As pop as bubblegum and more lyrically inventive than teenagers ought to be, The Skids at their creative peak \u2013 circa 1980 and The Absolute Game <\/i>\u2013 changed ideas about punk\u2019s limitations. Yet less than six months later it was all over.<\/p>\n
In April 1981 band visionary Stuart Adamson had walked out for the last time, returning later that year with the more muscular Big Country, at times refusing to talk about, let alone entertain, the idea of playing Skids material live.<\/p>\n
But times were different then. If it seemed the remaining Skids had nowhere to turn \u2013 dealt the final blow following the suicide of Adamson in 2001 \u2013 fate intervened; hurricanes and heritage trails, Butlin\u2019s Weekenders and topping the bill at Blackpool Tower proved strong motivators for today\u2019s remortgaged punks.<\/p>\n
As comeback records go, then, Burning Cities <\/i>isn\u2019t a bad album, but neither is it a particularly great one. Where once lead vocalist Richard Jobson exploded with youthful rage at the injustice of military campaigns \u2013 Into The Valley, Melancholy Soldiers, Masquerade\u2026 take your pick \u2013 here on the Iona-esque Desert Dust he burns with all the anger of someone whose underfloor heating\u2019s on the blink (\u201cThe streets were rough\/ The times were hard\u2026 were very hard.\u201d)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more than enough here to keep the diehard fan happy, though; One Last Chance is an avuncular Sweet Suburbia, Into The Void scatterguns all over the place like a vulcanised Ramones riff. All the while a scan of the writing credits \u2013 B Watson, J Watson, M Glover, M Metcalfe, D Kelly \u2013 offers a variable musical answer to the eternal lightbulb conundrum: how many musicians does it take to replace Stuart Adamson?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As pop as bubblegum and more lyrically inventive than teenagers ought to be, The Skids at their creative peak \u2013 circa 1980 and The Absolute Game \u2013 changed ideas about punk\u2019s limitations. Yet less than six months later it was all over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8023,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[],"issue":[10093],"class_list":["post-193450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album","category-reviews","issue-january-2018"],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n