A “feral child” from Fife gets recruited by a punk band who have five long years in the sun and split up. Until rebooted when U2 and Green Day cover one of their singles 25 years later. The Skids are back on tour again, a show “that leaves nothing in the dressing-room” and once disastrously involved a backflip, and Richard Jobson’s stories of those early days here are tremendously funny and engaging. On the menu …
… Steve Jones, two members of Legs & Co and a stolen car (and the day Jones burgled Francis Bacon)
… “no member of Big Country was actually Scottish”
… Hugh Cornwell as his ‘designated teacher’ on the Stranglers/Skids tour, aged 16: “main lesson, biology”
… “my two heroes were Iggy Pop and Alex Harvey so I aimed for something in between”
… 500 people at the stage door “and none of them women!”
… how U2 and Green Day started the Skids revival
… “bands of my vintage milking as much as they can of the King’s Pound on their last hurrah”
… 1,000 miles on a stolen motorbike, aged 15, to buy a pair of leather trousers
… on Top Of the Pops with Diana Ross
… and the “natural melancholy and internal sadness” of Stuart Adamson
Plus his Hare Krishna brother and living with Steve Severin while besotted with Siouxsie of the Banshees.
Skids tickets here: www.skidsofficial.com
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