Iconic Scottish Punks The SKIDS Are Coming To Australia

For the First Time Ever, Iconic Scottish Punks, the SKIDS are coming to Australia for a Greatest Hits Tour (Into the Valley, The Saints are Coming, Working for the Yankee Dollar, Masquerade, Sweet Suburbia and more) to celebrate their forty-fifth anniversary

The SKIDS weren’t your archetypal 1-2-3-4 punk band, they were different. Their songs resonate as much, if not more, today. Since reforming SKIDS and recently celebrating their forty-fifth anniversary, have proven to be a force of nature. With a catalogue to die for, Richard Jobson’s ability to connect with his audience remains a constant, while his voice remains strong and passionate.

The SKIDS are at the peak of their powers and still a mighty live force. Join them and celebrate the SKIDS legacy as they fire up a set full of their crowd pleasing anthems. Richard Jobson talks to Hi Fi Way about touring Australia for the first time.

The first Australian tour for The Skids is finally going to happen, you must be excited?
It has taken a long time, we were set to come during the last Skids album, which was The Absolute Game. We were really flying high at the time. We had just played our biggest tour ever. The album was a massive success, and we were booked to go to North America and we were definitely coming to Australia and then on to New Zealand. Then Stuart Adamson decided to leave the band and the rest is history really. Um, so it was a kind of sad moment. None of us saw it coming and those plans were destroyed immediately, which was a great shame.

Has there been a lot of pressure from Australian fans to tour here?
Yeah there has, and, and also quite personal stuff, in a good way, from people who I used to go to school with even, who obviously immigrated to Australia and I had had a very happy, successful life there. They keep on saying, come on, you’ve got to come, you’ve got to remember Rob, that there was a period between the end of The Skids and then I had a second band called The Armoury Show, which was a very brief experience. Then I just gave up on the music industry completely for like thirty-five years or more and it was only reawakened by the success of the The Saints Are Coming when Green Day covered it, that people said, why don’t you try and put a band together again and play? So, it was only meant to be like a couple of bits of fun here and there, and it just kept on growing and growing. I remember even the first gig we did properly was in a pub in our hometown Dunfermline in Scotland and then the last gig we did before lock down was the Albert Hall in London in front of six thousand fat bald blokes. It was a pretty incredible.

Are you amazed how something like Green Day covering The Saints Are Coming would throw you back in the limelight to rejuvenate the band?
It’s interesting when we play live, because people under the age of, well, I call them the young people in the audience, normally people under fifty-five who say, why do you do a YouTube Green Day cover version? I’m going like, what are you talking about? Stuart Adamson and I wrote that song, that’s our song. They go, really? I didn’t know that. I go, yeah, yeah, it’s a Skids song and so they’re pleasantly surprised, but we actually think it’s a YouTube cover we’re doing, which is bananas. I think the only time when U2 ever played it live was in Australia, in fact, during the last world tour. I think they started off in Melbourne? They played the The Saints Are Coming live, because I watched it being streamed and it was pretty amazing to watch a song we wrote when we were fifteen years old, being played by the biggest rock and roll band on the planet to an enormous audience in Australia who were lapping it up. It’s quite incredible.

There definitely seems to be quite a buzz about it and excitement for this tour.
Well, that’s great to hear. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to come to. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never been. I was offered the opportunity and some people around me said, well, you know, it’s a long way to go to just do a few dates. I said, well, you know, it might be the only chance I ever get to go, so I’m going to take it. As I said to you at the beginning of our conversation, we had an opportunity right at the peak of the young Skids, and that was taken away from me and so this time I thought I’m just going to grab it. When the offer came through and I said, I don’t care if we’re playing like bars in backwaters, I don’t care. Let’s just go and have a lot of fun and connect with the audience.

I think that’s going to be one of the magical things because a Skids show, is very different from a lot of our contemporaries. We don’t hide behind the music. I do a lot of talking at the gigs, telling stories, anecdotes, I have a bit of a life, so why not share it? It’s fun. I take the piss out of myself and people seem to enjoy that. A lot of the bands I go and see from the genre and era that I’m from tend to hide behind the music a little bit, you know, which we definitely don’t. The music’s cool and I’m, I’m very proud of the music, but we want to connect with the audience in different ways. I think that’s really going to work in Australia. Every person I’ve met from so far away, their attitude is very similar to the things that I like in life, so you tell it like it is and don’t take yourself too seriously, and at the same time be proud of who you are. All of these things, I think to me is a cocktail that’s really going to be immensely exciting when we get down there.

Congratulations on the forty-fifth anniversary. Did the, the band celebrate the milestone in any particular way?
Well, we released a new album, Destination Dusseldorf and it was an enormous success considering, let’s cut to the chase here, we’re part of the heritage industry, the whole nostalgia train is the one we are on, whether you like it or not, you have to go with it. So, who the hell is going to care about us releasing a new album? But it really worked and it was really well received, it sold incredibly well, and people started to take our new music quite seriously again, we had tried before and we nearly got to number one, but the last time we tried it that very irritating Australian called Leo Sayer got in the way.

Can fans expect to hear just about everything from The Skids back catalogue?
Yeah, it’s a difficult one that, because some of the guys in the band sometimes want to play quite obscure songs and I go, nah, the show must be cohesive, and it has to have a through line. I think I’ve learned that from making movies and being involved with drama. A gig is a story and it has a beginning, a middle and an end and that story has to have a through line and the audience need to be taken on that journey. The other guys, I don’t think they understand it as well as I do because they’ve never done things like drama or written a novel or whatever, where you have to have those elements in place. That’s how I see it. So, I see it more of as a show and where it’s got it’s peaks and troughs. I think that’s a really important thing because at the end of the day, people spend their hard earned cash to come and see you, they don’t want to see a bunch of self-indulgent idiots from Scotland coming all that distance just to indulge themself. We’re there to indulge the audience, not ourself.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Skids on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring…