Into The Valley - Richard Jobson

 INTO THE VALLEY - RICHARD JOBSON

Everybody likes The Skids, surely? And if you don't then you've obviously not been paying attention? And everybody loves lead vocalist Richard Jobson, don't they? What with his Sunday matinee film idol looks and his high-kicking dance routines on Top Of The Pops, how could you not? So as night follows day, everybody's going to want to read Jobson's autobiography, aren't they? Of course they are.

Published in 2020, Into The Valley by Richard Jobson is the story of his childhood up until the point of when his band, The Skids, split up. Interestingly, the immediately striking thing about it is how it reads because it's not well-edited at all. In fact, I wonder if before publication anyone apart from Jobson even went over it to check not so much for spelling mistakes but for composition and syntax? It's something that Jobson acknowledges in his introduction, however, where he tells us he didn't write his story in the conventional way of sitting down with pen and paper or even sat at a keyboard typing it. Instead he spoke it, recording his thoughts as they came into his head. It makes for a distinctive and somewhat more personable style, particularly if you can keep in mind that he's talking in a Scottish accent though at times admittedly it does jar.

Another striking thing about it is the absence of tales from the coalface of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. At the time of The Skids initial success and them appearing on Top Of The Pops, Jobson was just 19-years old, straight out of a small mining village near Dunfermline. He tells us he was never interested in drugs, and that's fair enough but surely he would have been meeting a few girls along the way even if it was Cynthia Plaster Caster's British cousin? The years 1979 and 1980 was also the time of a rise in skinhead violence at gigs and surely The Skids would have encountered this also? It's not important to have this kind of stuff in an autobiography of a lead singer of a punk band, of course, but it's just that it's noticeable by its total absence. 

What we get instead - and the main, underlying theme of the book - is the story of Jobson's relationship with fellow band member and lead guitarist Stuart Adamson. Following The Skids splitting up in 1982, Adamson went on to form Big Country but then in 2001 he took his own life. Throughout the whole book Jobson speaks of Adamson as though he was a troubled soul but there's absolutely no clue or indication of what Adamson was actually troubled about or where his troubles stemmed from. 

Adamson was in the habit of suddenly walking out on the band and not being seen for days, and there was also an obvious divide between his wish for security and a family life and Jobson's London and Berlin-centred more freewheeling life but you get that in a lot of bands. There are probably things that Jobson isn't telling us about and of course that's his prerogative, but it tends to leave a large, unexplained hole at the centre of the book.

Jobson and Adamson obviously had a very special creative, working relationship together and so even after The Skids split they remained friends. On the subject of Adamson's passing, Jobson remembers his big smile, his amazing talent, and the way they passed each other in mid-air during a live gig - young and free. It's a wonderful image and very heartfelt. The way that Adamson's presence is there throughout the book and more so than any other person in Jobson's life tells us that getting all this down in book-form is probably a kind of catharsis. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in the slightest.

Beyond this, it's interesting to note the path that led Jobson to meeting Adamson and forming The Skids. Starting with a somewhat isolated childhood, then the joy of Marvel comics, listening to John Peel, reading the weekly music newspapers, then to reading the more 'difficult' books you tend to read as a teenager such as those by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. It's classic stepping stones and a well-worn path taken by many of the same generation. And the outcome, the question always arrived at particularly when coming from a working class background is 'how do you make a move into the arts when the arts are completely controlled by the class system?' By 'the arts' this also means playing music in a band and for Jobson and others of his generation the answer was 'punk rock' - it being the metaphoric and even for some the physical key to the door.

As for his views on punk rock, Jobson offers up various observations: The Clash were majestic and terrifyingly brilliant, The Slits were a crazy noisy mess, The Damned were confusing because punk was meant to be much more than mere comedy, the Buzzcocks (when The Skids supported them) were drunken arseholes, and Richard Hell was a 24-carat tosser. His criticisms are also at times aimed inwardly, advising one of the most frequently requested Skids songs, TV Stars, with its chorus of 'Albert Tatlock' is idiotic and stupid, whilst he - Richard Jobson himself - is sometimes a bit of a wanker.

It's all good stuff and all makes for an interesting read. Into The Valley isn't the best rock'n'roll autobiography by any means and I'd say Jobson should probably have employed a proper editor to go over it with but for all that, for any fan of The Skids it's probably essential reading.

John Serpico