Big Country was my favorite band. If you've been reading this column for a while, of course, you know I'm phrasing that a little coyly. Big Country was my favorite band for many, many years, but I retired them and the rest of my original set of favorites at the end of the Nineties, and in two years since I haven't added anybody but Tori Amos to the new list. But if aging football players can get traded back to their old team for a day in order to retire in the uniform to which they rightfully belong, then I can bring Big Country out of retirement for a night in order to say goodbye to them the way I lived with them. And if in a sense Tori has taken their place in my life, this is succession, not supersession. In fact, I will go one step further: Big Country had to come first. If I hadn't spent ten years with Big Country, I wouldn't have been ready for Tori, and it would not have worked the other way around. It is clear to me in retrospect that Big Country were the core around which I constructed my conviction that music is the thing humans do best. I had favorites before them, a series in which the top spot changed hands quickly and frequently, but Big Country were the band that erased the line between my music and my self. Everything I think of as part of my adult life with music, from the way I collect it to the way I think about it to the compulsion to write about it, derives in one way or another from my experience with Big Country. If I had to assign my transition from casual music fan to music believer to a single point in time, it would be the moment, standing in VVV records in Dallas, that I came to an unfamiliar cover in the Big Country bin and simultaneously discovered the concepts of twelve-inch singles, region-limited releases, alternate mixes and non-album b-sides. Big Country taught me that music supports obsession, in both the logistical and emotional senses (and I'm not sure I could say in which order). Yes, I know, it might be that I was destined to believe that one way or another, and without Big Country I would have found somebody else from which to think I'd learned the same lessons. But I didn't, and although I acknowledge the possibility intellectually, my heart knows no life other than the one I've led, and can't imagine having led it this way without Big Country.

Big Country were hardly the first band to have an enormous semi-novelty hit very early in their career, and then spend the rest of their days sinking slowly back into obscurity, but they went about it in rather paradigmatic fashion, and this too was a critical component of my life with them. They were rock stars when I discovered them, because when I was that age, if they hadn't been rock stars I wouldn't have known about them. They had videos in which they puttered around desolate Highlands on little ATVs, and MTV played them. But when MTV and Big Country parted ways, I went with Big Country. I was raised on radio as much as anybody, and Big Country were instrumental in weaning me off mainstream media as my primary source of music exposure, and in conclusively separating popular success and critical acclaim from personal worth, in my mind. Even following them in the UK wouldn't have been the same; every person who said "Big Country? They're still around?" to me, over the years, fueled my resolve to search for all the other great bands that were getting ignored somewhere. And with every new one I found, I became more sure that the effort is necessary. Big Country fueled my belief that you cannot live a meaningful life with music passively, and by extension that you cannot live a meaningful life passively, period.

While I appreciate the condolences, both the "I'm sorry for your loss" notes and the "I'm sorry for our loss" ones, there's something wrong with condolence as the sentiment. Big Country were incredibly important in my life, but I did not know Stuart. We were introduced once, after a show I contrived to be in London for, but it wasn't a meaningful personal interaction in either direction. My repeated offers to write liner notes for Big Country reissues were ignored (I'd have offered to do graphic design and proofreading for them, too, if I'd known these later ones were going to look so bad), and I don't know if Stuart ever read anything I wrote about him. Nor were his songs the sort that invite the audience into the narrator's dilemmas. I'm sorry he died, and sorry that there's now not even a remote chance that Big Country will ever make more music, but I was resigned to that already, and I'm not convinced there's a compelling reason to treat his death as an event in my personal life. His music was his role in my life, and his death, in itself, doesn't revoke the records or their effects. People die. I still think we're better at making music than dying, but dying is the one thing everybody eventually manages, so I can see the counter-argument. I suspect I believe that genuine grief is the prerogative of the people whose lives were changed by the fact of his death, by the difference between his presence and his absence, and those of us whose lives are only changed by the knowledge of his death, and who, absent "news", would have gone years between contacts before thinking anything was amiss, have little right to appropriate it. I have no wish to reenact, in any kind of miniature, the nauseating spectacle that surrounded Princess Diana's death. If Stuart had taken the noose off and said "I will not kill myself, but I will never write or play music ever again", the effect on me would be essentially identical, and grief would hardly have been my response. A great story does not become less great by ending. Arguably the opposite.

I've realized, in wading through so much archival stuff at once in an assessing frame of mind, something I would no doubt have denied bitterly up until now. As much as I love the second half of Big Country's career, and as many lessons as I think it taught that the first half did not, the first half is the half that matters. In an important sense, Big Country were an Eighties band. The Crossing, Steeltown and Peace in Our Time are individually irreplaceable, and The Seer is necessary for the transition from Steeltown to Peace in Our Time to make sense. Any one of the second four albums, on the other hand, could be deleted without diminishing the catalog significantly. Any two, probably. Arguably any one of The Buffalo Skinners, Why the Long Face and Driving to Damascus could stand in for all three plus No Place Like Home without sacrificing anything qualitative. And lessons temporarily aside, how much would we lose by discarding all four? Very little of the band's best music. There is no shame in that.

This farewell is not just mine. Big Country made it through most of their life without a web site, but the site has been central in organizing and evangelizing the last few years, and clearly serves as a forum for coping with Stuart's death. It has also brought people to me, and so, as some of the more plaintive emails have reminded me, I have other people's grief to express along with my own. I may be able to convince myself that grief is not exactly right, but if I couldn't convince curious skeptics to buy Big Country albums, I have even less hope of convincing people who loved Big Country that Stuart's suicide is not a profound tragedy. Nor, turning this equation around, ought it to be our responsibility, those of us who supported Stuart so passionately for so long, to save ourselves from despair one by one. Stuart knew we were out here, and thus had to know what killing himself would do to us, collectively. He weighed the pain he would cause against the pain he would escape, and according to some private calculus, death beat life. Or he preferred our pain to his. We don't know what his pain was, and it's too late for an argument even if we did, so we're left with a confusion of responses: loss, obviously; regret, that our love wasn't enough to sustain him, and guilt that maybe it would have been if we'd tried harder to spread it; anger at his selfishness; sympathy for what must have been his pain; empathy, maybe; moral queasiness, perhaps, if it seems like this one death may have touched us in a way that thousands upon thousands, in New York or El Salvador or Afghanistan, didn't quite (or maybe, in the other direction, like some of our own family members didn't); frustration, because no explanation is available; horror; fear, panic, paralysis; anger again; grief again; resentment for coworkers, laughing obliviously; alienation from anybody who doesn't understand how much this means to us; grim morbidity; an inability to listen to Stuart's voice, or to listen to anything other than Stuart's voice; loneliness; hope, in our collective response. We say all these things for you, Stuart, or more accurately, for ourselves. You left your music behind for us, and you also left behind all the people your music saved and elevated and changed. We will have to be enough for ourselves.

Although in theory I grant any artist the right to decide how long a story they decide to tell, which means nobody has any responsibility to keep making records for me one day longer than they want to, in practice I abhor retreat. I hated it when Mark quit, I hated it when the band quit touring, I hate it that Stuart moved away, I hate it that Big Country didn't stay together, making records against any resistance they could ever encounter, until meteors or arthritis or a train wreck finally shut them down. I hate it that J.D. Salinger doesn't write, and Scott Miller claims he's done with the Loud Family. You have the right to stop, but you have the responsibility to waive it and keep trying, because you can't know what you still might accomplish. The world provides all the variety and chaos anybody would need; what we ask from individual people is unshakable devotion to whatever it is only they can do. A hero never surrenders, and maybe this makes heroes kind of unbearable, but that's why we have so many, and remote controls to switch them on and off.

Stuart was wont to insist that Big Country did not espouse any particular overriding ideology, but even under the narrowest interpretations of "ideology" I think he was underestimating himself, and surely no band with "Flame of the West", "Republican Party Reptile", "The Selling of America" and "The President Slipped and Fell" in their canon can claim political innocence with a straight face. What he meant, I think, is that Big Country's songs were not ideological in motivation. They were almost invariably about personal struggles, and sometimes personal struggles have political consequences, but mostly they do not. Put the other way, sometimes politics has personal implications, but mostly it does not. Stuart's songs rarely strayed into ideology because real human problems rarely reach ideological stature. Big Country were one of rock's greatest champions of underdog courage and routine strength.

But no matter how odd the setting or constraints, the case for Big Country being the best rock band ever was always easiest to make when they took the stage. They were my favorite band forever, but I only saw them play three times. The first show was in Dallas, on their first US tour; they knew so few songs they played "In a Big Country" twice, and it threw the place into a frenzy both times. The second time was a legendary/notorious mid-afternoon gig on a barge afloat in an artificial lagoon behind the Cambridgeside Galleria shopping mall, across the street from where I worked at the time. If there is a worse environment for an immersive rock concert than a lagoon with thirty feet of fetid water between the audience and the band, in cloudy daylight, with punishing slap-back coming off the glass mall facade into which the band was forced to play, I've never seen it, but I still get chills walking through that space years later. The third show was in London on my first visit there, a trip scheduled in complete ignorance of their tour schedule, and the experience of seeing them play for a rapturous British crowd was tantamount to a religious pilgrimage. Big anthems are what big concert venues are most straightforwardly suited for, but to me the most astonishing moments in Big Country's shows were never the "One Great Thing"s or "Look Away"s, they were the more restrained songs, most of all the "Chance" and "Harvest Home" audience sing-alongs, Bruce's little chirps on "Wonderland", or anything from the second half of Steeltown. "In a Big Country" and "Look Away" (and later "Seven Waves" and "We're Not in Kansas" and "God's Great Mistake") set the world in motion, and then the smaller songs stood in the middle and let it spin around them. I have never felt closer to having the indoors turned inside out to become the night sky.

Big Country knew as well as anybody the predicament the decade split in their catalog had put them in, and it is to their enormous credit, I think, that they always made sure the current material held up in concert alongside the classics. Even Come Up Screaming, their grand farewell, resisted the temptation to rely entirely on known favorites. The reasons that the last four records cannot be discarded, no matter how much you believe the first four obviate the need for them musically, all have to do with perseverance and self-belief. If Peace in Our Time was a derailment, then No Place Like Home was the train bumping across open fields to try to meet up with the tracks at the next bend. The Buffalo Skinners was a fuck-you to anybody who thought Peace in Our Time and No Place Like Home meant Big Country were done. Why the Long Face proved the band didn't have to stay angry to stay focused. Driving to Damascus suggested they might still have had a dozen records left in them. The first four records might have sufficed, and that's why the last four make me almost as happy just by existing. Getting lost is harmless, and harder than it sounds; letting yourself become paralyzed out of fear that you'll never find this spot again is far more common, and far more dangerous.

But here's the hard question, for me: how does Stuart's alcoholism and suicide color everything that went before? I divested myself from Guided by Voices when Robert Pollard merely got divorced (to oversimplify), and I don't remember the last time I felt like hearing a Nirvana record, so shouldn't I now go back and reject everything that Stuart has soured by killing himself? I am severely, perhaps congenitally, unsympathetic to self-destructiveness. I cannot abide smoking or drug abuse (hell, drug use), and I tolerate drunkenness only by making a concerted effort, if at all. A particularly unsympathetic part of me figures that if you don't like yourself enough to take the most rudimentary precautions to preserve your own life, why would I ever want to become attached to your survival? Big Country made "stay alive" into a slogan, and to have Stuart violate so basic a directive hurts a lot. His situation differs from Pollard's and Cobain's in one incredibly important aspect, though: his suicide was not cast as part of his art. Kurt had become a personality artist, so far that his suicide now feels to me like the only artistically viable conclusion to In Utero. Pollard traded a personal life for music. Stuart seems to have ended his life as a private act. Big Country were already defunct, and on Stuart's terms, so there was nothing for suicide to accomplish there. The new band was breezy and uncomplicated, producing music I'd have thought you'd only make if you were no longer expecting to battle demons on a daily basis. Stuart spent five weeks and several thousand miles separating himself from the people he was about to hurt. Once he'd decided he no longer wanted to be alive, he went about his death in a fairly compassionate manner. No rivers had to be dragged to find his body, no relatives had to discover him dead. He didn't leave a note, but even that might be a kindness. His depression was toxic, and the safest way to dispose of it was to take it with him into the grave. I have chosen to believe that his death was not a rejection of the themes of his music, but rather that music was a pitched battle against death that he won for twenty-five triumphant years, three bands, twelve studio albums and innumerable moments of enduring hope. Kurt only lasted four years and three albums. Kurt was twenty-seven, Stuart was forty-three; forty-three is still much too young, but old enough for death to have been an intelligently reasoned decision. I'm pretty sure living on into amiably doddering old age would have been a better ending to Stuart's story, but this death doesn't need to undo any of his life's work. "Rest in peace", we say, and Stuart has earned his peace; it is not our place to dictate when he gets to rest in it.

So I don't think I'll listen to the Raphaels again. Supernatural is death music to me now, in a year when the last thing I need is more contemplation of death. The gift the end of a record gives us, and so too the end of a career or a life, is the opportunity to go back to the beginning again. Whatever my mixed feelings about the questionable logic, overlapping scopes and sloppy production values of Ian Grant's Big Country vault-clearing projects, Track Records' reissue of The Absolute Game, the third Skids album and the last one before Stuart's departure, is diligent, unadorned but faultless. "Three down, five to go", Richard Jobson wrote at the end of the credits. Skids lasted only four, Jobson's subsequent band The Armoury Show only one. Big Country made their eight. And for this length of this album, tonight, even that once again hasn't happened yet. For a few minutes it's 1980, and Stuart, Richard, Russell Webb and Mike Baillie are still yelping through these intricate, spiky, twittering songs. Bruce is stacking shipping cartons, Tony and Mark are playing on Pete Townshend's Empty Glass. I am in my bedroom memorizing "Used to Bad News" by Boston for a lip-sync contest in Drama class. The blue and green carpet in my room is indestructible, and nobody I love will ever die.