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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
When Pong Was Still Fun..., September 26, 2001
You are probably well into your thirties like myself if you remember The Skids. They were a Scottish band that fell somewhere in between punk and New Wave who put out a number of UK Top 40 singles in the late 1970s. Most remember them as the band that had a young Stuart Adamson developing his guitar style and songwriting abilities before forming the classic New Wave band Big Country. There have been several full length CDs put out chronicling The Skids fifteen minutes of fame; this list now includes their 1979 release Days In Europa.Its important to recall the times this album was written in when listening to it now in the twenty-first century. The economic situation was not good at all on either side of the Atlantic then. The Old World was truly dying off but, still wielded great influence. This was the backdrop upon which The Skids were writing and performing. The UK was transfixed by Paul Wellers common man anthems in the form of The Jam while the college set were enthralled by the edgy polemics of the Gang of Four. The violent frustrations of the punk movement were by then often drowning in a sea of heroin but, their mark had been left. Americans were still wandering about looking for cheap gasoline while the Eagles and Jackson Browne droned away on the Philco AM car radio. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were on the horizon. Worse yet, disco still lived. It was time for a change. This album contains the original ten tracks and adds on seven bonus studio tracks from the same recording period that were mostly B-sides to the singles. Aftermath is a dub version (remember those?!) of Masquerade. It is hard not to chuckle or grimace at some of the keyboard sounds that were so much the rage then. You can almost sense bands like Magazine, The Teardrop Explodes, New Musik, and Missing Persons furiously taking literal notes when listening to Pros and Cons for the first time. Richard Jobsons opening vocals in Thanatos remind me alot of Joey Ramone. There is much less of a punk edge on this album compared to The Skids debut release Scared to Dance. It does come out to a degree in Charade but sounds little like The Sex Pistols, Clash, or Buzzcocks assuming thats what you define punk by. Are you a dedicated fan of the Entertainment! period of Gang of Four? You will love Peaceful Times then. I would love to ask Mike Peters and Dave Sharp of the Alarm if they listened as much to Out of Town as I suspect they did in their Seventeen days. You can clearly hear a good amount of the exuberance that would so define the early material and stage shows of the Alarm through the early 1980s on this cut. The best remembered song from "Days In Europa" was the anthemic Working for the Yankee Dollar. The single version is also included on this release and will have you crooning away in the rousing chorus. Speaking of rousing choruses, the B-side Grey Parade absolutely blew my doors off even though, as a Yank, I could only understand about every third word! Big Country and Stuart Adamson nuts will go wild hearing the future sound of Big Country forming in Vanguards Crusade. Lyrics for the first ten songs are included. And dont worry a thing about the album cover; there is nothing Nazi at all about The Skids. The bottom line: You have to be an honest judge of your personal musical interests when deciding whether to buy this CD. If you are a trendy hits only, please person, this disc will only be useful for signaling rescue aircraft if you are ever lost deep in the woods on a sunny day. If you are a true fan of music and are intrigued with seeing how bands influence each other and evolve the genre, then this disc will be a sure thing. I grew up listening to a radio station that promoted itself as Daring to be Different by playing the B-sides and other album tracks just as much as the hit songs while hobnobbing with the bands. This is how my ravenous interest in Big Country got started. If you think Big Countrys only song was In A Big Country, then stop reading this review now and move on to something else. But IF YOU KNOW BETTER, then BUY THIS CD! You will pick up on tons of cool bits that the masses are oblivious to while enjoying one of the few best things that late 1979 had to offer.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bigger, Better, Brilliant, January 21, 2004
Thanks to my wife I got Days in Europa in my Christmas stocking. This CD is choc full of perfectly formed guitar riffs and solos and now that it includes bonus tracks this album is a revelation even to a long standing Skids fan like myself. This is because according to the liner notes the album was remixed and released with an alternative cover shortly after its original release in 1979. My cassette version is obviously the latter and is minus Pros and Cons but includes the single mix of Masquerade. The most refreshing thing about this album apart from the remastering is that it is the original mix which makes it eminently collectible. You cannot deny the power of classic anthems like The Olympian or Thanatos while the original album's closer Peaceful Times is sublime, complete with backwards drums, guitars and backing harmonies and a lead vocal narration not unlike a serman from the pulpit - and sounding uncannily like the Band Aid song Feed the World some six five years earlier. Stuart Adamson was a true guitar hero even at the age of 20 and has influenced the likes of The Edge. This is very obvious in Out Of Town where the middle eight uses the same chords as the middle eight in Two Hearts Beat as One, and the atmospheric intro to Another Emotion is a not unlike the intro to Where the Streets Have No Name. If you like good guitar oriented rock this album is a must have.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect Soundtrack to 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men', April 10, 2006
I saw the Skids at the 'Nashville' pub in Chiswick (I think) on one of their first forays to London in 1978. Their songs were punchy and catchy, with riffs so powerful you'd think they'd been weaponised, delivered courtesy of ace Caledonian Riffsman, Stuart Adamson. Strangely, Stuart learned to play guitar in the British army as part of an experimental unit attached to a top secret research estabishment 'somewhere in England', researching the effects of power-chords on Soviet armoured formations. The unit was disbanded in 1976; another victim of the labour party's slashing of the Defence budget in the UK at the first whiff of economic trouble, and Stuart returned to his regiment. Its worth noting that among his comrades in the unit at the time, were L/Cpl Mick Jones, later to utilise his skills for the Clash, Sgt Paul Weller, likewise for the Jam, Pvt Steve Jones for the Pistols and 2nd Lt Pete Shelley for the Buzzcocks, although Shelley was training in non lethal applications of the technique, for crowd control etc. In any event, the US military paid heed, and from the work pioneered by the Royal Cumbrian Mechanised Guitar Borne Infantry, the doctrine of 'deep strike' was developed, specifically to target the 2nd and 3rd echelon Soviet formations that the British lads had believed would be vulnerable to high intensity punk rock guitar riffs.
Meanwhile, Richard Jobson was a frustrated wandering existentialist poet, having read a copy of 'The Plague' by Albert Camus he'd found on a tube train. He spent the rest of the 80's thinking he was member of the Bauhaus living a doomed existentence in Weimar Germany. The two met when Jobson was leaving the Porton Down bio-warfare research laboratory after volunteering for an experimental drugs trial to raise money for a trenchcoat, only to find Adamson busking in the car park. The marriage of talents is comparable to that of Mancunian mope rockers, Morrissey and Marr. Its also strange that despite producing such brilliant music with their original wordsmiths, neither Marr nor Adamson quite lived up to their promise in their subsequent careers. Jobson's influence on the subsequent development of the 'New Romantic' movement of the early 80s has never really been discussed, but just read the lyrics of this album and listen to the 'b' sides (and 'c' and 'd' sides, some of these were double single packages) of some of the later singles. 'Hymns From a Haunted Ballroom' springs to mind. He clearly influenced the mood of the scene 2 or 3 years hence.
Finally, if you've read this far, you deserve to know that the beautiful, distorted, backward wall of noise rolling around your ears that comprises 'Peaceful Times' is actually 'Animation' played backwards. It works much better that way.
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by The Skids 
