It’s who I am: Richard Jobson, Skids

Phil Ross drinks tea with Skids’ Richard Jobson and hears how Scotland’s No. 1 punk poet came to wear his politics and his German roots with pride.

A solitary figure strides purposefully across the concourse at London’s St Pancras International station. Silhouette-like, clad in black – hat, jeans and bomber – Richard Jobson stands out, distinct from the anoraked tourists and office-wear commuters that populate the platform. We had arranged to meet in The Betjeman Arms, a large pub named after the Poet Laureate, nestled in a corner of the massive Victorian Gothic train station, a short walk from the British Library. The pub is bustling and noisy, full of chatter and the clink of glassware. So I suggest sitting in the outside area, empty with the chill of January still thick in the air. “Fuck it we’re Scottish” he exclaims and we both laugh. 

The documentary The Story Of Skids: Scotland’s No. 1 Punk Band had raised some interesting questions for me, as much for what it left out as for what it included. More than that, the film had touched some raw personal areas, like toxic masculinity, sectarianism and his epilepsy, a subject he had not discussed publicly until recently. So when an opportunity to sit down with Jobson was suggested, it came as both a pleasant surprise and a chance to explore some points that the film didn’t.

We take a table adjacent to the Eurostar platforms while a barman brings tea and I bring up the subject of the documentary. “It’s kind of just me talking”, he says with a laugh. “I’ve gone to lots of screenings, but I’ve never really managed to…” he stops short, and I wonder if he was about to say: ‘…sit through it’. 

“I find myself a bit unbearable to be honest” he continues, without pausing, “but the screening in Acton was really fun ’cause Cookie from the Pistols came, and Dave Vanian, and a few other people. They all really liked it, so that made me feel nice”, and immediately the frontman is in full flow – charming, cinematic and well-practiced. “I’m still friends with all my gang from when I came to London as a kid”, he announces. “The ones who are still alive anyway, and that’s really special for me. Siouxsie and I had breakfast just last Friday”.

He recalls the old days, to the occasional accompaniment of my teacup clinking on its saucer, and I get a sense of a man at ease on safe paths and comfortable stories. “Spizz lived upstairs” he says, “downstairs was me and Severin in the basement flat, party central. Steve was this very cool, detached, pre-goth iconic guy, but secretly a bit of a party boy. We had some great times there, Siouxsie would come up from Bromley, she was always on the sofa.”

“We moved to Kensington when I was with Mariella [Frostrup], my wife at the time. I eventually unloaded that flat on Morrissey. It was the weirdest thing when I went back to pick up my mail”, he laughs and his square jaw breaks into a grin. “There he was in my old place on Kensington High Street. It had been almost like a salon; Severin was into very cool art, I had my take on art, and so did Mariella. But going back was like visiting a care home. Full of doilies and baskets…I was like: ‘What the fuck?’

His Morrissey memory flows into Morrissey the man. “I loved his period in The Smiths with Johnny Marr,” he says. “The music was amazing, the lyrics extraordinary, what a performer. Not so sure about him now.”

What do you mean ‘not so sure’? “I’ll just be clear”, he says, opens his jacket and points to the words wrapped around the skull and cross bones logo of his St Pauli T-shirt. “Gegen Rechts”, he pronounces with a glint in his eye, “Smash the right! Morrissey’s a contrarian, and so is Lydon, but the two of them can fuck off.”

It’s a blunt answer, deliberate, clear. 

The St Pauli shirt, of Hamburg’s famously anti-fascist football fans and dockside punk subculture has become a Skids feature that he wears on stage with great pride. When he mentions his family heritage, I find myself wondering what it must have been like growing up German in a post-war mining village in Fife.

I think back to the eighteen-year-old Jobson high-kicking his way into Britain’s living rooms on Top of the Pops in 1979, like a big ned let loose on prime-time television. With 15 million viewers that night, almost every working-class kid in the country saw something they recognised in the attitude of Into The Valley. What they wouldn’t have seen was his earlier epileptic episode that afternoon, that it was his close friend and bandmate Stuart Adamson’s care and support that got him through that day in the studio. They wouldn’t have realised that the explosive performance was the resultant relief, release of stress and adrenaline.

Bassist Bill Simpson had been unimpressed at Jobson’s audition. “He can’t sing and he can’t dance,” he muttered, to which Adamson simply replied: “Perfect.” Having threatened the other hopefuls away from the audition with violence, Jobson was soon forced to confide in him about his epilepsy, and Adamson quietly took the younger boy under his wing. Before long, the songwriting partners had become like brothers.

But Jobson had been part of punk’s inner circle for some years. At fifteen he’d ventured to London on a stolen motorbike to buy leather trousers and had become mates with Sid Vicious, drummer with The Banshees at the time. “Sid had the cropped hair then, before the spikes,” he tells me. “He was incredibly kind and looked after me, and through him I met Siouxsie, Cookie, Steve Jones and the others. So, London really got into my blood before I even joined the Skids. My grandmother was German, my father was born here, London’s always been part of who I am.”

It’s a throwaway line, my grandmother was German, but it lands differently in context. His father’s side, the Hulskramers, were Ostfriesian gin traders who sold gin to the Scots from the island of Norderney, north of Hamburg. That story had been quietly folded away in a Britain still shaped by the war, where 1970s popular culture, comics, films and toys all taught the same lesson: Nazis were evil, Germans were still the enemy.

For a young boy carrying what he later confided was the “embarrassment and shame” of his “hidden away” German roots, punk’s provocative use of Nazi imagery didn’t simplify things, it complicated them. “When punk rock happened it became even more difficult in a funny kind of way,” he admits. Sid and Siouxsie wore swastikas while Joy Division named themselves after concentration camp brothels. Jobson was in the middle of it, caught up in the controversy and excitement, but conflicted by his own suppressed heritage. And he couldn’t leave it alone.

While Sham 69 were chanting “if the kids are united” and the Pistols drawled “I’m a lazy sod”, the teenage Jobson was navigating the complexity of an outwardly mixed Catholic-Protestant yet secretly German household from the quiet of Dunfermline Library. Reading Brecht, Tucholsky and Joseph Roth, he was crafting heavy compositions like Dossier (of Fallibility) on martyrdom and sectarian violence. Charles was a more straightforwardly Orwellian study of class struggle, while Of One Skin embedded fragments of family history in layers of allusive imagery. This was not the King’s Road. It would eventually constitute Skids’ debut album Scared To Dance, released in February 1979, reaching No. 19 in the UK charts, while Into the Valley which peaked at No. 10 would remain their biggest chart success.

1979 also saw Skids quickly write and record their second LP Days in Europa, released that October. Jobson had fallen for a beautiful German girl called Caroline and followed her to Berlin. She worked in a place called the Europa Centre, where the follow-up album found its name. While with her, he came across a magazine in a flea market, the official programme for the 1936 Olympics. “The image was perfect for the song The Olympian, which had been the working title for the album.” The Olympic artwork was quickly replaced after accusations of Nazi glorification, though Jobson disputes claims it was banned. “There’s a lot of misinformation about that sleeve,” he says. “It’s completely not true. But it was disruptive for sure.” A companion disc was titled Strength Through Joy – a phrase that translates from the German “Kraft durch Freude.”

It occurs to me that Virgin was the label that had pushed the Pistols’ and Sid’s swastika imagery into the mainstream. “Were they pushing the Nazi thing to stir publicity?” I ask. “No. They certainly didn’t encourage it,” he says. “Virgin was a hippie, liberal record label. They gave us a lot of freedom with the artwork.” 

“So you walked in on day one, Sweet Suburbia single artwork under your arm”, I press him, “with that SS-style lettering in the Skids logo?” He holds up his hands. “Look, I take full responsibility for all the Skids artwork. It was me that was behind it all.” There’s a flicker of something – defensiveness perhaps, and I realise that beneath the cinematic charm and well-practised anecdotes, some of this is still tender ground.

“My lyrics have always been anti-fascist. Always,” he says emphatically.

At its core, Days In Europa is an anti-imperialist record. Jobson even names a track directly after a Wilfred Owen poem in Dulce Et Decorum Est (Pro Patria Mori), while the album’s biggest single Working For The Yankee Dollar captures the tension in a single line: “a German son with a Yankee gun.” He writes about Vietnam, the seduction of nationalist propaganda and the recruitment of young men into conflicts they barely understand.

But that’s not what people saw. They saw the sleeve and many had difficulty seeing past it. “It was a bit of a muddle,” he concedes. The songs said one thing. The sleeve said another. And for a teenage songwriter compulsively circling the imagery of his German roots, the contradiction may not have been visible, even to himself.

During days off from touring the album, Jobson would head to London. “I felt liberated and free to discover more about who I was,” he says. He was being offered work in theatre and cabaret, and had recorded a poetry LP. With Caroline, he felt happy for the first time in his life, no longer constrained by the hopelessness of his epilepsy.

When the tour ended, Adamson went home. Jobson went to Berlin. “He knew I would never come back to Dunfermline,” he wrote in his book Days In Europa. “In retrospect, I should have spent more time with him, writing new material and engaging with him and what was going on in my head,” he reflected. “And maybe he would have shared some of the darker stuff that was haunting him.”

But Berlin gave him something Dunfermline never could. In Kreuzberg, a few streets from the Wall, he discovered that German culture was vast, ancient and had nothing to do with what he calls “the twelve years of horror” that post-war Britain struggled to see beyond. The writers he’d been reading in the library weren’t distant intellectual curiosities. They were part of something he could see and hear and walk through every day. A culture that had fought hardest against fascism, and it was his.

He’d been building towards this for years, he says. “The embarrassment and shame of having that [heritage] as part of your family, your family story, whereas when you actually lived there, none of that mattered anymore.”

He later wrote of his time in Berlin in The Kreuzberg Sonata, a fictionalised novel about a young writer who moves to Kreuzberg with his lover and is drawn into the city’s punk counterculture near the Wall. “It was such a great time. I met so many wonderful people,” he tells me. “It’s actually rather beautiful and funny in places, but it’s a very sad story.”

Caroline, who struggled with depression and addiction, took her own life in their Kreuzberg apartment. Jobson has kept his flat in Berlin ever since.

“You either deal with a tragedy or shut it away,” he writes in his book The Absolute Game. “It followed me around every day. But I never talked about it, not to anyone, I was a shut it away person.”

Upon his return, he discovered bassist Bill Simpson had left the band. Adamson wasn’t bothered, which surprised Jobson, as the two had been friends for such a long time. He had settled into married life with Sandra, “he never asked about Berlin or anything that had been going on in my life,” he writes. The general reception of Days In Europa at Virgin had been disappointment, and it was agreed the next album would refocus around Adamson’s guitar. But Berlin was in the writing whether anyone noticed or not. Then Adamson called to say he didn’t want to work with him anymore. No explanation. Weeks later he reversed the decision, again without explanation, and Jobson found himself in the recording studio.

Released in September 1980, The Absolute Game would become the Skids’ most successful album, reaching No. 9. It was a powerful, emotionally direct collection of songs about the loss of innocence.

In The Devil’s Decade, a homage to his father and the communities left to rot in the name of progress, the filter is gone. In Goodbye Civilian, written with his older brother Francis in mind, who had found his own identity through the Hare Krishna movement, he chants triumphantly “goodbye to the shame.” The code and allegory that shaped the first two albums could no longer contain what he needed to say – the metaphors were beginning to fall away.

Unable to speak about his grief, unable to speak about Caroline to anyone, “It’s all over the lyrics,” he says, the only way through was the writing. A Woman in Winter. A woman in Berlin. Gone forever. 

By the time of Joy, the Skids’ final album, Adamson was all but gone too. At Hammersmith Odeon on 21 October 1980, their biggest show to date, Adamson didn’t appear for the soundcheck. The band spent the day in panic. They were even trying to teach Steve Jones his guitar parts backstage when, fifteen minutes before the show, Adamson walked in, and simply said: “Right, are we doing this?”

Their relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that Adamson contributed just one guitar track on the melancholic Iona. Jobson and new bassist Russell Webb shaped what remained. The Skids sound had always been Celtic – but the last album, while brave and exploratory, was built completely on flute and bodhrán, stripped of guitar, it was completely uncommercial. 

The Skids were finished. Jobson formed the Armoury Show with Webb and The Banshees guitarist John McGeoch. Adamson formed Big Country with Bruce Watson, a friend from Dunfermline who’d been cleaning submarines at Rosyth. Joy sank without trace.

The Armoury Show lasted one album, with John Lydon luring McGeoch to PiL before they could fully develop – a theft Jobson has never quite forgiven. 

In the years that followed, he rode waves of success, drifting from career to career. Modelling for Ralph Lauren and Comme des Garçons, shot by Peter Lindbergh. Presenting on television alongside Paula Yates and Magenta Devine. He interviewed greats like Robert De Niro and Sean Connery and directed Sixteen Years of Alcohol, a film drawn from his own book. But he was adrift from music, perhaps from purpose.

In 2007, with Big Country’s Bruce Watson, he reunited with Simpson for three gigs in Dunfermline as a tribute to Adamson, who had taken his own life in 2001. Further reunions culminated in 2018’s Burning Cities, a straightforward, allegory-lite punk protest album. By now the St Pauli T-shirts were becoming a fixture on stage, and with them, a growing sense of purpose seemed to have resurfaced. 

While his youngest brother had been investigating the German side of the family – who were these people, what happened to them – two of his brothers veered towards Irish nationalism and Glasgow Celtic. Their mother, a Farrell from East Cork, had sung Seán South and other Irish rebel songs around the house – “and that was ingrained,” he says. It was perhaps in Hamburg that the threads came together.

“We played there in the ’80s and had a decent following among punks living in the squats around the docks,” he says. “It was a rough area and St Pauli were a nothing team – like St Mirren or something.”

Like many Scots-Irish Celtic supporters, Jobson found a welcome among St Pauli’s anti-fascist fans, working-class and fiercely value-driven. But there was something else that felt familiar too. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Hamburg lay only a short distance from the North Sea island where his grandmother’s German family had once lived. The search for expression that began in Dunfermline Library, gained clarity in Kreuzberg, settled into identity in Hamburg among people who seemed to be speaking the same language, in more ways than one.

That said, Jobson has always maintained a strong connection to his hometown, underlined recently by a Skids and Dunfermline Athletic collaboration. Their Scared to Dance inspired kit sold out in just four hours, with Jobson donating all his profits to White Ribbon Scotland, a charity dedicated to ending male violence against women.

It’s part of a conscious effort to ensure a “positive energy continues to come out of the band”, he tells me, “and keep them relevant.” It is a philosophy that also sees him supporting Glasgow’s Calton Books “as much as I can,” including a forthcoming event in April with the Calton Weavers Commemoration Committee to honour Scotland’s first working-class martyrs.

The teenager who once rode into London on a stolen motorbike now seems to know exactly who he is, where he stands, and why he’s still doing it.

“You’ve got to give something back,” he says. “You’ve got to be part of something. Represent something. How could I get up on that stage and perform if it’s just a routine? The absurdity of that would kill me.”

Any suggestion of defensiveness has completely disappeared. The square-jawed, cinematic menace of Jobson has returned, reassuringly blunt as ever and he’s scathing about some bands on the scene. “For them it’s just a mercenary, cynical exercise. Just gimme, gimme, gimme, the worst kind of capitalism.”

“But you’ve got to be part of something. Represent something. And I’m very proud that I think Skids manage to achieve that.”

People see the St Pauli shirts and ask what Gegen Rechts means. They see Siempre Antifascista and suddenly they get interested. They say, “All right, I’m going to wear that T-shirt because I agree with that.”

A short distance from our table, the glass doors of the Eurostar exit slide open with a whoosh, and my train of thought is broken. The concourse fills quickly with wheelie cases and backpacked travellers from Paris, Rotterdam or some other city along the line – each with their own story, their own family, and somewhere to be.

“There’s not a moment where you get slammed in the face,” he says. “It’s all a gradual thing. You start to awaken to something and realise how important it is to you – who you are and what you are.”

It’s the meaning of life, really.

Video: Richard Jobson talks about Die Toten Hosen’s Skids cover  

Info tours and merch: Skids Official

Buy: The Story of the Skids, Scotland’s No 1 Punk Band on Blueray

See Richard Jobson talk at Calton Books, Glasgow – 26 April 2026

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Photo of Richard Jobson by Naomi Dryden-Smith

Other photography courtesy of and provided by Tom Finney at Screenbound International Pictures.

Words by Phil Ross. More writing by Phil can be found at his Louder Than War author’s archive.