Skids will join Green Day before heading east

THE day two of the greatest rock bands in the world joined forces to help restore New Orleans’ legendary music community is hard to beat — but playing Montrose is a close second.

A year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the American city in 2005, U2 and Green Day united to perform a cover of The Skids punk classic The Saints Are Coming.

The performance at the pre-game show of the Monday Night Football match between the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons in September 2006 marked the launch of a fundraising venture for the victims.

Eleven years on, an entirely new chapter of Skids music history is being written with the reformed Fife band specially invited by Green Day to join them as a support act at their mammoth concert at Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park on July 4. The Skids will play before the US rockers on American Independence Day, as part of their 40th anniversary celebrations which have seen them play a series of sell-out shows recently.

Skids frontman and former movie director Richard Jobson said the experience would be “amazing”.

“We’ve never played with Green Day before,” said Richard, who wrote The Saints Are Coming about a friend who had been killed in Northern Ireland while serving with the Army.

“It’s extraordinary to think I wrote that in Dunfermline library when I was 16.”

The band is returning north of the border next Thursday and Friday for gigs in Montrose and Dunfermline

It’s almost two months since The Skids launched their 40th anniversary tour.

An archive picture of the jute mill.