Into The Valley – Skids (1979)

Description

Additional information about this Skids vinyl art.

Skids – The Artist

Skids are a Scottish punk rock and new wave band, formed in Dunfermline in 1977 by Stuart Adamson (guitar, keyboards, percussion and backing vocals), William Simpson (bass guitar and backing vocals), Thomas Kellichan (drums) and Richard Jobson (vocals, guitar and keyboards). Their biggest successes were the 1979 single “Into the Valley” and the 1980 album The Absolute Game.  Skids enjoyed a further year of chart success as the singles “Masquerade” and “Working for the Yankee Dollar” reached the Top 20 in the UK chart. The latter came from their second album, also released in 1979, Days in Europa, with the record’s production and keyboards by Bill Nelson.

Into The Valley- The Song

‘Into The Valley’  is a 1979 single by Skids, taken off their Scared to Dance album, and is their best known song, appearing on a number of punk rock and Scottish music compilation albums. It reached number 10 in the UK Singles Chart for the week ending 24 March 1979. It was written by Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson. The song’s lyrics are notoriously unintelligible owing to Jobson’s diction. This has been sent up in a television advertisement for Maxell audio cassettes which features printed (incorrect) “translations” of the words.The chorus, often misquoted, is actually “Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky”. Jobson has said that the lyrics were written about the recruitment of Scottish youths into the army and more specifically about a friend who had been killed whilst on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. Local legend still persists that the valley mentioned is a reference to High Valleyfield, known locally as “the Valley”, a village with a reputation for “mini warfare” between its residents and those of nearby towns and villages (namely Torryburn, Rosyth, Oakley and Inverkeithing), near Skids’ home town of Dunfermline.

The Scottish Soldier – The Shape

This record is modelled into the silhouette of a Scottish Soldier wearing their distinctive beret saluting.

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