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.
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.
Jack Hargreaves OBE (31 December 1911 in London – 15 March 1994) was an English television presenter and writer. His enduring interest was to comment without nostalgia or sentimentality on accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside.
He is remembered for appearing on How, which he also conceived; a children's programme that went out live, mistakes and all, about how things worked or ought to work. It ran from 1966 on Southern Television and networked on ITV until the demise of Southern in 1981.
Hargreaves is better known as the gentle-voiced presenter of the weekly magazine programme Out of Town, first broadcast in 1963, following the success of his 1959 television debut with the B&W series Gone Fishing. He went on to co-host Country Boy with Ollie Kite, also on Southern Television, in which they introduced a boy from the city to the ways of country. His country TV programmes continued in the 1980s with Old Country. Other programmes he created for local viewers were Farm Progress and a live afternoon series Houseparty.
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