Old school reunion as Skids go on tour
Richard Jobson talks new material – and the revival of old favourites
When I spoke to Richard Jobson of Skids last week, there were times the conversation had echoes of the heady days of 1977, the year he formed the band with Stuart Adamson, as punk was at its height.
As he set out the reasons for the Scottish band’s reunion, I could hear the chants and shouts of the other band members coming from the vocal booth in the recording studio.
It wasn’t a million miles from the sound that characterised their biggest hits, Into The Valley, Masquerade and Working For The Yankee Dollar.
Yes, it is the 40th anniversary of their formation, but Jobson, now 56, doesn’t want the tour marking it to be a total nostalgia fest. He and the remaining members of Skids are cutting a new album. The songs, he promises, won’t dominate the sets of shows such as the one in Dublin’s Academy venue on Friday week, but it was vital, he felt, that they had new material to offer on the tour.
‘I didn’t want us to be one of those heritage, nostalgia-trip bands. I wanted it to be real and to show we still had a voice.’
At first they announced just a handful of shows for their tour — then they were ‘offered an extraordinary amount of dates’. Consequently, they will be touring until January 2018.
‘The new songs sound better than I could ever have dreamed of,’ Jobson says. He hopes the album, called Burning Cities, will be out in July.
‘The nostalgia thing is very much a part of things, but I just wanted it to be more than that. We have written songs in the style of different eras of the band. Obviously the ghost of Stuart Adamson is always there.’
Adamson’s guitar sound, perennially compared to bagpipes, was as much an integral part of Skids’ sound as was Jobson’s declamatory vocals and, by punk standards, intelligent, sometimes literary lyrics. After they split up in 1981, Adamson went on to huge success with Big Country, but after their decline he died by suicide in 2001. The current Skids line-up features Bill Simpson, Mike Baillie from the original Skids, Bruce Watson of Big Country and his son Jamie.
‘Initially Stuart wrote the words and the music, but then he saw what I had been writing and he took a back seat with the lyrics,’ he says. ‘I think the words that I wrote encouraged a more anthemic quality in his music.’
Jobson was born in Kirkcaldy in Fife in 1960. His mother was from Cork. Her singing, his stint in the church choir, and supporting his favourite football team had as much of an influence on his musical style as the Sex Pistols or the Clash.
‘And I might add, people have asked me did I see terrible things at that time. All I saw was people being helped. I don’t believe in what the Church sells, but I do believe in the spirit of it. My mother always sang Irish ballads. I was unaware growing up that those songs were quite political. The anthemic quality of the songs I wrote came from a combination of my mother’s singing, the hymns I sang and the chants I heard standing on the terraces of Celtic Park. Particularly songs like Working For The Yankee Dollar, Into The Valley and The Saints Are Coming.’
The Saints Are Coming of course became a worldwide hit in 2006 when it was covered by U2 and Green Day for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
‘I wrote The Saints Are Coming in the library in Dunfermline when I was 16, maybe 15 actually. Then one day 30 years later, I was out and managed to forget my phone. I missed about 30 phone calls from one number. It was The Edge.
‘He explained that both U2 and Green Day were in Abbey Road Studios in London and they were doing the final parts of the song for the Hurricane Katrina Relief charity. He invited me down. Of course I went down and had such a great time. To see something I wrote when I was a teenager being recorded by two of the biggest bands on the planet was incredibly special.’
Skids play The Academy, Dublin on Friday, May 26
‘My mother always sang Irish ballads. I was unaware growing up they were quite political’