LP reviewed in Sounds, 3rd July, 1982
THE SKIDS ‘Fanfare’ (Virgin VM2)***** | TOWARDS THE fag end of 1978, some time after cool critics had officially nailed down the coffin lid on punk, the Skids came along and cocked up the post mortem by crafting some of the finest music ever to come out of the great rock ‘n’ roll rejuvenation.
The sound they developed over three excellent albums was a majestic and highly individual blend of Big Chant pop and joyous punk energy built on Stuart Adamson‘s sparklingly innovative guitar-play and embellished by Jobson‘s challenging and only occasionally impenetrable lyrics.
They had power, glory and unashamed feeling and made it all as singalongable as a video tape of Rogers and Hammerstein highlights.
As an attempt to summarise the Skids’ achievements, ‘Fanfare’ is inevitably frustrating. The way I see it the Skids never recorded a duff track until ‘Joy‘, the fourth album where Adamson had gone AWOL and Russell Webb and Jobbers were cavorting down a blind alley of pseudo-ethnic gloom.
The Skids | Fanfare | (Virgin) 1982
So in reducing over thirty of their songs to the twelve ‘best’ Virgin had to leave out lotsa goodies including the mighty ‘Scared To Dance’, ‘The Olympian’ and half a dozen other of my favourites. But the quality of the qualifiers means the only way around the upsets would have been a double album set.
From that perspective what you get is fine; a strong wide-ranging selection from all three elpees.
The raw and excitingly diverse ‘Scared To Dance’ supplies the rollercoaster grief of ‘The Saints Are Coming’ and that rumbling surging paean to Charlton Athletic ‘Into The Valley’.
The Bill Nelson produced and widely misunderstood ‘Days In Europa’ bequeaths the thicker, insistent churn of ‘Animation’, ‘Charade’, ‘Masquerade’ and the almost skippy journey through Apocalypse Now terrain of ‘Working For The Yankee Dollar’.
While the fuller, most complete Skids album ‘The Absolute Game’ provides (sob) just the contagious ‘Circus Games’, ‘A Woman In Winter’ with its magnificent mix of mournful chorals and absurdly catchy verses, and one of my all time favourite Skids songs ‘Out Of Town’ which co-stars one of Adamson’s best riffs and a gloriously rousing chorus.
The Skids | Fanfare | (Virgin) 1982
The other three tracks are rarer but equally worthy of a place here. There’s ‘Sweet Suburbia’, their first Top 75 hit and an infuriatingly poppy romp through newtown neurosis; ‘Of One Skin’, a previously unavailable and good quality live recording of the hammy first album stop-start stormer; and ‘Valley’ b-side ‘TV Stars’, outrageous pre-Oil populism that parades a list of famous characters punctuated by a rousing chorus of ‘ALBERT TATLOCK’. Bloody inspired, mate.
The only real surprise about the Skids is that they never achieved more than Hammy Odeon and a brace of Top Twenty hits. Why, almost everyone on Sounds liked ’em, so think how big they should have been. (Garry Bushell)
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