Skids – Galatos, 8 May 2024: Review

Skids are the seminal Celtic Folk Rockers who serendipitously reverberated through the original Punk explosion and created genuine Gospel Punk.

In the same fashion that there is only one true Punk Blues album, and that is the Gun Club’s Fire of Love. They could never quite burn like that again. You did hear it on a few live bootlegs at the time.

Skid’s classic anthem Into the Valley is blasted through late in the set.

Into the valley/ Betrothed and divine/ Realisations no virtue/ But who can define/Why soldiers go marching.

It is a brother to Thomas Dorsey’s Peace in the Valley gospel standard. Dorsey was inspired to write this during World War Two. Dark times were all around and he was on a train as it went through a tunnel. The sensation of coming back into the sunlight produced the song in a moment of inspiration.

Skids are channelling Trade Union Hall Folk here also. Big hearty voices and bonding camaraderie.

The two principles Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson came together to form Skids in 1977 in Dunfermline, Scotland.

Jobson is on stage tonight, the sole original band member.  Adamson went on to form Big Country, in many ways an expansion of the Skids sound and temperament. He died in 2001.

Adamson was the guy that loved guitars, and the meshed skirling bagpipe sound that was the Big Country trademark was there in buckets from the start. It is all over those first three albums, Scared to Dance, Days in Europa and The Absolute Game.

Jobson was coming from a different angle, with his big passionate vocals. Coming down the avant-garde path of Captain Beefheart and the German Krautrockers. He identified with the feral nature of the Stooges and Alice Cooper, being of that mindset himself.

The Skids did not last much longer after Adamson left. Jobson had another one, The Armoury Show, before pursuing a solo path as songwriter, poet, and television host.

There was a 30^th anniversary reunion of the band, when Bruce Watson of Big Country and his son Jamie Watson came on board. Reinforces the nature of twins that both bands share the same musical DNA.

Those two stayed and Skids were back in business. Touring and putting out new material.

Those two have left prior to this 45^th Anniversary Greatest Hits Tour. On stage tonight are Martin Metcalfe, Fin Wilson, Conor Whyte guitars and bass, Nick Hernandez drums.

Jobson is bouncing around like a young teen Punk on stage, and he yells it’s good to be back in New Zealand! For the first time!

It has taken almost half a century for the Skids to get down here. Maybe what stopped them was the entry screening at Customs Australia.

Do you have any criminal convictions?

What! Do you still need one to get in?!

Opening song Charade, off Days in Europa (1979). The powerful rhythm section kicks off immediately and you hear some of the signature ringing guitars. They are judiciously spread throughout the set.

Of One Skin sets Jobson off, pogoing and jumping around to the thundering drums on the smallish stage. Seriously thought that he can’t last much longer doing that.

Then he commends the audience as being the youngest he has seen. There’s a guy that’s 54 here, a toddler!

Predominantly older males who look like they drive Audi’s and Volvo’s and have come from a Rotary meeting. I feel smug in the fact that I am over 60 but I look younger. I admit there are a few aging hippie types as well.

Jobson does not drink alcohol or do recreational drugs. But he does suffer from epilepsy, which he has commented may have been a life-enhancer for him paradoxically.

And he does resemble the jerking white blokes unsyncopated dance style of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.

Working For the Yankee Dollar is the best Clash song that they never wrote. It is the Skids ripping into I’m So Bored with the USA and matching it.

But they do a ferocious version of the Clash’s Complete Control. Justifiably claimed by music critic and history academic Greil Marcus as the greatest Rock’n’roll single ever made.

Hurry On Boys is a great Folk activist song to rally the troops in a trade union meeting.

Were the Sex Pistols Folkies at heart? Jobson is mates with those band members, although he has a personal disdain for John Lydon.

I am remembering a concert that original bass player Glen Matlock did in Auckland prior to Lockdown. He played solo with acoustic guitar to all those classic Punk anthems (including Blank Generation).

Circus Games and Jobson dedicates this as a tribute to Stuart Adamson, being the last song they wrote together. Heart-warming Big Country guitar riffing and close to the Punk sound of the Clash’s Guns of Brixton.

Of course, TV Stars is pure Folk Punk chanting, to the mantra of Albert Tatlock! If you ponder on it, Punk has as much of the working-class of Coronation Street as it does the Art School and Dada Situationist philosophical elements.

Art movements can come and go in a flash. It can disappear up its own arse hole of pretentiousness. What is left is the irreducible core, of which the Skids can celebrate their own legacy.

Masquerade is Jobson’s personal favourite. Hard as the nails the bass guitar fires out, and melodic, so it’s Power Pop.

They drop a couple of new tunes. Destination Dusseldorf is the title track of their most recent album from last year. It has the same crunching riff power of their hits.

The closer, also off that album, is Here We Go Again. Ringing bagpipe guitars mesh and they wind it up. It has the air of the Scottish Highlands.

At the bridge, the tempo slows down and Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side breaks out. And the coloured girls go doo do doo do doo…. They bring back the original song to finish.

Skids came from the core of Punk Rock and carry that same Folk ethic as the Pistols. And the Gospel you may ask? Perfectly encapsulated by their biggest song.

Rev. Orange Peel

Photography by Leonie Moreland

Skids

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Vorsen

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