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 founder and performer with the punk rock band Skids. After leaving Skids in 1981, he formed Big Country and was the band's lead singer and guitarist. The group's commercial heyday was in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he was a member of the alternative country band the Raphaels. In the late 1970s the British music journalist John Peel referred to his virtuosity as a guitarist by calling him "a new Jimi Hendrix".

Adamson was born in Manchester, England, to Scottish parents Anne (née Muir) and William Adamson. When he was four, his family moved to the small mining village of Crossgates, about a mile east of Dunfermline in Fife. Adamson's father joined the merchant navy and was rarely home, so Adamson was mostly brought up by his mother. Adamson attributed his love of music to his mother, who worked at a record shop, and would often bring records home. Adamson received his formal education at Beath High School.

Adamson started playing 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 in 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 number 10 in the UK Singles Chart. The band had four chart singles in the United Kingdom that year. 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."

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.