Big Country’s song ‘One Great Thing’ is an anthem for the Scottish Yes campaign: it was soaring in the background during an item recorded at a ‘Yes’ rally on the Today programme the other day. And since Big Country’s bagpipe-sounding guitars were one of the joys of my adolescence and I’ve been partial to a check shirt ever since, my heart soared along with it.
‘Yes,’ said Jim Lafferty from the Yes campaign’s communications office, appropriately enough, when I rang to ask how it had come about. ‘It was suggested by Jim Downie and Will Atkinson of the creative team.’ I understood that they had not, however, spoken to the band, having gone straight through to the record company about the rights. Still, it made an intuitive sense: as I recall, at least half Big Country’s original line-up was at least half Scottish and the music has a kind of epic standing-on-a-windblown-hillside-north-of-the-border quality that one might readily associate with wanting to be rid of the sassenachs.
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