Armory Show - Interview with Richard Jobson

  by John Clarkson

published: 17 / 4 / 2025

“With The Skids. most of the songs are in major keys,” Richard Jonson says to Pennyblackmusic. “With The Armory Show, most of the songs are in minor keys, so even musically it has got a different rhythm and it is born from a different place. The Skids waa always a band of hope. The first Armoury Show album had a lot of that kind of hope too on songs like ‘We Can Be Brave Again’. This is, however, the antithesis of that. There is no hope. There is no point in being brave again.” Richard Jobson is best known for being the frontman with The Skids, the band he formed with guitarist, the late Stuart Adamson as a working class, punk-obsessed 15-year old in Dunfermline in 1976. They released three classic albums, ‘Scared To Dance’ (1978), ‘Days oF Europa’ (1979) and ‘The Absolute Game (1980), in rapid-fire succession, During the recording of an underwhelming and misrepresentative fourth album ‘Joy’ (1981) Adamson left The Skids to form Big Country, and shortly after its release the band split in early 1982. Since reforming The Skids permanently in 2016, Jobson has recorded another three albums with them. ‘Burning Cities (2018), covers record ‘Songs From a Haunted Ballroom’ (2021) and ‘Destination Dusseldorf’ (2023) The Skids have, however, been only one chapter in Jobson’s life. He has made six festure films, including the much acclaimed, semi-autobiographical ’16 Years of Alcohol’ and Edinburgh-set chase thriller ‘New Town Killers’. He has also written several novels, various pieces of memoir as well as autobiography Into the Valley’ (2018), collections of poetry and recorded spoken word records. He has worked as well as a television presenter and a model. Jobson is on the phone to Pennyblackmusic to talk about his other band, The Armory Show’s new album ‘Dead Souls’, which takes its name from a book by Russian writer Maxim Gogol. The Armory Show is a continuation of Richard Jobson’s short-lived mid-80’s projecr, The Armoury Show which, taking their name from an influential New York art exhibition of 1913, he formed in 1983 with former Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ guitarist John McGeogh. They recorded just one album ‘Waiting for the Floods’ (1985), before breaking up when McGeogh went off to join Public Image Ltd. Much darker and more experimental in tone than the often anthemic Skids, ‘Dead Souls’ opens with ‘Harry Dean Stanton’, a tribute to the cult actor; paints a nihilistic portrayal of a world of no comfort and in despair on brooding tracks such as ‘All the Hallelujahs’ ‘Nothing’, The World Stopped Turning’ and ‘Vortex’, and closes with ‘Rhineland Blues’, which pushes voice samples of Jobson’s hero, artist Joseph Beuys, up against a surging hailstorm of electronica. The line-up of The Armory Show features the same current line-up as The Skids, including Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and Filthy Tongues frontman Martin Metcalfe on guitars. Richard Jobson began by telling Pennybackmusic why he has released ‘Dead Souls’ as an Armory Show record. PB: Why did you decide to release ‘Dead Souls’as an Armory Show album rather than as a Skids album? RICHARD J:OBSON: Because it sounds nothing like The Skids. It sounds completely like the Armory Show. It is an entirely different thing. It is a different type of music, different type of lyrics, has a completely different atmosphere. It is a totally different experience to The Skids. PB: It could be argued, however, that no two Skids album have been the same either. There is a big jump, say, from ‘Burning Cities’ to ‘Destination Dusseldorf’. RJ: Yeah, possibly. I wrote ‘Burning Cities’ in conjunction with Youth from Killing Joke, who is a massive Skids fan and it was his take on the Skids, which is a very different take, say, from some of the songs that I wrote with Martin Metcalfe, who is also a big Skids fan. These latest albums we have recorded since we got back together are about me working with people who are fans of the Skids and their interpretation of the band. I feel relaxed when I work with other writers. I don’t want to force things on them, but I think I can hear things on ‘Buirning Cities’ and ‘Destination Dusseldorf’ that look back to our earlier era. ‘Kings of the New World Order’ from ‘Burning Cities’, for example, is a song that could have quite happily sat on ‘The Absolute Game’, and you might notice that on either of those albums. PB: Do you see then in very basic terms The Skids being the dependable punk and new wave-influenced older brother and The Armory Show as the more experimental post-punk half sibling? RJ: Yes, absolutely. That is completely how I see it. I see the Skids as being born of a genre and working within that genre and having some of the basic principles that are at play there, whereas with the Armory Show we have got a track on the new album called ‘Rhineland Blues’ that is essentially the voice of Joseph Beuys, the German artist, who is a great hero of mine, set to an electronic backbeat. There is stuff in there that is inspired by bands like Neu!, the German electronic band. The influences are different. The Armory Show gives me the ability to work in a different kind of music that I love. I could have never done ‘Dead Souls’ as a Skids album. I don’t think that would have ever worked, so I think I can be a lot more relaxed with the Armory Show and to try things without the restraint of it being very particular to a genre. PB: Why did you with this new version take the ‘u’ out of Armoury Show? RJ: The original Armory show was spelt ‘Armory’. Tickets from the original exhibition which took place in New York in 1913, spelt it that way. I wrote a poem about the inspiration of that exhibition, about something new hitting the new world and changing the view of American art forevermore. That poem was the inspiration for the name of the band, so somehow the English spelling of ‘Armoury’ became the way we did it which I thought was an absolute mistake, so we have gone back to the way which I wanted originally, PB: The front cover of ‘Dead Souls’ shows a painting of a religious figurine from the back. What does that symbolise to you? RJ: The album’s title ‘Dead Souls’, takes its name from a book by the Russian writer Gogol. I am big fan of Gogol and a lot of the Russian literature of that period. The album and the lyrics of the album suggest that we are looking for something spiritual and not finding it because we are living in a world where money and consumerism have become the religion of the world, and the idea is that the religious icon is looking away from us as a result. When you are looking at a piece of art from the back of a subject, then it suggests that you looking into a void. It is being playful with what the notion of what spirituality is and iconography is. If you look at the lyrics of the album, one of the key tracks is called ‘Nothing’, and I am a believer that there is absolutely nothing, nothing beyond this world. and that is what the album is suggesting and what Gogol also was with his wonderful book ‘Dead Souls.’ PB: You were raised a Catholic. Do you see the whole album as being taken from the perspective of a lapsed Catholic? RJ: Yes. When I saw the painting on the front cover of ‘Dead Souls’, it made perfect sense to me. It is looking away from it, I was raised a fairly devout Catholic, and some of the theatricality of that has stayed with me. I think that a lot of the early Skids songs and the way they were constructed have an anthemc quality and that was all born from that experience. The Armory Show is a bit colder and it has a different kind of edge, whereas with The Skids you could say that it has a different sense of coming. It offers a vague semblance of some kind of optimism. The Armory Show offers no optimism whatsoever. The sleeve on ‘Dead Souls’ immediately tells you that something is not quite right , and then you look at the titles of the tracks - ‘All the Hallelujahs’, ‘Dead Souls’, ‘Nothing’, ‘Vortex’ - and they all lead you to this idea of the emptiness of things, that we are all leading this completely pointless, empty 4xistence and there is nothing there anywhere else. I wish more people would take that point of view. Then there would be less wars in the world. Most wars are based on religious domination or a ridiculous nationalism. I look at how people live their lives now, and certainly in the Western world, of which I am a part of, it is based on consumerism, which is hideous. You try and buy you way out of misery. You ain’t going to succeed. PB: You have worked with Martin Metcalfe for about fifteen years and since his then band Isa and The Filthy Tongues wrote the title track to your film ‘New Town Killers’. What do you think he has brought to this recording in particular? RJ: I have a really good working relationship with Martin. I don’t have to work very hard to get him to understand what I am writing. He seems to get it. He shares similar taste in art and literature to what I do and also in film, so the shorthand between us is easy. I have worked with other people and certainly within The Skids, and it was nearly impossible with them. I sometimes wondered if they had actually even read the lyrics, and they were just putting stupid tunes to my word whereas with Martin I have never had that usue. He gets what I am about, and for him it is an opportunity, of course, as well to express another part of his complex make-up. The Martin that does Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and the Martin that does the Filthy Tongues is not the same Martin that works with me on The Armory Show or even The Skids stuff that I have done with him. He is very versatile, but he definitely reads and listens to what I am trying to say. He finds the connections very, very quickly. I will send him the lyrics with a basic tune, and then he elaborates on it and takes it to a better place. With ‘Harry Dean Stanton’, for example, which I wrote with him .I wrote a very simple version of it, and he embellished on it and made it much more musical. ‘Harry Dean Stanton’ is about the cult actor, and reflects on his film, ‘Paris, Texas’. That film is fairly desolate and set in a desolate environment, and i think in that song we have tried our best to reflect that. PB: Did you spend a lot of time working on the track listing of ‘Dead Souls’? It becomes more and more abstract as the album moves on. RJ: Yeah. We definitely paid attention to how people used to make albums, where you would make an album that you felt worked on both si4es and that you were taken on a journey with, something like ‘Berlin’ by Lou Reed. I wanted this in its own way to take you on a journey that starts quite musically but gets darker and darker as you jump into the void with it. PB: How do you plan to promote this album? The Armory Show have played occasional one-off dates in places like the 229 in London and have also played support slots to The Skids. How are you going to get this album out there? RJ: At the moment we are working on an interesting strategy of not letting ourselves fall into the pattern of playing rock and roll venues. to me. I would rather play places like the V&A in Dundee than more traditional rock venues like the Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh or PJ Molloys in Dunfermline, We hope to take it into a different realm. This is not exactly new territory. Roxy Music did that 45 years ago. I can see why they would have done that. I understand that. There are venues all over the UK that are under-used, and it is really finding a way to enter the door to these places and to persuade them that this will be a really interesting thing to do. It doesn’t have to be a big place. It can be a small place. I went to an exhibition recently in Pittencrieff House. It is a beautiful house in the Glen as they call it in Dunfermline, and it was formerly someone’s house. The guy who did the cover of the Armory Show album is called Ian Moir, and he had an exhibition in there. It struck me that that would be the perfect place to do a show, that you make an event of it rather than another gig. We have got to just find the venues. There is one thing for sure. The venues are there. It is just a matter of the people who run these venues being a little bit more inspired and progressive in their thoughts, rather than them just saying that this is an art gallery for showing Modern Art. Art galleries are modern day churches after all. Why can’t they be more hallowed than that and start connecting the art in a different way to people, so you have got musical events there? It is crazy that these places are not being used in that way. I pu iti down to fear really. Last year The Skids did an acoustic session in Dunfermline Abbey, and everyone said, “That has never happened before. How did you manage to pull that off?” and I said, “Well I asked if they would let us do it?” They set a few parameters, like “Could you maybe not swear as much as you normally do?” and “You like to tell stories. Could you maybe make them a little bit tamer?” And these were all easy compromises. The fact is that we were able to take er one of the most historic buildings in Scottish history for an hour and a half and perform there, so if I can do thatI know that I should be able to do the V& A in Dundee or the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh PB: You seem to be at a really nice stage in your career in which you feel you could do pretty much anything. RJ: Well, I did feel like that when I was young. Remember. I did release ‘Scared to Dance’, and then I released ‘The Ballad of Etiquette’, which was on Cocteau Records and was a spoken word album, and then another one, ’10.30 on a Summer Night’, which was celebrating the wonderful work of Marguerite Duras, the French writer. I was absolutely lambasted for it. So, you think, “Why? Why did people think that it was so absurd?” Was it because I was a working kid from Dunfermline? What was it that made people resent that ambition so much?” Surely, even if they didn’t like the work, they might have said, “Well, at least he is trying to do something that is a little bit different from what everybody else is doing?” PB: What do you make of that young man who forms The Skids at the age of fifteen in Dunfermline all those years ago now? RJ: Well, I think that I have got some admiration for this young person, who was quite fearless, who was not scared to go on stage and perform, yet at the same time who was not afraid to get involved in political theatre inspired by heroes like Bertolt Brecht, and then do spoken word records, and try and create a different type of music which was more European and celebrated Europe more than North America. That was really the young guy that I was. People often say, ”What was the difference between you and Stuart Adamson?” I think he was always interested in Americana. I was always interested in Europe, and the Europe of the past coming out of the rubble but also the Europe of the future, whereas America was never that interesting to me.I always thought that their value system was always a bit clichéd and ridiculous, and it never really worked for me. That journey into Europe on European tours with The Skids was really exciting, and that captures something about that early work, and that is why a lot of the books that I have written, ‘The Kreuzberg Sonata’ and more recently ‘The Alabama Song’, capture the essence of that idea, that you were very much on the trail of Europe. PB: Last couple of questions. You mentioned ‘The Alabama Song’, which has just come out. What is that about? RJ: It is the follow-up to ‘The Kreuzberg Sonata’. It is about a character called Lang. who goes to Germany and opens a whisky bar in Kreuzberg. It is a bar where people hang out and talk. There are various morality tales, but it is about friendship essentially, people who get together and talk in a subterranean space about who and what they are in a fast-moving world. It is about connections and being a human being because most of these people realise, as I do, that this is it. You have got your friendship and love being born out of that and when it is gone it’s gone. That’s it. There’s nothing else. PB: You wrote and directed six films but have not made a film now since 2013. Could you see yourself returning it or is that something you have finished with? RJ: I think that I am going to leave it now because one of the problems with filmmaking is the number of people that it involves. I made e small, low-budget movies but I still needed a lot of people around me. There are lots of departments required so it is difficult, whereas sitting with a notebook and a pen you can do anywhere. I love that. I don’t have the pressure. Also making a film you have to compromise from the first second because there is so much money involved, whereas with your own writing you don’t have to compromise. You are essentially writing for yourself. I am never going to write a bestseller because I have no interest in that. I am never going to write a crime novel because I have no interest in that particular genre. The books I write have become less bleak (Laughs), whereas my music has become more bleak My books have a kind of gentleness about them which I quite like. PB: So what are your plans for the next few months? RJ: Well, I am doing lots and lots of book events all over the place and a few little Skids things here and there, but I think we are keeping the Skids on hold for the 45th anniversary of ‘The Absolute Game’ towards the end of the year . There are some great songs on that album, so I am looking forward to that, and in amongst that finding these ways to present The Armory Show in a different way. I think it will work. It is just a matter of persuiading people. If you can persuade the people at Dunfermline Abbey to let a punk band in there to do a session, then we can persuade people to let us do anything.# PB: Thank you.

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