Skids: Masquerade

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Skids – 'Songs from a Haunted Ballroom' (Cleopatra Records) – RPM Online". Archived from the original on 20 May 2021 . Retrieved 16 June 2021.

Bill Simpson, Bruce Watson, J.J. Johnson (3), Jamie Watson (6), Mike Baillie, Richard Jobson, Russell Webb, Rusty Egan, Stuart Adamson, Tom Kellican In 2007, the band reunited for a handful of gigs and played sporadically before reforming for a 40th anniversary tour in 2017. A new album, Burning Cities , was released in 2018, and an acoustic album, Peaceful Times, in 2019. They still tour to this day.

As a kid I was a skinhead,” he says. “It’s kind of interesting talking about it now because people’s idea of a skinhead is this kind of National Front, right-wing thug. But this was before all that – it was all about music, clothes and football. I’m from an Irish Catholic family, but where I was brought up was in a pretty hardcore Protestant housing estate – I think we were the only Catholics on it… saw the original line-up re-form to celebrate their 40th anniversary with a nationwide U.K. tour. With the dates rejuvenating the group's passion, the band entered the studio to record new material. The resulting fifth album, Burning Cities, was issued at the beginning of 2018. ~ Jason Ankeny HOMETOWN Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland One of the people who didn’t forget was U2’s The Edge. Approached with the idea of doing a charity single with to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina, he came up with the idea of a cover version of The Skids’ third single The Saints Are Coming (the New Orleans Saints is the name of the American football team whose stadium was used as shelter while the good people of the Big Easy waited in vain for their government to help them). Released in 2006, it topped the charts around the world. I was into ska and R&B,” says Jobson, “then I got introduced to Alice Cooper through my brother: Love It To Death and an album called Killer. There’s an Alice Cooper fan club convention in my new movie, actually… And then there was Leonard Cohen. One day he gave a copy of the New York Dolls album – and that was it for me really – I just saw something there. Maybe it’s because guitarist and co-songwriter Stuart Adamson went on to form the achingly untrendy (but frequently brilliant) Big Country: not only did this put off the hipsters, but it meant that – unlike the vast majority of punk and new wave bands – a reunion was never on the cards. Neither Adamson nor frontman Richard Jobson having any need or desire to trade on their past.

Debut album Scared To Dance was a flawed but brilliant mix of keening guitars and anthemic choruses. The critics hated it. “It had a high production value and at the time people found that kind of offensive,” says Jobson. “Stuart was influenced by Bill Nelson and Nils Lofgren – that guitar-led thing – and he did guitar solos. We’d gone to Amsterdam and it was such a modern place. Britain during the 70s was still kinda like, post-war, even London – you almost felt like you were still on rations. But Amsterdam felt modern. You had all these Bauhaus buildings and everything – and then you’d go to Germany and it had all been rebuilt and was sparkling and exciting. It made a big impression on me that there was this other place out there that was full of excitement and possibility and much more about the future than the past.”The band undertook another reunion tour in 2017 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their formation. It had a more extensive set of venues than the 2007 reunion with concerts throughout the UK and Ireland, and headlining the 2017 Rebellion Festival on the final night. The lineup included Richard Jobson, Bill Simpson, Mike Baillie, Bruce Watson and Jamie Watson.

Simpson, Bill (2007). "The Skids by Bill Simpson 2007". Stuart-adamson.co.uk . Retrieved 12 May 2015. He won’t elaborate, but Jobson’s first film 16 Years Of Alcohol chronicles the growth of a skinhead who falls in love with an art school student and discovers The Stooges and the Velvets. His gang then turn on – and knife– him. (“It was pretty much as it happens in 16 Years…,” he admits. “My fellow gang members stabbed me.”) The Aryan thing?” says Jobson. “I thought that sleeve looked great – but I was probably, I dunno, 18 then. But is it in the songs? I don’t think it is. I mean, there’s a song called The Olympian and there’s a sense of Europe… To be fair, I think what had happened is that we’d gone to Europe. On the flip side of their first Virgin single, "Sweet Suburbia" (1978), the band proclaimed themselves to be "Open Sound", which was essentially a description of the soaring histrionics of Adamson's guitar style. When married to the martial rhythms of the drumming and the bellowing, chant-like vocals of Jobson, this sound conspired to lend their repertoire a rousing, anthemic quality. It was heroic music which at its best, as on the first album, Scared To Dance (1979), seemed to capture the drama and turbulence of battle. Unfortunately, the sound was an all-too-graphic reflection of the band's own stormy relationships, a turbulence which was to settle only with the departure of Adamson in the summer of 1981.

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A new album, Destination Düsseldorf, has been announced for March 2023, [11] then postponed to June 30th. Reissued in 1995 as Sweet Suburbia – The Best of the Skids and in 2005 as Into the Valley – The Best of the Skids