By Brett Milano

It’s still a Big Country, but the population is a little different nowadays.

“I used to be the youngest one in the band, now I’m the oldest,” says guitarist and leader Bruce Watson. “My head and my heart and still very much into doing it. Even though there are times when my body says, ‘This is getting a bit silly, isn’t it?’”

The classic Scottish band headlines the “Totally ‘80s” tour at Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, N.H. on June 19, with Tommy Tutone, Bow Wow Wow and Gene Loves Jezebel. And there have been some changes since it last hit Boston in 2013. At the time their singer was the Alarm’s frontman Mike Peters, stepping into the shoes of Big Country’s late founder Stuart Adamson. Peters left after a year and succumbed to lymphoma this past spring.

Big Country also lost its rhythm section last year, another singer after Peters came and went, and Watson had to replace nearly everybody in the band. There are now three new guys — singer Tommie Paxton, bassist Chris Stones, and drummer Reece Dobbin — plus his son Jamie Watson, who joined on guitar in the Mike Peters era.

“It’s exactly the same, believe it or not,” Watson says. “We sound the same as when we recorded the original records, maybe even more so. We’ve got three guitars now so we can do all the overdubs and harmonies that we put on back in the day. So it’s not like the old days where you bought ‘In a Big Country’ and it didn’t sound that way when you saw us play. That’s what you want to hear, you don’t want to see us start jamming halfway through.”

And Watson has no problem being the last original member standing.

“I’ve only ever done one thing and that’s Big Country, I’ve never not been in the band since Day One. So about those guys that left — I won’t get into it because it’s negative and boring.”

Big Country’s trademark is of course the bagpipe-like guitar sound that Watson and Adamson developed.

“People said it sounded Scottish or Irish, but we just called it playing guitars. The bagpipe thing happened because you bend the strings a certain way in the melodies, and sometimes there’s that drone happening.”

But he says it was more a question of what not to play.

“We wanted to have two guitars and take the blues out of it. The closest thing to us was bands like Thin Lizzy, Status Quo and Wishbone Ash. But they all played blues, and they were doing it so much better anyway.”

Stuart Adamson will always be a bit of a mystery. Despite his flair for writing uplifting anthemic songs, he was plagued by alcoholism and depression and took his own life in 2001.

“All of us feel his presence onstage. Those are very honest songs that Stuart wrote — some of his songs were black and white, others very abstract and open to interpretation. I can tell you that one of his favorite tricks was to write the darkest, most depressed lyrics that you can possibly imagine, but the music was so uplifting that you didn’t notice. That was better for us than writing ‘I love you baby, I want to get out in the car tonight’.”