Skids (band)

Skids were a Scottish punk rock and new wave band, formed in Dunfermline, Fife in 1977 by Stuart Adamson (guitar, keyboards, percussion and backing vocals), William Simpson (bass guitar and backing vocals), Thomas Kellichan (drums) and Richard Jobson (vocals, guitar and keyboards). Their biggest success was the 1978 single "Into the Valley" and the 1980 album The Absolute Game.

History

Early years (1977–1979)

Skids played their first gig on 19 August 1977 at the Bellville Hotel in Pilmuir Street, Dunfermline, Scotland. Within six months they had released the Charles EP on the No Bad record label, created by Sandy Muir, a Dunfermline music shop owner turned manager. The record brought them to the attention of national BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel. This led to a local gig supporting The Clash. Virgin Records then signed up Skids in April 1978. The singles "Sweet Suburbia" and "The Saints Are Coming" both made commercial inroads, before "Into the Valley" reached the UK Top 10 singles chart in early 1979. The band released their debut studio album, Scared to Dance, the same year. It was recorded at The Townhouse Studios in London, England with production and keyboards by David Batchelor. Adamson walked out towards the end of the sessions before all the guitar overdubs were completed. Session guitarist Chris Jenkins was chief maintenance engineer at Townhouse studios and completed the album using Adamson's studio set up, adding additional guitar to four tracks – "Into the Valley", "Integral Plot", "Calling the Tune" and "Scared to Dance". In the meantime Adamson returned to Scotland while the recording was finished. He rejoined the band for the live concert tour promotion of the album. The record included "The Saints Are Coming", which was later covered in late 2006 as a charity single by U2 and Green Day.

Blood and Soil

Blood and Soil (German: Blut und Boden) refers to an ideology that focuses on ethnicity based on two factors, descent blood (of a folk) and territory. It celebrates the relationship of a people to the land they occupy and cultivate, and it places a high value on the virtues of rural living.

Rise

The German expression was coined in the late 19th century, in tracts espousing racialism and national romanticism. It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism. This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of the Nazis. Major figures in 19th-century German agrarian romanticism included Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who argued that the peasantry represented the foundation of the German people and conservatism.

Ultranationalists predating the Nazis often supported country living as more healthy, with the Artaman League sending urban children to the countryside to work in part in hopes of transforming them into Wehrbauern.

Richard Walther Darré popularized the phrase at the time of the rise of Nazi Germany; he wrote a book called Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Nobility Based On Blood And Soil) in 1930, which proposed a systemic eugenics program, arguing for breeding as a cure-all for all the problems plaguing the state. Darré was an influential member of the Nazi party and a noted race theorist who assisted the party greatly in gaining support among common Germans outside the cities. Prior to their ascension to power, Nazis called for a return from the cities to the countryside. This agrarian sentiment allowed opposition to both the middle class and the aristocracy, and presented the farmer as a superior figure beside the moral swamp of the city.

Blood and Soil (book)

Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (ISBN 978-0300100983) is a 2007 book by Ben Kiernan, who for thirty years has studied genocide and crimes against humanity. In Blood and Soil Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence, including worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies, particularly the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. The book won the 2008 gold medal for the best book in History awarded by the Independent Publishers Association. In 2009, Blood and Soil won the German Studies Association’s biennial Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize for the best book published in 2007 or 2008 dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in its broadest context, covering the fields of history, political science, and other social sciences, literature, art, and photography. In June 2009, the book’s German translation, Erde und Blut: Völkermord und Vernichtung von der Antike bis heute, won first place in Germany’s Nonfiction Book of the Month Prize (Die Sachbücher des Monats).