Credit Where It's Due

The lyrics below, of course, come from the Skids. I bought Scared To Dance as a youth infatuated with Big Country and looking for the origins of their melodic roar, and it proved to be an important album for me. I spent hours listening to that LP—no mean feat, considering that its fourteen tracks run only about thirty-three minutes total.

I was initially attracted by Stuart Adamson's guitar, naturally, but there was something about Richard Jobson's vocals that held me—perhaps the fact that I couldn't understand a goddam word, so impenetrable was his bellow: because my original LP had no lyrics or liner notes, I had to pretty much make up my own words if I wanted to sing along. And such is the quality of the music that you want to sing along.

It's the template for a certain kind of perfect white rock song—bludgeoning rhythm section, keen guitar hooks, full-throated, footie-chant choruses. It's Pavlovian: I'm hard-wired to respond to it, from Tenpole Tudor on down. There's something martial about it, something wonderful and terrible as the scent of blood on the wind.

Big ups to Matthew for finding me a clean MP3 of "Into The Valley," by the way. Credit where it's due.