.

Adamson's father, a fishing industry executive who travelled the world, encouraged his son to read literature, and both parents shared an interest in folk music.

Adamson received his formal education at Beath High School.

Adamson entered rock music during the British punk rock movement of the mid-1970s, forming a Dunfermline band called Tattoo in 1976 after seeing The Damned at a gig across the Firth of Forth in the capital city of Edinburgh.

Besides Adamson, Tattoo included his friend William Simpson, who would also play bass guitar in their next band, Skids, which began performing in the local area and in Edinburgh.

Adamson founded Skids in 1977 when he was 18.

He and Simpson first recruited drummer Thomas Kellichan and performed as a trio until meeting the 16-year-old Richard Jobson.

, who became the act's lead singer/frontman, Adamson and Jobson being the principal songwriters for the act.

Skids' biggest success was the single "Into the Valley", released in 1979, which reached #10 in the UK Singles Chart.

The band had four chart singles in the United Kingdom that year.

The group's commercial heyday was in the 1980s.

His interest extended to the race track where he sponsored the career of the British Championship rider Iain Duffus in the late 1980s.

After leaving Skids in 1981, he formed Big Country and was the band's lead singer and guitarist.

Adamson was involved with the band's first three long-players, before quitting the act in 1981 after disagreements with Jobson, whose personality was increasingly dominating the band's output.

Jobson later said of Adamson: "This was a guy who had a mortgage, a wife, and a family when we were all trying to live some mythic punk lifestyle. He seemed level-headed, grounded."

Adamson found international fame with Big Country, a band formed with friend and fellow guitarist Bruce Watson, then employed as a submarine cleaner at Rosyth naval base, and a rhythm section of studio musicians Mark Brzezicki and Tony Butler, found with the help of his label.

He had two children with his first wife Sandra in 1982 and 1985.

His son Callum Adamson is the guitarist of the band Ahab, and his daughter Kirsten has a solo musical career.

Big Country's first hit, 1983's "Fields of Fire", reached the UK's Top 10, and was rapidly followed by the album The Crossing.

The album was a big hit in North America (Canada.#4, United States #18) powered by the single "In a Big Country", which was performed on Saturday Night Live and the Grammy Awards.

The video for "In a Big Country" received frequent airplay on MTV and featured the band riding all terrain vehicles in the countryside.

Their second album Steeltown appeared in October 1984.

The band's third album The Seer (1986) featured Kate Bush on the title track.

The first two albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite.

The band's lineup rarely underwent changes, the exception being the departure of drummer Mark Brzezicki who left in the summer of 1989 and was replaced by Pat Ahern.

In the 1990s, he was a member of the alternative country band The Raphaels.

Brzezicki re-joined the band in 1993.

Adamson was married twice.

In 1996, Adamson split with Sandra and moved to Nashville, US.

There he married his second wife in 1999, a hairdresser named Melanie Shelley, and founded his final band, the alternative country band The Raphaels, a duo of Adamson and Nashville songwriter Marcus Hummon.

Adamson was a keen motorcyclist who regularly purchased new machines for riding around Fife.

The band continued to record studio albums and tour until 2000.

Adamson supplied much of the distinctive guitar work, as well as being the lead singer and main songwriter (both music and lyrics).

On 26 November 2001, Adamson was reported missing by his wife Melanie.

At the time the couple had been estranged for several weeks, and Melanie filed for divorce on the day he had disappeared.

He had been due to face drunk-driving charges in March 2002, and had been ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).