Skids - The Saints Are Coming: Live And Acoustic 2007-2021 (2022)

• 6CD set collecting together four live shows from the reunited Skids including one from their acoustic tour plus their 2019 acoustic studio album, ‘Peaceful Times’

• Plus their nine track 2007 Radio Clyde session that includes a cover of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s ‘Vambo’.

• With each CD presented in a newly designed wallet and the booklet features a new interview with singer Richard Jobson, who says in the sleeve notes “we don’t want to do it if it’s not fun for us and not fun for the audience. I think you can hear that in these recordings. Everyone is having fun.”

Skids were the leading Scottish punk band, playing their first gig at the Belleville Hotel in their home town of Dunfermline in August 1977 when Richard Jobson was just 16.

After U2 and Green Day had a worldwide hit with their cover of ‘The Saints Are Coming’ in 2006 with proceeds going to victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Richard Jobson reformed Skids the following year and played an incendiary radio session for Radio Clyde that is released for the first time as Disc six of this box set. Original lead guitarist Stuart Adamson (who had left Skids to form Big Country in 1981) took his own life in 2001, his place on guitar in the reunion was taken by his Big Country compatriot Bruce Watson and Watson’s son Jamie.

Skids reunited again in 2010 with an incredible set at The Alhambra, Dunfermline on disc 1, which is played with an energy that defied their age. Their 2017 show at The Roundhouse on disc 2 is another amazing performance from a band firing on all cylinders. The 2019 acoustic album ‘Peaceful Times’ on disc 3 showed that thundering punk classics worked well as acoustic numbers drawing attention to the quality of the lyrics. The album was followed by an acoustic tour by Jobson and the Watsons from which their gig in Gateshead is included on disc 4.

On disc 5, Skids’ 2021 Lockdown show performed in Livingston opens with a storming version of ‘Charade’ and finishes with powerful, passionate renditions of ‘Circus Games’, ‘Masquerade’ and ‘Into The Valley’ with no let up in between. “Oxygen for Mr Jobson, and a defibrillator” he quips at the end.