Western civilisation on the Skids: three records to take into battle

Please admire this lovely Skids triptych below. Nice, no? Well, kind of. Earlier this month, I bought these from a charity shop in Haringey, north London. For not much money - £1.50 for Charade, £2 for Circus Games and a princely £2.50 for Yankee Dollar (which is actually two records as it's the limited-edition* gatefold double-single). Hmm, who cares? Er, yeah, it's not - even I'll admit - anything so very remarkable to pick up some cheapish punk-era singles in one of the hundreds of charity shops in London. Or ... is it? Actually, I'd say this is just a bit out of the ordinary. These aren't, after all, records by the Clash or the Jam or the Stranglers. To my mind the Skids were always a slightly odd band, a queasy mix of celebratory pop and a sort of angular Bill Nelson-ish nerd-rock (Bill Nelson produced Charade and also Vanguard Crusade, the b-side to Yankee Dollar). An acquired taste. Into The Valley, their big hit - a real crowd-pleaser when it was played at our final-year school Christmas disco in December 1979 - seemed to get the balance right and (I reckon) still sounds pretty good now: check out that rumbling bass at the beginning and those irresistible ahoys! later on. Yeah, the Skids. Dunfermline's art-rock swaggerers. Richard Jobson's distinctive vocal style (never, tbh, quite my thing) and statuesque build, and Stuart Adamson, the good-looking guitar wizard who's stuff in Big Country always bored me rigid (ahem). Around 1984-85, caught up in a doomed punk record catch-up, in quick succession I bought the first four Skids albums. God knows why. I think they were all going cheap or something. Anyway, I never really got into them and though I've still got Scared To Dance and Days In Europa, I've hardly played them in the past 40 years (oh dear). But ... it's not all doom and gloom. Acquiring these three singles has re-ignited my interest in the Skids (at least a little, anyway) and it's been a genuine pleasure giving them a spin. For what it's worth, four decades on I now enjoy Yankee Dollar (it's a fun pop song, nothing very deep), I don't massively like Charade (too repetitive, even a bit bloke-ish and Jam-like), and I quite like Circus Games (to me it comes across as a sort of quirk-pop/Pink Floyd hybrid). Time does funny things to your brain. The 40-odd years since these records came out has, weirdly enough, made me more appreciative of the gloomy synth-pop of Grey Parade (b-side to Charade) than I would ever have expected. The sort of dirge that would never in a million years have got anywhere near the charts in 1979. So yeah, I'm glad I bought these three records in scenic Haringey the other week, finding them deposited in a small box on the counter with nothing else very interesting to be found except a copy of PiL's Flowers Of Romance - this and the Skids presumably being the residual remains of a larger post-punk singles collection, the ones no-one wanted. Times were tough when these records came out in 1979-80 (Thatcherism, Reaganism, the Cold War) but if anything they're even worse now (Trump, Putin, Starmer's deeply-unpleasant reheated Thatcherism, anti-migrant hatred). But anyway, forget all that for a minute, because .... Into the valley ... Ahoy! Ahoy! 

(*Not that limited, unless you think 50,000 is a small number). 

Buy three, get four: Western civilisation on the Skids/three Skids records on my table