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. 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 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.

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